# Drawdown Explorer: Behind the scenes of the world's most powerful climate solutions platform

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Project Drawdown
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0mJQMpYsNE
- **Дата:** 28.05.2026
- **Длительность:** 57:17
- **Просмотры:** 213

## Описание

Join Project Drawdown for an inside look at the collaborative effort behind Drawdown Explorer, highlighting both the science behind the platform and how it was brought to life.

Launched in September 2025, Drawdown Explorer has quickly established a reputation as the world’s leading climate solutions platform. It is what the climate movement has been missing: an all-encompassing platform using the best available data to provide decision-makers with actionable, localized intelligence on the most effective climate solutions. 

By aggregating and analyzing thousands of solutions across sectors – from energy and transportation to food systems and land use – Drawdown Explorer enables governments, businesses, and communities to prioritize interventions that have the greatest potential for measurable impact. Its open-access design ensures that anyone, anywhere, can explore climate solutions backed by rigorous science, making it a powerful tool for accelerating climate action globally.

Todd Reubold, Project Drawdown’s Director of Marketing & Communications, hosts a conversation with two of the key leaders behind this work: Amanda Smith, Ph.D. Project Drawdown’s Senior Scientist, Built Environment, and Chad Upham, Creative Director of Covive. 

Amanda offers insights into the scientific methodology and people behind Drawdown Explorer, including how solutions are assessed and evaluated within the platform. Chad – Drawdown Explorer’s developer – shares behind-the-scenes insights about the design process for an open-access online platform specifically built to provide detailed, up-to-date intelligence on climate solutions.

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0mJQMpYsNE) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

Welcome everyone again to Drawdown Ignite and today's webinar, Drawdown Explorer, lessons learned since the launch of the world's most powerful climate solutions platform. My name is Todd and I'm the director of marketing and communications at Project Drawdown. And I want to thank you again for joining us today as we take a peek behind the curtain at one of the world's most powerful climate solutions guides ever built. It is my pleasure to introduce our two featured speakers for the day, Amanda Smith and Chad Uppam. Dr. Amanda Smith serves as senior scientist for the built environment and leads technical work on the draw down explorer for solutions in buildings, electricity, industry, transportation and other energy related drivers of climate change. She is a researcher, analyst and educator who studies how we produce and use energy and how that impacts the environment. She holds a bachelor of science from the University of Memphis and a PhD from Mississippi State University, both in mechanical engineering and has worked in academia, a DOE national lab and industry. And now to introduce our second speaker with a degree in graphic design from the Art Center College of Design and an MBA in sustainable management from Prescidio Graduate School. Chad leads Kovive, a multid-disciplinary design agency focused on communications that inform and aspire. Chad has been working with Project Drawdown since its inception around 2016, supporting the launch of the Draw Down book and several iterations of drawdown. org, the website, including design and development of Drawdown Explorer. So, with that, I'm looking forward to today's insights from both uh both of you. And Amanda, I'll hand it over to you next to get us started. Thanks so much, Todd. Um, hi to the several folks from Portland, Oregon that I saw in the chat. I'm here as well and everybody in the Pacific Northwest and those joining us from around the world. I'm really happy to tell you more about the Drawown Explorer. So, maybe a year and a half ago, Todd and I visited with you. The Explore website didn't actually even exist yet. And I'm gonna give you a little review on what the Explorer is and does, but really mostly talk to you about what does it look like from the inside. And then um Chad will help me give you more details on how we actually created it. So in a nutshell, the draw down explorer pulls together the best science and evidence on which solutions really help the climate, where they do that, when they act, when we should act, how they work, and who plays a role. So the point is to really synthesize the science and the evidence. And today I want to talk a little more about the how we do it and the who is doing it in terms of assessing these climate solutions, getting the information to you in a package that's usable and explorable. So every solution we start with a definition. That was the first thing that we realized was most important was to give really clear boundaries around what we can quantify. So a solution has to have some clear boundaries. It has to be a thing or a practice that helps the climate so that we can quantify it, give you some scientific assessment. We also found we really have to have a very clear description of what we're comparing it to. So there's some baseline, there's some other way to do this thing without a climate solution and we have to be very specific about that to quantify what it is. And comparing this solution to the baseline helps us know how it works. There's really two big ways that a climate solution can work. we can find the sources of emissions and we can cut them or we can remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it. So we just look at where that happens and we classify solutions in sectors according to where those emissions get cut or where the carbon gets removed. So we're studying a solution's effectiveness, how well it does that. We're studying where it's adopted, where it can be adopted. We're studying its climate impact on a global scale. What are the risks and benefits associated with every solution? Where are the levers of action? Who plays a role? And geographically, where are the priorities? Based on where it's most effective, growing, based on where it's needed. And when I say we, I want to be very clear. We have some really amazing research fellows who join us at Project Drawdown. They bring in very deep expertise. They make themselves world experts on topics very quickly and they serve with us for a few months to a few years. Um, everyone has a graduate degree in some form of science or engineering. Most of them have PhDs and everyone's practiced in creating some new knowledge through their own research. They're very skilled also at synthesizing information from others and presenting it for other people. So when we're going to start considering a climate solution, one of the first things we learned is we have to have a really clear framework for deciding what is a climate solution. And my colleague Tina Swanson leads that work. She works very closely with one lead research fellow when we've identified a solution that we're going to study. So to figure out if it's a solution, we ask could it

