Drawdown by Paul Hawken (Book Summary)


On the off chance that you care about your home planet by any stretch of the imagination, there’s a valid justification to be discouraged and alarmed at this moment. From record warmth waves to fermented seas, from fierce blazes to dissolving ice tops, the impacts of global warming are appearing significantly quicker than researchers foreseen. 

Notwithstanding these disturbing admonition signs, the measure of CO2 discharged into the climate as a result of human movement is relentlessly expanding. 

Project Drawdown is an alliance of researchers and analysts committed to changing this condition. Utilizing peer-surveyed science and scientific models, they will likely light up basic and financially practical arrangements that radically lessen, and even turn around, mankind’s CO2 discharges. 

These sections show the absolute most encouraging answers for global warming, empowering people, networks, organizations, and governments to beat a lack of concern and make a move. 


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From attempted and-tried advancements like sustainable power source to less natural methodologies, for example, reinforcing the privileges of indigenous individuals, these procedures will assume a critical job in sparing the planet – while profiting human wellbeing, networks, and wallets en route. 


1 – Global warming caused by human carbon emissions is a fact, but there is a return.


In 1829, Prussian polymath Alexander von Humboldt was stunned when he crossed the Baraba Steppe of Russia. In his journal, he noticed how the serious agribusiness of the district had exhausted the land, drying up its excellent lakes and bogs. 

Humboldt was one of the primary researchers to recognize the negative impacts people could have on their condition. He prophetically distinguished deforestation and the “incredible masses of steam and gas” discharged during mechanical procedures as two significant natural dangers. 

Over two centuries later, in 1975, geochemist Wallace Broecker first utilized the expression “global warming” to depict the consistent ascent of the world’s surface temperature. Today, there’s no uncertainty this warming is genuine. 

Researchers presently anticipate that temperatures will ascend by 4 degrees Celsius before the century’s over. The results of environmental change incorporate out of control fires, dry seasons and ocean level ascent, which thusly will prompt brutal clashes and mass relocation. 

Much like Humboldt anticipated, an unnatural weather change is brought about by the “incredible masses of steam and gas” delivered by human action, for example, consuming petroleum products, making concrete and cultivating the land. These all discharge carbon dioxide, or CO2, into the world’s environment, subsequently creating a “nursery impact” that prompts the warming of the planet. 

In spite of a reasonable association between carbon outflows and global warming, humankind’s carbon impression is relentlessly expanding. In 2016, 36 gigatons of CO2 were produced. Envision the substance of an Olympic-size pool, and afterward increase that by 400,000 – that is one gigaton. 



Along these same lines, just easing back or cutting carbon discharges won’t be sufficient to stop a worldwide temperature alteration. We have to reach drawdown – the point in time at which ozone-depleting substances pinnacle and after that start relentlessly diminishing. 

In case we’re to accomplish this, we need to fundamentally diminish our CO2 outflows. However, we should likewise advance procedures, for example, the normal photosynthesis of plants, that diminishing the CO2 as of now in the environment. 

Fortunately, we as of now have the apparatuses we have to switch global warming. Sustainable power sources, woods security, and feasible agribusiness are a portion of these advances. More up to date procedures incorporate e-vehicles, sea cultivating, and carbon air catch. Practically these advances have extra advantages: they set aside cash, make employments, forestall contamination and improve individuals’ wellbeing. 

In the accompanying sections, we’ll investigate inside and out how these “no second thoughts” arrangements can cut carbon discharges and help us accomplish drawdown. 


2 – Energy from fossil fuels should leave their place to renewable energy from solar, wind and water.


On the off chance that you turn on the lights in your home, where does the power originate from? Undoubtedly, it was produced by consuming fossil fuels. Almost 80 percent of the world’s power originates from fossil fuels, for example, coal, gas, and oil, all of which contain huge measures of carbon. 

Yet, in case we’re not kidding about turning around global warming, we have to drastically change this. Fortunately, vitality is surrounding us, put away in the beams of the sun and the movements of wind and water. The innovation to reap these sustainable power sources is ending up progressively proficient, making them focused on fossil fuels. 

We should investigate them. 

Wind energy initiates the clean energy movement. Not exclusively are wind ranches quick and modest to manufacture, but on the other hand, they’re proficient. Take the 32 seaward wind turbines introduced close to the shoreline of Liverpool, England: a solitary revolution of one of them is sufficient to meet one family unit’s day by day power needs. 

Denmark, then, as of now supplies 40 percent of its electricity through wind control. On the off chance that different nations were to go with the same pattern, it may be workable for inland wind vitality to deal with 21.6 percent of worldwide vitality needs by 2050, which would diminish carbon dioxide by a mind-boggling 84.6 gigatons. 

