Multisolving

Lessons on How to Fight Climate Change 3.23.2020
Beth Gardiner
Read more in YaleEnvironment360

Exponential growth shows the urgency of swift action. Waiting to see the impact ignores the “terrifying power of compounding growth.” We’re watching leaders climb this “learning curve.”  Governments enforcing personal choices. Leaders fearing mistakes above inaction. Vested interests prevail. Current emissions reductions will be temporary. Cites “multisolving,” Elizabeth Sawin’s work, addressing large problems together (including pandemic and climate change). Sawin sees the pandemic as “an accelerated version” of the climate story: we “honor the pain by heeding” the lessons learned.

Journalist and author of Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution, Beth Gardiner has published in the NY Times, The Guardian, National Geographic and Smithsonian, and was long an AP reporter.

Steps to re-invigorate the economy must free us from polluting fossil fuels 3.24.20
Elizabeth Sawin
Read more in Daily Climate

The skies are suddenly clear. “Some say the real plague is humans…I don’t buy that.” It’s our fossil fuel infrastructure…Action on climate change aims to reduce suffering; this pandemic is generating “staggering” amounts…But we have well-studied, well-documented examples of how to improve air and water, lower emissions, and produce other benefits. Be loud. Be clear. Insist that steps to reinvigorate the economy must free us from the burdens of a fossil-intensive economy.

Links Between COVID, Climate Change and Inequity 4.1.2020
Elizabeth Sawin
Read more in U.S. News & World Report

“We face three massive threats, and the only way to neutralize any one of them is to succeed at addressing all three at once”—the pandemic, climate change, and racial and economic inequity….With care, one expenditure of time and money can help improve multiple problems, a strategy we call “multisolving.”

Covid-19 sucks but it could teach us how to avoid the worst consequences of climate change 4.2.20
Elizabeth Sawin
Read the full article on Resilience.org

Beth Sawin is co-director at Climate Interactive, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that helps people see what works to address climate change and related issues like energy, health, food security and disaster risk reduction. She is a member of the original Council on the Uncertain Human Future (the national group).