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0mJQMpYsNE&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

work? Is there a physically plausible reason it could work? Is it actually ready to do that? Can it be deployed? Are there data that can show us that it's proven? How effective is it? How big is its impact? A lot of things are really great and cool to do and they may not have a global impact on the scale of the emissions that humans are generating each year. And I'll talk about how we deal with that. What are its risks? We recognize that every solution, just like every baseline, has some risks associated with it. And is it cheap particularly compared to what we would do otherwise and is it cheap per unit of impact in terms of the climate? So we wind up classifying these solutions and we found that we needed to be able to describe solutions in a variety of ways, but we wanted to keep it as simple as possible and make sure it was clear what we're actually finding. So the highly recommended solutions are the big project draw on solutions that we're really excited about and that you find the most information about. But we also find other solutions that are worthwhile. They may be great things to do and not have a huge impact. They could be worthwhile for a couple of other reasons. Lots of proposed climate solutions are keep watching solutions. There's a physically plausible mechanism. There's a way it could work. Maybe it hasn't been piloted yet. Maybe we really just don't have the data to study it. And there are climate solutions that we don't recommend. It could be that there's not a good reason that they will work. It could be that the risks are too great. So each of the worthwhile keep watching and not recommended solutions still get at minimum an internal review by our scientists before we present the information to you. So we write up why it's in that category and what we learned from studying the evidence. I'll give you an example of one of those. Um, when we look at deploying green roofs, this is something studied by Dr. Henry Agoo, who's actually joining us on the call today. Um, and we found that this was a worthwhile climate solution. It's a good thing to do. It has a plausible reason that it could work. Sometimes there are alternatives that cut building energy use more cheaply or more effectively. Um, and the amount of data that we found was mixed. So, we'll show you for each solution that's worthwhile how we went through this framework and what our findings were on each of those. You'll find a little write up and some references so you can follow the information yourself. Now, for a highly recommended solution, you'll see a real deep dive. These are the ones where the evidence is actually there and they're showing that they have the most potential to be effective, to have a global impact, and we have the right data to evaluate them. So we can tell you what the science is showing us. When we get into a highly recommended solution, the fellow is working closely with two internal scientists. Primarily these five folks on our internal um science team. These are expert scientists who are full-time staff at project drawdown. And the research fellow leads the assessment, but they pair up with a couple of staff scientists and they study each of those key factors that I'm looking at. Where's the evidence for how effective it is? Where it's cutting emissions or removing carbon. Where is it adopted? what is its impact and potential for impact? What are the risks and benefits of that solution? How can we act? And where are our geographic priorities? So solutions effectiveness is quite simple in practice. Oftentimes when we look at the evidence, right? um we find we have mixed findings and we have a lot to look at but we want to identify how it's doing that compared to a baseline um and present the evidence um quantitatively on how much it can cut either carbon dioxide or methane or another warming agent um versus the baseline. We also want to see where is it currently adopted. How much is it growing? So adoption trends are something to really watch out for. What's a potential adoption range? Ideally, according to studies who have looked at potential globally or in different regions that we can put together and is there some upper limit? Is there some physical limit? If I'm going to um put out um solar PV panels and agricultural fields, then I certainly can't do more than we actually have in terms of agricultural fields worldwide, right? And then I look at what's the potential for impact. So, if I go through that adoption range or up to the ceiling, you can actually play with sliders on our website to look at the solutions impact and compare it to the yearly emissions um that we're putting out into the atmosphere each year and get a sense of, okay, if we were to increase recycling metals to this amount, we could go almost up to 2% um of the current global emissions. So, it gives you a sense of scale for each solution. And one of the coolest things that I find is I'm always surprised what sort of benefits it has. So Dr. Ruthie Burroughs um along with my former colleague Ysef J came up with a framework where we look at how can a solution also protect human well-being, protect the environment, other species in the world, and help us adapt to a changing climate. And there are specific categories of how it does that. We also look at the research and present you

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0mJQMpYsNE&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