Solar energy is another significant renewable that is as of now sparing 330 million tons of CO2 yearly. Solar panels create power from the photons contained in the sun’s beams. They can be assembled in enormous sun-powered homesteads or introduced independently on housetops. 



Such housetop microgrids are an extraordinary autonomous power hotspot for the 1.1 billion individuals worldwide that are not associated with a concentrated power matrix. 

Improving the capacity, transmission, and appropriation of energy will be another test in moving the energy equation. In practically all types of creation, yet particularly in delivering power from gas or coal, most of the energy is lost as warmth. Cogeneration frameworks can give this overabundance heat something to do by occupying and utilizing it for region warming, high temp water, and ventilation. 

Research, advancement and budgetary guides will be expected to spread these atmosphere neighborly advances. In 2015, the worldwide non-renewable energy source industry got more than $5.3 trillion in immediate and roundabout endowments. If that cash was placed into sustainable power sources rather, we would be well on our approach to sparing the planet. 


3 – We have to eat less meat, make farming progressively various and lessen our nourishment squander.


What do Buddha, Confucius, and Leonardo da Vinci share? They were all defenders of a plant-based eating routine. 

Their old knowledge is lost on current ages: the world is eating more meat than any other time in recent memory. What’s more, the meat business represents 20 percent of every single nursery ga discharges, which originate from both the creatures themselves and the farming expected to encourage them. 

The arrangement is basic: we have to eat not so much meat but rather more plants. Embracing a vegetarian diet can cut our carbon discharges from nourishment utilization by 63 percent. 

How might we accomplish this? Open battles that commend plant-based nourishments and reframe meat as a delicacy could move socially settled in dietary patterns. On the off chance that this message arrives at just 50% of the populace, we remain to spare 66 gigatons of carbon emanations by 2050. 

Eating plants won’t be sufficient, however. We additionally need to change how we develop these plants. Present-day mechanical farming depends on developing a solitary harvest each year until the dirt winds up saline and unworkable. What’s more regrettable is that dirt corrupted by such farming quickly discharges its carbon content into the air. 

On the other hand, sustainable techniques, for example, agroforestry grasp complex plant networks that improve the dirt instead of drain it – and discharge significantly less CO2. These strategies treat nature as an interconnected framework in which each plant and creature profits by the presence of all others. 

Not exclusively do the trees give shade to the creatures, yet they likewise sequester carbon that offsets bovine’s methane outflows. If silvopasture was expanded by 60 percent around the world, it could spare 31.1 gigatons of carbon discharges by 2050. 

To enlighten this guideline, how about we consider silvopasture, an antiquated agroforestry framework rehearsed in Spain and Portugal. Rather than eating on deforested land, silvopasture bovines are permitted to touch in the woods. 



Nearly as significant as what we wind up gobbling is the thing that we end up not eating. In spite of the 800 million individuals on the planet as yet experiencing appetite, 33% of all nourishment delivered never makes it onto our plates. 

Retailers in high-salary nations are permitted to dismiss nourishments dependent on minor knocks and wounds, markets toss out nourishment that doesn’t sell, and best-before dates are so ineffectively controlled that they frequently confound shoppers. 

Delivering nourishment that nobody eats doesn’t just waste assets – it likewise makes pointless ozone harming substances. Truth be told, if we decreased nourishment squander by 50 percent by 2050, we could stay away from 26.2 gigatons of carbon outflows. 


4 – Urban areas need to improve their structure benchmarks, foundation, and power supply to spare energy.


Smog, traffic blockage and an absence of greenery can cause urban communities to appear the direct opposite of living at one with nature. However, the thickness of urban focuses could enable them to progress toward becoming cutting edge trailblazers of climate-friendly answers for water, vitality, and lighting. 

The initial step to making a city more climate-friendly is making its structures more vitality productive. There are numerous approaches to lessen vitality use in structures. Divider and roof protection produced using fiberglass or even old papers can avoid heat misfortune in winter and overheating in summer, lessening the requirement for warming and cooling. 

Greening rooftops with plants keep structures cool while sequestering carbon. “Shrewd” electrochromic glass changes its shading as indicated by the time, saving money on warming and lighting. Not exclusively do these innovations cut power costs, yet their broad reception will have a net constructive outcome on the earth. 

For example, if energy benevolent LED lights ended up pervasive in structures worldwide by 2050, we would spare a sum of 12.8 gigatons in carbon outflows. 

