Project Drawdown is a nonprofit organization that conducts rigorous assessments of climate solutions, communicates science-based insights, and collaborates with partners worldwide to accelerate climate action.
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Founded by Paul Hawken in 2014, it is widely recognized as a leading global resource for climate solutions to help the world reach “drawdown,” the point at which greenhouse gas concentrations stop rising and begin to steadily decline.
The project’s research focuses on existing, scalable, and economically viable solutions that reduce or remove emissions through scientific analysis, outlining pathways to achieve drawdown by mid-century.1
The Project Drawdown Framework
Project Drawdown operates through three interconnected pillars that translate climate science into scalable climate action.
- Scientific Research
Project Drawdown advances science-based climate solutions by developing and continuously updating quantitative assessments of these solutions, drawing on peer-reviewed literature, open-source datasets, and sophisticated modeling.
- Stakeholder Engagement
Scientific insights are translated into actionable climate strategies by engaging and empowering policymakers, investors, business leaders, and community organizations to drive the adoption, scaling, and implementation of high-impact climate solutions across sectors.
- Storytelling
Solutions are communicated in accessible, compelling terms through clear, evidence-based, and human-centered narratives that translate climate data into relatable examples, shifting public perception from climate anxiety toward solution-oriented action.
Across these pillars, every solution is assessed using a multi-dimensional framework that includes annual greenhouse gas impact (Gt CO2-eq/yr), current and achievable adoption levels, cost relative to baseline systems, speed of impact, and co-benefits such as health, biodiversity, food security, and economic development, enabling structured prioritization across sectors and geographies.1,2
The Drawdown Roadmap
The Drawdown Roadmap is a five-part strategic framework developed by Project Drawdown to identify, prioritize, and deploy the most effective climate solutions.
It provides a structured decision-making system for determining which actions to take, when and where to implement them, and how to allocate resources to maximize climate impact, grounded in scientific evidence rather than political or market narratives.
- Sectoral Allocation
The roadmap organizes climate action across major sectors, including electricity, buildings, transportation, food systems, and land use.
Electricity and heat generation contribute around 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions, whereas agriculture accounts for roughly 10-12%, a smaller share than the energy sector. This enables prioritization of higher-impact sectors where interventions can achieve greater emissions reductions.3
- Time-Based Prioritization
Temporal prioritization is based on the principle that earlier emissions reductions yield greater long-term climate benefits because greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere.
Evidence suggests that approximately 76% of total climate benefit is achieved when emissions reductions are implemented within the first decade, due to the cumulative buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This reinforces the importance of immediate action, as delays significantly reduce the overall effectiveness of mitigation efforts.
- Geographic Hotspot Targeting
Geographic targeting directs climate interventions toward high-emission “hot spots” instead of uniform deployment.
For example, monitoring and data analysis can identify concentrated emission sources in industrial corridors, such as coal-fired power plant clusters or dense urban transport networks, allowing mitigation efforts to be focused on areas that yield the greatest emissions reductions.
- Maximizing Co-Benefits
Climate solutions are prioritized based on their ability to reduce emissions while also delivering broader benefits for health, biodiversity, food security, and economic development.
For example, fossil fuel combustion causes approximately 9 million deaths annually from air pollution, so transitioning to clean energy reduces emissions and improves air quality and public health outcomes.
- Eliminating Barriers
The roadmap emphasizes removing structural and institutional barriers, such as policy misalignment, market inefficiencies, and fossil fuel subsidies, which still amount to hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Addressing these constraints accelerates the adoption of scalable technologies like renewables, electrification, and efficiency improvements.4,5
Project Drawdown presents the Drawdown Roadmap: Using Science to Guide Climate Action | Unit 1
Video Credit: Project Drawdown / YouTube.com
Current Programs and Action Hubs
Project Drawdown uses multiple programs and platforms across sectors, geographies, and stakeholder groups to translate scientific climate research into practical strategies for identifying, prioritizing, and deploying high-impact climate solutions.
Drawdown Explorer
The Drawdown Explorer is a global decision-support platform launched in 2025 to accelerate climate action by identifying and scaling the most effective climate solutions across national and regional contexts.
Built on extensive scientific analysis, it translates climate research into localized, actionable intelligence that guides the allocation of financial, institutional, and technological resources toward high-impact interventions.
The platform evaluates around 150 solutions across major sectors based on emissions reduction potential, cost, scalability, and co-benefits such as health, biodiversity, and economic development.
The platform classifies these solutions into four categories to assess their climate impact and deployment readiness:
Table 1: Drawdown Explorer Climate Solution Categories
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Category
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Description
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Example(s)
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Highly Recommended
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Scientifically robust, cost-effective, and suitable for rapid scaling with significant climate benefits.
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Heat pumps, forest protection
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Worthwhile
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Contributes to climate mitigation but has a limited system-wide impact compared with higher-priority solutions.