with citations to explain to you where it's been shown to do that, why, and how. And taking action. A lot of you may be joining us because you want to take climate action. Um, my colleague Dan Jasper works closely with the research fellow and looks at specific categories of types of people who have a role to play in this solution. and he looks for research, case studies, um lots of information from practitioners on how these people actually play a role effectively as the solution is getting rolled out. So it could be a lawmaker, someone making policy, someone who's actually practicing, for example, a practicing architect, someone leading a business or a nonprofit or investor, people deploying money towards cap uh towards climate solutions um like philanthropists and investors, thought leaders including educators, people who are doing research um into the technology itself, and general communities and households where they play a role. One of the most fun things to browse too on the explorer is the maps. So each solution has a geographic deep dive. My colleagues Alex Sweeney and Dr. James Gerber work closely with the research fellow to understand how can we visually illustrate based on the geographic data that we have available to us where the solutions potential is for being effective and for being adapted. This map is a particular favorite. But I think it's really cool because one of the things we study if you're a buildings person is called cooling degree days and heating degree days. It tells us over a year based on where you are how much time you're going to spend above a certain temperature. So if you have a lot of cooling degree days um or a lot of heating degree days then you're going to spend money in terms of energy um to heat or to cool. When we look at cooling degree days worldwide, um what we took a look at here is over the past 25 years. So from the beginning of this century to 2025, how have the cooling degree days changed globally? So one of the interesting things we see with climate change, right, is that it affects different places in different ways. And we see that the growth in cooling degree days, which you'll see as darker spots on your map, is concentrated in particular areas. that really has a lot of implications for um the types of buildings that people need, the growth of air conditioning, all kinds of um health aspects as well as energy aspects of how we take care of ourselves and how we live in buildings. Um so this was a really fun one to put together. Each solution also goes through an internal review. So the research fellow pairs up with another research fellow who tests them, ask questions, checks for errors um and with two staff scientists who are collaborating and asking questions along the way as the evidence is rolling in. For highly recommended solutions, we always go through an external expert review. So these are worldclass leading scientists, world-class practitioners who have deep expertise in that particular technology or that particular practice who get to read our information, look at our sources, check our spreadsheets and tell us what they think. The research fellow then gets that information, talks with the two staff scientists who are on the solution and we always always make changes in response to what we learn from those outside people. So I really want to thank them uh for doing that. Then before it gets to you, we also go through an internal scientific communications expert review because we're nerds. We spent a lot of time in academia, most of us. And we have people on staff who have deep expertise in communicating science in a way that's engaging and true and clear. And so Mary and Skyler have been amazing at helping us and working closely with the research fellows to get that information to you in a way that everyone's really happy with and that's digestible uh and fits on our website. We always want to write a little more than we have room for. Okay, then exciting a solution gets published. I want to thank especially my colleague Daria Chic who coordinates this project. I couldn't put her face on every slide going through but I should have. So she really shepherds it from conception in getting it to the web team. Um and you can see the methods for doing everything that I've just described as well. We share everything. Um my colleague Megan Matthews um is a research associate and she's also really careful about making sure that the methodology gets updated and is very accurate to what we're doing. Sometimes because we're running through solutions for the first time, we run into a new problem and find that we really need to define something else in our methodology or add a little information in an appendix to make it really clear how we're treating a particular sector. So, she makes sure all of that is coordinated and gets published to the web um so that everyone can see why and how we're doing what we're doing. Uh my colleague Sarah Gleason um also helps us make sure that the solution assessment findings are consistent across solutions and consistently presented across solutions as well.

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0mJQMpYsNE&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

She's checked pretty much every single one on the website. Um and then again you can download our spreadsheet which has our sources and any sort of calculations that we've made and the downloadable map. So, the map that I just showed you, I downloaded right off of the website and you can grab any maps that are cool and interesting to you, use them in your own presentations. We're so proud of what we've done and how it's turned out on the web. And I'm going to let Chad tell you a little bit more about that process of how it actually gets into the um web pages that you're seeing on the draw down explore. Thanks, Greetings from San Francisco everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I want to talk a little bit about the design process and then I'll do a walkth through of the drawown explorer on the website. When I got involved in the project a year and a half to two years ago, we really just started with ideas and sketches, sample solutions, sample content. This is a sketch that was shared with me early in the beginning of the idea of a dashboard. And so we take this simple idea and then work with it, iterate, iterate working with the science team, the communications team to arrive at what we have as drawdown explorer today. And that continues to evolve as we add new solutions, new use cases, new information that we want to share or receive feedback from our audiences. Uh we continue to evolve the platform. We'll start by looking at the about explorer section of the landing page here at drawdown. org explorer. It explains these classifications, the four categories that Amanda talked about. And we have a link right here to a primer that provides a very comprehensive description of uh what drawdown explore is uh methodology. We have some FAQs. So some really important information right here. There's also a great video. Uh we won't play it today, but it's a great summary that uh provides an introduction for how to use and how to navigate Drawdown Explorer. We present our solutions in three views. this card view, a table view, and then a chart view. And we'll start by looking at the card view first. To date, we have 103 solutions evaluated with 54 additional solutions identified as coming soon. I think just two more solutions or one more solution was added yesterday. So the draw down explorers content continues to be uh added to on a regular basis. The chart view allows us to look at solutions in a visual way. We can hover over and receive some information on each one of the cards. And some other things that we can do here is filter by classification. If we just want to see solutions which are not recommended, if we want to uh see transportation uh solutions, we can view those as well. Or we can search by name. For example, wind solutions or seaweed solutions. We can see uh there as well. The URL updates as we uh change these categories. So if you want to share just a subset of solutions, you can copy that URL and share that with others. Also within the card view is the ability to shuffle if you want a surprise to float some new solutions to the top that you might not have been looking at before. Uh you can also sort these alphabetically or by their carbon input. If we flip all the cards, we can see uh the carbon emission impact range on the back of those cards. Or by clicking on view the solution, we can go see that solution detail page. We'll also look at the table view. So the table view includes uh all of the information that Amanda was talking about the effectiveness, adoption uh and cost and GHD impact as well as additional benefits. So this is another way to do that and you can download this information as a CSV. This is generated dynamically. So you might come back in a couple weeks and there may be some new uh solutions added to that uh to that download. The table view and the car view it give us the information but sometimes it's hard to see the big p big picture impact. So a chart view allows us to see the GHG potential GHD impact of all of these solutions. We can group them by sector. the cluster of how these solutions work or we can uh sort them by GHG impact. We can also filter by uh by the sector or by name. Anytime we have a chart like this, it's important to remember that while some of the solutions have greater impact, we