Be that as it may, how might we execute these innovations in our urban surroundings? One path is for urban areas to begin making them required for new structures. More established structures can likewise be made considerably more vitality proficient. Take the Empire State Building: by including an additional layer of protection to its 6541 windows, its vitality use was cut by 40 percent. 



Another way urban communities can improve their carbon impression is by creating a foundation that supports climate-friendly strategies for transportation, for example, public transportation, walking, and biking. If more urban areas were to improve bicycle paths and make “walkable” neighborhoods where homes, shops, bistros, and parks mix, vehicle use would fall, and inhabitants would be more advantageous and more joyful. 

In the Netherlands, one of the most bicycle well-disposed nations on the planet, 27 percent of neighborhood outings are made by bicycle. All around, if this measurement could ascend to simply 7.5 percent by 2050, carbon outflows could be decreased by 2.31 gigatons. 

Not exclusively would cities be able to improve the progression of residents, however, they can likewise improve the progression of power, water, and warming to those natives. Improving dispersion through limited frameworks can counteract vitality misfortunes and overproduction. 

Copenhagen, for instance, utilizes a confined warming framework, filled with waste warmth from close by power plants, to keep its residents warm in the winter. On the off chance that urban communities overall expanded limited warming from its current 0.1 percent utilization to 10 percent, we could maintain a strategic distance from 9.38 gigatons of carbon emanations by 2050. 


5 – Customary methods of transportation must turn out to be more eco-friendly, and ought to be displaced by climate-friendly choices.


Mobility is a significant piece of our feeling of freedom. We need to have the option to move around on the planet, visit friends and family and travel to fascinating spots. Tragically, the vehicles, transports, and planes we depend on to do so all utilization customary ignition motors that consume petroleum products – loads of them. 

The boats and trucks that transport our nourishment and items aren’t a lot greener. To diminish CO2 outflows, these vehicles need to turn out to be more eco-friendly. New plans, innovation redesigns, better upkeep, and checking can add to diminishing their fuel use, in this way cutting outflows. 

As of now, planes represent 2.5% of worldwide carbon discharges, a number that will undoubtedly develop as air travel turns out to be progressively well known far and wide. To counter this expansion in flights, Boeing and NASA are now teaming up on a flying machine intended to be 50 percent more eco-friendly than a customary plane. 

This new airship has its motor in the back and better wings, rendering it lighter and progressively streamlined. 

The pretended by boats in the atmosphere condition is regularly ignored, although worldwide exchange transport by ship makes up a critical 3 percent of carbon discharges. One procedure demonstrated to cut fuel utilization is “moderate steaming,” a basic decrease in working velocity. 

Be that as it may, neither planes nor boats discharge as a lot of carbon yearly as our vehicles, trucks, and transports, which record for an alarming 25 percent of every single nursery outflow. Making these vehicles more eco-friendly by diminishing motor size or utilizing lighter structure materials won’t be sufficient. 



In a perfect world, they’d all be supplanted by electric forms sooner rather than later. Be that as it may, until this innovation is completely created, half and half vehicles could be an extension arrangement. Crossover vehicles incorporate an electric engine with a great ignition motor and are around 30 percent more eco-friendly than ordinary autos. 

Numerous administrations around the globe have started financing the acquisition of half and half autos, making them an engaging option in contrast to purchasers. 

Another versatility elective that ought to be financed and created is mass transportation, for example, open transports, metros, and fast rail administrations. Where mass transportation is modest, effective and consistent, it can defeat the social intrigue of vehicles, chop down discharges, and straightforwardness both traffic blockage and contamination. 

Ridesharing, e-bicycles, and e-bikes are other transportation strategies that can bring down the carbon cost of getting around. Numerous applications give these administrations to minimal expenditure, making it progressively appealing to leave one’s vehicle at home. 


6 – We have to ensure woodlands, peats, and wetlands and reestablish debased land.


Up until this point, we’ve predominantly tended to the initial segment of the recipe to unravel climate change: cutting carbon emission. In any case, to repulse global warming, we likewise need to secure and reestablish the environments that normally take up carbon in the air and set it back in the dirt where it has a place. 

Forests, particularly rainforests, are probably the most biodiverse environments on earth. Plants, bugs, creatures, and trees live in nearness, shaping complex networks of common advantage. Recently, researchers found that individual trees speak with one another using a shrouded system of growth in the dirt. 

Over this “wood wide web,” they share supplements and crucial data about creepy crawlies, dry spells, and different risks. Taken every single together, woods store 300 billion tons of carbon, yet 15 billion trees are chopped as the year progressed. At the point when woods are demolished, soil wellbeing dives, and the corrupted land discharges its carbon content into the air. More than 10 percent of yearly carbon, outflows are caused thusly. 