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Efficiency improvements in fishing vessels
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Keep Watching
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Promising solutions that require further evidence, technological maturity, or cost reductions before large-scale deployment.
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Enhanced rock weathering, small modular nuclear reactors
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Not Recommended
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Solutions that are scientifically weak or present significant environmental or systemic risks.
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Energy-intensive vertical farming, blue hydrogen, and fossil fuel-linked carbon capture pathways
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The platform also highlights “emergency brake” solutions and geographic hot spots where targeted interventions yield disproportionately high climate benefits.
By continuously integrating updated scientific data and structuring evaluations across adoption pathways, constraints, and regional priorities, Drawdown Explorer is a dynamic framework for prioritizing and deploying climate solutions at scale, enabling more precise and effective climate decision-making worldwide.6
Drawdown Labs
Drawdown Labs is a private-sector initiative working with businesses, investors, and philanthropists to scale science-based climate solutions.
It moves beyond traditional sustainability reporting by encouraging systemic action, including aligning corporate lobbying with climate science and shifting financial flows away from fossil fuels. The initiative also supports internal employee-driven climate action and cross-industry collaboration.
Key partners such as Google, Intuit, and Impossible Foods apply these strategies to decarbonization, financial systems, and sustainable food innovation.7
Drawdown Food
Drawdown Food is a science-based initiative transforming food, agriculture, and land-use systems to address their significant contribution to global emissions.
It highlights that only a small fraction of climate finance, around 3%, is directed toward food system solutions, while misinformation and greenwashing often dominate public discourse.
The initiative develops and communicates evidence-based strategies while engaging policymakers, businesses, investors, philanthropists, and community leaders to scale high-impact interventions such as sustainable agriculture, land restoration, and emissions reduction in food supply chains.
Drawdown Nexus
Drawdown Nexus is a program designed to address climate change, biodiversity loss, and human well-being challenges in an integrated way. It identifies solutions that reduce emissions, protect ecosystems, and improve social outcomes.
The program combines local, bottom-up experience with global scientific data and research to design practical, scalable strategies. This enables coordinated action across regions and sectors, grounded in interconnected environmental and societal priorities.8
Impact of Project Drawdown
Project Drawdown has had a significant global impact on how climate solutions are identified, prioritized, and implemented. It has influenced strategic climate planning through emergency-brake solutions, geographic hotspot targeting, and co-benefit integration, aligning emissions reduction with biodiversity protection and human well-being.
Through tools like Drawdown Explorer, it has expanded access to science-based, data-driven guidance, thereby improving governments, investors, businesses, and communities' ability to deploy high-impact climate interventions.
The organization has also helped redirect substantial financial flows, including more than US$2 billion, toward underfunded but high-impact areas such as food systems, methane reduction, and ecosystem protection.
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Its frameworks are actively used in global policy forums and localized initiatives, enabling region-specific climate action such as Drawdown Georgia.
Overall, its contribution has strengthened the use of scientific evidence in climate decision-making and accelerated the adoption of more effective and systemic climate solutions worldwide. However, progress remains uneven across regions and sectors due to funding gaps, policy misalignment, and slow implementation.
Therefore, timely investment and engagement are essential to sustain momentum and scale science-based climate solutions effectively.2,9,10
References and Further Reading
- Simons, D. (2022). Project Drawdown: The World’s Leading Climate Solutions Database Is Growing. https://earth.org/project-drawdown/
- Project Drawdown. (2026). Mission and Impact. https://drawdown.org/about
- Ge, M., Friedrich, J., & Vigna, L. (2026). Where Do Emissions Come From? These Charts Explain Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Sector. World Resources Institute. https://www.wri.org/insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas-emissions-countries-and-sectors
- Project Drawdown. (2026). The Drawdown Roadmap. Using Science to Guide Climate Action. https://drawdown.org/drawdown-roadmap
- Dr. Jonathan Foley. (2024). Drawdown Briefing: The Drawdown Roadmap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJs260g44QI&t=39s
- Project Drawdown. (2026). Drawdown Explorer. The World’s Ultimate Climate Solutions Platform. https://drawdown.org/explorer
- Project Drawdown. (2021). Corporations partner with Project Drawdown to scale global climate solutions. https://drawdown.org/news/corporations-partner-with-project-drawdown-to-scale-global-climate-solutions
- Project Drawdown. (2026). Forward: Driving Meaningful Climate Action. https://drawdown.org/publications/forward-driving-meaningful-climate-action
- Ray C. Anderson Foundation (2026). Drawdown GA - We’re bringing climate solutions home. https://www.drawdownga.org/
- Project Drawdown. (2025). Impact: Annual Outcomes and Outlook Report. https://drawdown.org/publications/impact-annual-outcomes-and-outlook-report
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