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0mJQMpYsNE&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00)

need all of them. Any solution that is shown here as highly recommended has passed a threshold of the test that means it's big enough to matter. So even some of these down here are worthwhile and and should be uh solutions that we are continuing to work toward implementation. From here, let's look at a solution detail page. I'll come here to protect forests. At the top of the page, we have the taxonomy. Uh that's the solution mode and sector and cluster. Uh the designation that this solution is highly recommended and a brief introduction. Across all of Drawown Explorer solutions, we have a dynamic glossery. So anytime you see a highlighted term in text, you can hover over it and get a definition. We also have the glossery here in the lower right hand corner. So you can look for any term uh and see the definition there as well. These are updated dynamically. So as new solutions are added and new terms are added to the glossery, that's all updated automatically. Each of these solution pages presents a lot of content. And so we have this uh helpful index, a list of content that allows you to skip to different sections if you want to go to the take action section or if you want to go directly to maps or read the overview. And we'll stay here at the dashboard. I want to talk about the idea of subsolutions within some solutions such as protect forest. Uh the science team looked at different types of forests or with different solutions like shared bicycles looking at private bicycles versus public shared bicycle sharing systems. Um so with any solution that has subsolutions has these tabs uh where we're able to see the details and information for each one of them. Uh in the left column we have adoption and effectiveness and the current adoption in the range of potential adoption. Anytime you have a question about what these mean. We have the info popup buttons that allow you to provide more information and it links directly to the section of the page where you can read more about that. In the center column, we have the current uh current impact of GHG uh equivalent uh and uh the cost to implement that solution, the speed of action, the protecting forest as an emergency break solution. You can read more about that in this section and the CO2 pollutants that are mitigated. As we move through these subsolutions, you can see that these dynamic charts change and that tropical forest protection has that very large potential for uh GHD impact uh emissions. In addition, we have our additional benefits. These are climate adaptation, human well-being and environment. And you can get a little summary of what those are. The ones highlighted in color are the ones that this solution uh is has the most potential to uh to provide. We're currently looking talked about that these different tropical forest solutions. As we continue down the page, we have an overview and we have an impact calculator. Here's where we can slide from the current adoption. How many hectares protected around the world? uh are there of boreal forests and as we increase from low to high how does that impact the climate potential? This session is called lessons learned. So I'll pause here to point out some of my biggest lessons learned working on this project and has to do with numbers. As we began designing and prototyping for not just one or two solutions, but a whole range of solutions, we found that we're dealing with very large numbers as well as very small numbers. And so how do we present those numbers that might have many decimal points or be very large? Uh so at one point we decided it makes sense to use the scientific notation uh for how these numbers are presented. So it was my job as designer and developer uh to provide all the scripting and uh calculator functions to present these inputs and outputs in a way that uh meets the scientific rigor of project the project drawdown team. As we add new solutions, we bump into new use cases that requires us to expand or adjust our rules or create controls for handling different types of anomalies. Another thing I learned and a feature that we needed to develop is the difference between the climate impact uh over a hundredyear or a 20year basis. I won't

### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0mJQMpYsNE&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00)

explain it and go into the detail. if you're curious about it, we can ask in the Q& A, but it was something that was important to show. And uh so we have this toggle here, and this really pertains to solutions that have a high impact of methane or refrigerants. And you can see the difference in how that impact is calculated on 100year 20-year basis. Next, we have maps and drawdown explore was designed to show you where certain climate solutions can have the greatest impact as Amanda discussed in the presentation. And I was able to work with that extraordinary mapping team to develop an interface and a content management system tool that allows us to showcase these maps, including the ability to compare two maps side by side. So, we're looking at forest protection here. We can see the tree cover on the left and perhaps intentional deforestation on the right. I'll zoom in here to the Amazon area and we can see areas of intentional deforestation. And then we can say what is the current adoption of forest protection? What areas are currently being protected and what's the uh potential for uh forest protection? Uh each of these have the sources and uh the information describing what we're looking at underneath it. You can also download a snapshot of this screen exactly as we're looking at it as an image and I've uh done one beforehand. So here's a snapshot a PNG that I was able to save to the computer that shows where it came from uh with our project drawdown reference which you can drop into presentations or reports. While we're here, I'll also showcase another. This is offshore uh wind turbines. And so on the left, I'm showing uh the technical potential for offshore wind in the United States. And then on the right, we have current adoption. And this lists the exact locations of certain wind projects and the megawatts that are generated by those. So, a lot of really impro interesting information that you're able to see in drawdown explorer. Continuing down the page, we have all of the details and this is where you can read about the effectiveness and cost. Uh we have charts here is adoption trend of global offshore wind uh capacity installed uh between 20 two 20 and 2023. Uh we also have some dynamic charts that show uh you how these calculations of adoption trend were factored. Uh we have the impacts and all of the information that goes behind it. We have this take action section where you can find specific things that you can do uh to work towards uh the uh in increased adoption of these solutions and a very extensive references credits and methods and supporting data. And this is where you can go and really find a lot of the documentation uh that the science team has prepared uh beyond the descriptions that we've provided here in this userfriendly format. Uh while we're here, I'll give a plug for supporting climate action. Uh making monthly donation, help pay a scientist salary is something that you can do and sign up for the draw down insider newsletter. That's probably how you heard about this webinar today. Uh but the team continues to put out really interesting uh insights and analysis uh that you can get from the draw down newsletter. And I'll stop sharing my screen for a little wrap up. For me, it's exciting to be in a room of people who care about and are interested in this work and who can give us direct feedback and guide us towards continuous improvement. My personal participation in Drydown Explorer and the design and development has been over a thousand hours. And that's just a small portion of all of the work that has gone into preparing what you're what you're seeing today. Um and as we look at the big picture as somebody who's worked with project drawdown from the beginning for more than 10 years um first project drawdown introduced the language of climate solutions and it became part of our vocabulary and discourse then everything became a climate solution. So what the draw down explorer team has done is keep us focused on the most effective solutions with science-based research and the key is in adoption and scaling up of these solutions where they can be most effective. So whatever your background, whatever drew you to this webinar today, at least one of these solutions is in your sphere of influence. So supporting, promoting, developing policy, investing, innovating, campaign, campaigning, buying, selling, switching, redirecting