Deforestation needs to be blocked now. Brazil has driven forest insurance development by model. Following quite a while of unchecked deforestation, the nation started in 2004 to institute solid authorization arrangements, observing the woods by satellite and financing economical advancement ventures. Thus, deforestation fundamentally backed off, and probably some of the forests could be reestablished. 



Most deforested land can be reestablished by basically disregarding it. Detached reclamation could reestablish 235 million sections of land of backwoods by 2050, maintaining a strategic distance from 22.61 gigatons of carbon emanations. Progressively dynamic methodologies re-establish or make forests by planting seedlings. 

Other biodiverse biological systems that merit our consideration are beachfront wetlands, for example, bogs, knolls, and mangroves, just as peatlands, for example, marshes and mires. Peatlands, for example, are a mind-blowing carbon sink. 

Peat is made of breaking down plant matter and holds twice as a lot of carbon as the world’s forests. We should guide, screen and safeguard these regular carbon sinks. 


Indigenous individuals, who are among the most influenced by environmental change and the least liable for it, could assume a significant job in ensuring these biological systems. Their customary practices of land the executives, agroforestry, and pastoralism are a model for nourishing off nature without draining it. 

Setting up preservation understandings, giving area possession and returning local terrains to indigenous networks won’t just guarantee their occupation yet that of the land as well. 


7 – Regular materials should be reused after use and supplanted by manageable options.


There’s a solitary family unit thing that has contributed more to global warming than dairy animals and planes consolidated, and you’re utilizing it day by day: your fridge. Most of the fridges, general store cases, and forced air systems use cooling synthetics that are amazingly hurtful to the atmosphere. Indeed, a unit of the substance utilized in ice chests discharges multiple times more warmth into the climate than a solitary CO2 atom. 

The predominant concoction utilized for refrigeration these days is called hydrofluorocarbon, or HFC. What’s more, at a universal meeting in 2016, 170 nations concurred that HFCs are so unfavorably influencing our atmosphere that they should be eliminated by 2024. 

Nonetheless, since the peril of refrigerants is most noteworthy at transfer, their expulsion from the course should be deliberately checked. Be that as it may, whenever done accurately, eliminating HCFs and other unsafe refrigerants by 2050 could decrease carbon discharges by 90 gigatons, making it the main answer for environmental change. 

Researchers gauge that this measure alone will lessen a dangerous atmospheric deviation by a full degree Fahrenheit. 

Refrigerants aren’t the main regular materials that we have to eliminate, notwithstanding. Concrete and plastic are likewise universal substances that remain to be supplanted by more atmosphere amicable choices. Customary concrete is produced using decarbonizing limestone, a procedure that, as the name spells out, causes carbon emanations. 



One elective strategy is to make concrete from the fly debris delivered by consuming coal, which avoids decarbonization and radically brings down discharges. Plastic, in the interim, could be produced using nourishment or paper squander rather than petroleum derivatives. 

Another piece of the generation chain to consider is what befalls items when they’ve filled their needs. The overwhelming way this is done is, obviously, through the family unit and mechanical reusing, where nourishment, yard squander, paper, cardboard, metals, garments, and wood is gathered and put to utilize again as fertilizer, biofuel, and crude material. 

One approach to energize reusing over ordinary transfer is through the legislative arrangement. San Francisco, for instance, charges family units for diverting trash for landfills yet removes reusing material for nothing. 


8 – Directed training projects can enable people far and wide to bring down their carbon footprint.


Concocting approaches, setting up guidelines and giving endowments that cut carbon discharges and secure biological systems are generally employments for governments, organizations, and associations. 

Be that as it may, turning around a dangerous atmospheric deviation similarly depends on people changing their conduct. Open battles, distributed preparing, and grassroots data sharing will be fundamental apparatuses in effecting such change. 

Farmers are a particularly significant group of audience for such training endeavors, as feasible cultivating stands to spare huge amounts of carbon discharges. NGOs are currently showing manageable cultivating methods around the globe. 

For instance, the System of Rice Intensification, or SRI, is an atmosphere cordial way to deal with improving the creation of rice, staple nourishment over the globe. Its key segments include transplanting rice seedlings prior, depleting the fields mid-season rather than persistently flooding them, and diminishing the utilization of manufactured manures for natural fertilizer. 

The outcome? Progressively safe plants and diminished ozone harming substance emanations. Also, SRI is allowed to utilize. Be that as it may, it’s not in every case simple to get ranchers to change how they work medium-term, as conventional cultivating procedures are regularly profoundly socially dug in. That is the reason SRI is best educated through distributed preparing that gives ranchers genuine instances of its effectiveness. 