### [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0mJQMpYsNE&t=1800s) Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00)

replacing or even simply abstaining from something. All of these are actions which you can justify through the research and the ideas that are presented in draw down explorer. And we hope that you'll continue to reference it for inspiration, for ideas, for clarity, and for hope. So Todd will now guide us in a conversation. Thank you. — Thank you. Wow. Both Amanda and Chad, let's give them all a huge virtual hand for such a fantastic presentation by both of them. So thankful to have you both as part of the team working on draw explorer. And thank you so much for giving us that peak behind the scenes. I learned a lot about Explorer that I didn't even know. So really, really appreciate it. Um I just want to say thanks to all of you. We've got some fabulous questions coming in so far. probably more than we're going to have time to get to, but I will say that all of the questions are shared with our science team after the webinar. So, the whole science team will see the things that you're wondering about, some new ideas for new features we might want to think about with Drone Explorer. So, keep those questions coming in even though we might not get to all of them. And Chad and Amanda, if you'd like to take a peek as we go along, too, if there's something you're seeing in the Q& A that you really just want to answer, feel free to let me know and we can jump in and tackle that question, too. Um, Amanda, maybe just to kick us off though, um, to kick off the Q& A, I'm just curious a little bit more about the origin story. Why did we even build Draw on Explorer? Can you tell us about the beginnings of this platform that we're seeing come to life now today? — Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we got to build on a lot of work that's happened at the Project Drawdown organization before. So almost 10 years ago now, our project drawown showed really for the first time that the scale of the climate solutions we have is on the scale of the emissions that we're creating. But this started a few years ago and I've been at project draw down for just over three years just for context um in conversations among our new science team. So at that point in 2023 we had brought on some internals science team expertise um and along with our executive director John Foley we were really looking at the information we're presenting and wanted to figure out how to give the best worldclass information about climate solutions in a way that was technically rigorous but that was actually understandable and usable to everyone on this webinar. are and we started there and we started with the questions that people are most often asking us when we're talking about climate solutions. Does this actually work? Do we know that it works? Where is it? Where should it be? How much does it cost? And we turned those questions into a framework. We started with the list of potential climate solutions. That list has grown as we've kept going. Um, but we wanted to look at the solutions that had the potential for biggest impact and the solutions that people were talking about the most. One thing that's really important is a lot of this was developed after we brought research fellows on board. Um so Sarah Gleon and uh Jason Lamb were among the very first fellows that we brought on when the draw down explore didn't exist and we told them basically what I just told you and said here's what we're trying to do and they constantly were helping us saying we actually need to have a definition here. We framework quantitative um uh limit here for this particular key metric. Um, and Megan, as I mentioned, helped us pull together the methodology, make sure that we're documenting all of that as we go, so that we're consistent across solutions, and so that once we made a decision, we can um, make sure to implement it across everything. So a lot of it was created as we were digging into the research realizing oh actually quantifying effectiveness is not that simple for the electricity sector because globally there's a lot of different ways to produce electricity and it very very much depends on where you are and what time it is like down to the second. Um and so we had a lot of questions come up as we went and we created methods to treat that but we always stayed focused on those big questions. What does it cost? How effective is it? where is it adopted? What's its potential? And how does that scale against the current global emissions? And we built it from the ground up from there. — Before I ask Chad a question, I just want to ask you a quick follow-up, Amanda. So Chad mentioned that there are a number of coming soon solutions are listed on the website. I know there's also behind the scenes a master spreadsheet of solutions that your whole team is looking at. And that's changed over time, too, hasn't it? That list has kind of ebbed and flowed and grown a little bit. Are you settled now on what that final list is or does that still have some flexibility to it behind the scenes? — Well, Todd's really giving you some insider baseball. Yeah, the in the spreadsheet that we see you see as cards on the website. That's what we're actually looking at. And I would say we're over 90% settled, but we never

### [35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0mJQMpYsNE&t=2100s) Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00)

consider anything across the explorer perfectly settled. So, if you look at each solution at the top of the web page, it says last updated. And sometimes information comes in from the web. Sometimes a new study is released that wasn't available to the fellow when they wrote that up and we actually go back and update it. Now our priority is to go through the solutions that we haven't actually performed a study for yet to do those assessments but we have updated a few because information came in that was so important that we felt like we needed to get that to you. So nothing is totally set in stone. The exact way that solutions are divided is not completely set in stone. Sometimes we even get feedback from the external reviewers that the way we've titled a solution um doesn't quite fit with the way it's being discussed in their community. So we've made adjustments even after a solution's actually gone out to um external review in terms of how that's classified. So you'll see the same types of things. I don't expect any um new big huge global impact scale solutions. I think that we know enough among our science team that we've captured all of those. Um but you will see some being added. You may see some being merged. broken out into subsolutions or even a couple different solutions. — Great. Thanks for that peak like way behind the curtain. I appreciate you taking on that follow-up question. So Chad, a question for you. Um, as a designer developer when you first started a project as massive as this, and this was a huge project. Um, what are some of those questions that are top of mind for you when you're putting on your design development hat and you're looking at something of this scale? And maybe a little bit of a followup to that, what are some of the lessons learned now that you've been working on explore for what seems like a couple years now? So just curious about those two things. — Yes. You know, I think critical is how do you present a lot of information in a way that people can understand and that isn't intimidating. Um, it's important for me as a designer to work with real content. And so that early in the process, I said, ' Give me one or two sample solutions and tell me everything that we're going to talk about that solution. Let's work, let's do some prototypes of some of the maps. the dashboard. And that was very iterative as we continued to uh figure out how do we want to present this information. um the lessons learned around h how do we handle anomalies, really big numbers, really small numbers, numbers that fit into a classification that we haven't considered before. Um all those different ranges and scales. Also, it's important for me that this website looks good and works great on a mobile phone, that it works great around the world, even where people don't have uh speedy internet with in low bandwidth situations. So that's something that we consider. how fast does it load and that it's accessible for uh users that they can navigate this with screen readers, they can navigate it uh with uh tab keyboard interface. Um and so keeping all of those in mind is really important as we move through the process. I think that me looking back on where we've come from and where we are now. What's really important is that people understand how to use it. I think it's great that this is an online reference resource that people can come back to. They can go to one particular solution that is their area of expertise and use that as a reference or they can use it to look at the big picture. But I think it helps guide us in are we directing our policy where we can have the greatest uh greatest impact and are we directing our investment where we can have the greatest impact um and putting our efforts and focus and campaigns into the right areas of work. makes me really thankful that both of you are here today because I think that you know giving this peak behind the scenes that Amanda did just building that trust in the platform the trust in what we've built is amazing and then Chad this walkth through of how people can use it. So, I'm really glad again this will be recorded today's session if you want to go back and rewatch anything that we've talked about during the session. And if you're curious, um, as Chad mentioned, that test solution improve cement production is the one that's probably stuck in all of our brains because that was the one that we circled around for months while we were building the initial prototype for one of these solutions pages. So, uh, pretty cool to see the whole system come to life. Now, though, question for both of you. Um, what are some of the biggest surprises you've encountered while developing or creating uh Drone Explore? And maybe I'll pass it to Chad first since you're unmuted. the terminology around these categorizations of highly recommended, not recommended, uh, worthwhile, uh, and how

### [40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0mJQMpYsNE&t=2400s) Segment 9 (40:00 - 45:00)

your project drawown is bringing a point of view to these solutions with those classifications and how that can then guide our conversations. And you know in the news we see a lot of stories about investment in things that might be a distraction. And so the cost of implementing some of these solutions, the technological solution where the magic bullet that's going to save us might be impractical from a cost point of view. Whereas simply protecting a hectare of tropical forest has so much more impact. And so you the work of draw down explore as they presented it and this is based on the work of many scientists around the world but that work helps us focus on where can we get the real impact. — Yeah. I'll say I knew going in that it would be a struggle to jump between the details and clear big picture messages, but I didn't quite understand how. So, um, a few weeks ago, I was talking with some fellows and I pulled up the original draft of the methodology, which I think happened before Dr. Megan Matthews was even here. Um, and I just sketched down some ideas and some things from meetings and it was about 11 pages. um and it's probably about 30 if you look at what you can download now. So there are so many things that we found that we needed to capture in areas that I didn't even know anything about to write about like um agricultural and land cover. Um and also we had to maintain flexibility going along. So as much as the types of people who like doing this kind of work are very much into getting down into the details and documenting everything because we're working across sectors when we ask these questions in the framework around is it plausible is it ready where is it we can't always quantify them in the exact same way because a hectare and a megawatt are so non-comparable. So we had to be able to talk about things with each other and kind of understand across sectors what someone was doing and then know our own sector our own expertise well enough to map it to what we were doing and leave that flexibility within the methodology and the perimeter and the FAQ that you see. So that was a really interesting challenge and the other thing that's surprised me on the inside of the work is how extremely collaborative it is. You see that the fellows are getting checked by another fellow. We knew they would work with two scientists, but I really thought it'd be more of a check-in in the beginning and some more document checks going along. These are constant conversations and there's all kinds of interesting scientific challenges. Even though we're synthesizing the work of other people, we're really careful about any judgments that we make, any way that we combine data. And those conversations are really, really interesting about how we frame things and we find things that are surprising um how we present them and what we do with that. So, um, just on the workflow side of it, it's been so much more engaging and I think that's just because the fellows in particular care so much about what they're doing and they're so curious and so interested in learning from each other. So, that's been really fun. — Couple questions for you, Amanda, and I'll kind of tie these two together. Folks are wondering um how frequent updates are made to the existing solutions. Is that monthly, quarterly, annually? And the followup to that question um that I'll tie together is do you have a timeline for the coming soon solutions and when those might be rolled out? — Yes, our target is to get the coming sol soon solutions out written up in the next year and that depends a lot because there are a few solutions we may expect to be worthwhile and they wind up being highly recommended and we spend a lot more time on them or vice versa. So there's not a tight timeline. Um, I would love to say we're going to review everything every quarter. Um, we don't have the staff right now and our focus really is on getting through those solutions that we haven't been able to write up yet and provide you the information on yet. So, when we decide to review or edit or update a solution that's already published, we're really doing that on the basis of brand new information, finding out from feedback that something's not coming across clearly or that something would be really useful to a particular audience. Um, and we prioritize it in that way. Once we've gotten through our lists, worked through the big spreadsheet, um, we'll start looking systematically at the solutions and we still prioritize those that have the most global impact in terms of how much time we spend studying them. Um, as well as c sometimes certain solutions, particularly ones that might be keep watching or not recommended wind up in the news. A lot of folks that want to invest ask us questions about those. And so we prioritize that as well because we feel like it's really important to get that information out there quickly. But there's no way to set an exact yearly