Engaging ladies ranchers must be a piece of any such instruction program. Although they make up 43 percent of the horticultural work power, ladies are only from time to time perceived as ranchers in their own right. 



Lacking access to funds, instruction and different assets contrasted with their male partners, their fields will, in general, be less beneficial. Supporting them through smaller scale financing and on-the-ground preparing that trains reasonable cultivating strategies will start to address this awkwardness. 

However, female ranchers aren’t the main gathering of ladies that could enable us to battle climate change with better access to training. Organizing the instruction of young ladies, by and large, would help decrease the world’s carbon emanations, partially because informed ladies will, in general, have fewer youngsters. 


Populace size is a dubious argument in the atmosphere talk, however better access to regenerative wellbeing administrations mirrors the desires of ladies around the world; 240 million ladies in lower-salary nations state they need the capacity to pick when they become pregnant. 

Giving these ladies access to family arranging would improve their lives while lessening the number of individuals on the planet, in this way sparing the CO2 emanations every one of them would deliver during their lifetime. 


9 – Advances, for example, self-driving autos, sea cultivating, and carbon catch hold the further potential to turn around discharges.


At this point we have been able to know a lot of settled advances that, whenever consolidated and spread, can repulse climate change. Notwithstanding these attempted and-tried arrangements, new companies and NGOs around the globe always think of new plans to decrease emanations and sequester carbon. How about we investigate three of the advancements right now being developed. 

While self-driving vehicles probably won’t appear to be inalienably climate-friendly, a significant number of the organizations creating them are matching them with low-outflow innovations, for example, electric engines, ride-sharing, and shrewd traffic steering. These activities may, at last, diminish fuel and individual vehicle use, therefore cutting carbon outflows. 

Ensuring our seas is another undertaking in the focal point of development. As the sea’s surface water retains over a portion of the CO2 discharged into the air – and more than 90 percent of its warmth – huge swaths of the sea have turned out to resemble deserts, to a great extent without marine creatures and plants. 

Things being what they are, how might we reforest the sea? With the assistance of kelp and phytoplankton, small scale plant creatures that can give nourishment, compost, and biofuel to different plants, creatures, and people. Setting up ranches of these microorganisms in the sea, a procedure known as marine permaculture could reproduce whole environments of green growth, fish, seals, and sharks. 

Another innovation that could remove carbon from the climate is Direct Air Capture. DAC frameworks attempt to copy what plants have been doing more than a large number of years through photosynthesis: catching CO2 legitimately from the air and transforming it into fuel. 



The primary test is that the carbon substance of the air is just 0.04 percent, making the procedure long and vitality exorbitant, at any rate in its current, simple structure. On the off chance that DAC innovation turns out to be progressively productive later on, it could be a possible method to diminish carbon in the air. 

All things considered, the advancements enlightened in this flicker may give want to the cynics among us who accept that mankind has, in parity, aggravating our planet. All things considered, researchers have named our time of development the Anthropocene, a period characterized by the human mastery of the earth. 

In any case, by saddling new advances and actualizing wide-extending approach changes over the world, we may have the option to turn around the negative effect we as animal types have had on the planet that continues us. And keeping in mind that environmental change represents an existential emergency to mankind overall, it additionally offers humankind an opportunity to demonstrate that it can improve.


Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming by Paul Hawken Book Review


It’s not very late! If networks, governments, organizations, and associations meet up to act now, we can switch a dangerous atmospheric deviation. The key innovations to decrease carbon outflows and advance their reuptake by the earth are as of now set up. 

They incorporate sustainable power source, practical cultivating, reforestation and reusing, across the board instruction programs and inventive future innovations, for example, self-driving e-vehicles and sea cultivating. On the off chance that generally executed, ceaselessly created and financed when vital, these advancements can spare the planet. 


Accomplish something. 

The gravity and extent of the climate crisis, alongside the way that such a large number of individuals in power continue denying and sustaining it, can leave one inclination incapacitated. Why try reusing when it appears to be evident that one person’s demonstration of good confidence won’t have any kind of effect? 

All things considered, one individual activity won’t change the condition, yet numerous individual activities, through a mind-blowing span and crosswise over networks, will. It’s never past the point where it is possible to begin reusing, biking to work or developing your nourishment, and starting to mend the split between what you know and what you do.


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Savaş Ateş

I'm a software engineer. I like reading books and writing summaries. I like to play soccer too :) Good Reads Profile: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/106467014-sava-ate

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