### [45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0mJQMpYsNE&t=2700s) Segment 10 (45:00 - 50:00)

timeline. Um I'm an engineer. I would love to do that and this project just really doesn't work like that. I've had to have had to accept that. — Great. Once again, Chad and Amanda, if you see something popping up in the Q& A that you just were chopping at the bit to respond to, please feel free to interrupt me and jump right in with that. Um Amanda, we've seen a number of questions related to AI. So I just wanted to ask you this question about how can you speak a little bit about how does AI inform or relate to the work we're doing for explore. Yeah AI is playing into a lot of scientific workflows. So that could be a whole discussion but for our workflow what you're seeing is the brain product of humans. We're not in any way against AI where it's useful for climate and where it's actually helpful. But what we found is that in terms of synthesizing research, we can't trust it. In terms of writing, it's not very good. And we want to be very clear that this is our intellectual product. We're sharing it with you freely. Um, I did see a question, hey, can I use this in classes? Yes, please. Absolutely. That's why it's freely available. It's not behind a payw wall. We want you to do that. But we want to be very clear when you see those contributors, that's who contributed to what you're seeing on the page. And when you see that citation, you're going to find that citation if you go to the web page where it's cited or let us know and we'll correct it if we gave you the wrong URL or something. So in our workflow, um, you know, AI optionally could be used for things like checking grammar. Um, you could ask AI for a source on a particular item, but you have to go and read that source. And we always try to track it down to the primary source before we're putting anything in the information for you. the spreadsheet was created by humans, checked by humans, um, and, um, published online by humans. So, we feel really good about that. Um, and then, um, as we go forward, we see that AI is going to play into how a lot of these climate solutions roll out, particularly in the electricity sector. Um, and we'll keep incorporating information about that. — Great. There are a lot of questions coming in related to audience. So, actually, I might take this one if you do don't mind. So for us the audience we have a number of different use cases in mind as we built the platform and now as we you know market and promote the platform to different groups. So as Amanda mentioned we hope that students and instructors and you know uh that educational audience is using this to learn about climate solutions. We're also hoping that and trying to do outreach to fellow researchers who might use this work to advance their own research. We do a lot of engagement work directly with investors and philanthropists who we hope that this information will help to steer their investments in the most urgently needed climate solutions. Uh we're also hoping do a lot of outreach to policy makers thinking that they can use some of the geographic perspectives that are presented here to really target policies or interventions uh geographically whether that's at the city, state, you know, national regional level. We've done some work um for different parts of the world around that related to policy makers. So the take action section is really important as we think about who those different audience segments are and we really do think that there's something in explore for all those different audiences and it's a job of us on the marketing communication side to make sure that more and more of those people are aware of this tool and this resource and to create these opportunities and these forums to better understand um all this information because it is pretty complex. So um but there are a lot of different ways that people no matter where you are around the world whatever your role is um you can really use explore we hope to um make an impact and we'll continue to work on that and continue to improve that work going forward too. Uh Chad a question for you is there anything you wish that explore in its current iteration included that it doesn't quite yet or anything that's kind of on your wish list as we think about a version 2. 0 for explore? Sure. I uh I think we're continuing to look at I showed that chart view uh that demonstrates uh the GHD potential. Uh but there can be a number of different ways of looking at these solutions looking at them by the cost of implementation as a visual way of presenting the information. Um, I saw a question in Q& A about are some of these more effective in certain areas and so how we might use mapping to really pinpoint where certain solutions might be most effective could be another feature that we continue to roll out. I saw a question in the chat as well about uh what actions can people take? And so I do want to reinforce that within each solution there is a take action section that goes through and talks about what people can do as lawmakers, as individuals, as investors. And each of those actions uh links to other resources and also the references

### [50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0mJQMpYsNE&t=3000s) Segment 11 (50:00 - 55:00)

section of each solution is very extensive. And so hopefully Drawdown Explorer can be a place that people come to reference uh to be able to go out and find other resources that support individual action that support uh the action of businesses or or corporations or uh policy makers. Um, there's a lot of information that's in each one of these solutions and we invite you to dig deep and to explore that those resources, not just the top lines, but all of the information that's provided. — Great. Amanda, I'll just check in with you. Any questions popping up in the Q& A that you wanted to answer? Otherwise, I could keep going through the list that I've been pulling together from the Q& A. No, I'll say thanks Chad for the um plug to dig into the deep scientific information and um just want to thank the folks in the chat who are saying I've been looking for stuff like this. Um it's really helpful and I'll we're going to share the chat with the fellows as well. It's so exciting to see that people are actually receiving and using what you have there. And I hope other academics will also realize this is a great start if you're doing a thesis on one of these topics. If you're considering a proposal on one of these topics, please jump in, grab the spreadsheet, grab the references. We want to accelerate what you're doing. — Yeah, we'd love to have, you know, these maps showing up in presentations that might be given, too. So, please feel free to use these resources as long as you um cite us. That'd be great. Um Amanda, I'm going to ask you this question and feel free to punt on this one if you don't want to answer it. Um the old climate solutions library was before your time. Um and there was a lot of focus in the old library on ranking of solutions. There were also some solutions that were more social science um focused. There have been a number of changes with the new explorer. You know, we've dep prioritized ranking, moved away from ranking. Um some of the other changes have happened around with some of those social science related solutions. Do you want to talk about any of those kind of changes and the evolution of the way that project thinks about climate solutions? — Sure. Yeah. I'll say I was one of the ones who pushed back against rankings most strongly. Um, and I know a lot of folks on the comm's team said this is really popular. Like this is an easy way to get shared and get people's attention. And I've seen that in my industry as well. For example, a lot of people don't understand how big the potential for refrigerant management and alternative refrigerants is. Um, and I love to get people more knowledgeable about that, excited about that, hopefully more responsible about that when they're in industry. But when we rank solutions, in order to do that somewhat behind the scenes, there really has to be a scenario of what's going to happen in the future when you start talking about potential. So, when we talk about adoption potential, we tie it back to studies and we're very clear about where we're drawing the lines. But if you're going to talk about between now and 2050 how much emissions something could cut, you're doing a lot of guesswork. And that's a really complex thing, which also in a very complicated way depends on what happens with all of the other solutions, right? Especially if you think about something like the electricity sector. I can't really talk about what solar PV is going to do unless I also talk about what's generating on the grid already, whether it's renewable or fossil fuel based. Um, so rankings are really tough. Also, as Chad mentioned, these are all things that we need to do. Um, a lot of times people are very excited about one solution and want to know what does draw down do about this solution because I love it. And I'm like, great. I'm very happy that you love cool roofs, but there's all these emissions that cool roofs absolutely can't address because they're just not happening due to HVAC use in buildings. And so, there's no one solution that we can put forward and say like this is it. This is going to fix it. It's not even something as big as fixing the food system or getting rid of fossil fuels like alone doesn't do what we need to do. So, we really wanted to make it a much more big picture, a much more integrated look at climate solutions. And where the solutions are comparable, we allow you to compare. And then we just acknowledge there's a lot of places where they aren't comparable. Um, when we talk about um benefits in particular, we really wanted to make that integrated throughout. So each solution provides a lot of other benefits and sometimes those other benefits are even more important. For example, if you're generating clean power, if you're shutting down a plant that's causing air pollution, to me that's the most immediate, most important benefit that it's offering, right? And that's working handinhand with the climate solutions. So, we really just wanted to see that those were integrated throughout um and that solutions that are a little bit more indirect or harder to quantify. We need to be able to boil back down to a specific technology or practice. There's a lot of technologies that help climate solutions

### [55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0mJQMpYsNE&t=3300s) Segment 12 (55:00 - 57:00)

roll out and you'll see more from that um coming out to the explore uh in the next year as well. also plug to subscribe to the newsletter to get updated um when we're starting to roll those out. And when we look at solutions that are related to um our social settings, um there are certain things like indigenous land management, um family planning, gender equity that are just the right thing to do on their own. And if they benefit climate, that's great. But again, we're boiling our climate solutions because of our focus at project drawdown down to very specific technologies or practices and then talking about the benefits that come rolled in with those. And we felt like that was more clear and we could create a more standard framework if we tighten the definitions in that way. Um, so that's how it's evolved and I hope that it's really useful and understandable um, in terms of how those integrated things work. — Thank you once again. I just want to say a big thanks to Chad and Amanda for joining us here today and a huge thank you to all of you for joining and asking so many fabulous questions. Like I said, we've captured all these questions. We're going to bring them to our science team. And uh I just want to do a quick plug for our draw down insights section because I was thinking as we're going along. We might have to do a draw down explorer questions Q& A um in draw down insights. All some of the really great questions we didn't get to today that we could summarize and go through. So keep an eye out for that potentially in the future. I also want to say a huge thank you to all of you who are supporting our work. You are really the engine for making all of this happen. We just couldn't do this without you and your support. So, as Chad mentioned, if you'd like to make a donation to support the team, the wonderful work happening at Project Draw Down, please, we'd love to see that donation, too. That'd be amazing for us. Thank you once again. We have plans for our next webinar in June where our executive director, Dr. Jonathan Foley, will be speaking with noted climate scientist, Dr. Katherine Heiho. So, you're not going to want to miss that discussion. I will send that out through our newsletter. So, if you're not signed up, please sign up for our newsletter and we will see you all soon. Thank you all for being here today. Take care. Bye now.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/53245*