Best Remedies for ‘Climate Doom’: Communication, Education, and Action
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Best Remedies for ‘Climate Doom’: Communication, Education, and Action
Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash
Earth Day (April 22) is right around the corner and you might be wondering what that even means when the media is bombarding us with climate doom, including the recent “final warning” from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which comes almost a year after their last final warning.
Beyond Sustainability is Beyond Mandatory
It has become clear that merely aiming to be sustainable (capable of being sustained or maintained) is no longer good enough to limit global warming to less than 1.5C. Former Unilever CEO Paul Polman equates corporate social responsibility (CSR) with being “less bad,” but says that “less bad is simply not good enough anymore… increasingly companies are starting to understand that you need to be restorative, regenerative, reparative. And this is really what ‘Net Positive’ leaders do.”
Agreed! But change and innovation are rarely born of anxiety and helplessness. Spreading fear and shaming people for their past choices won’t get us where we need to go. When was the last time you heard someone say the climate situation is hopeless, or “we’re doomed!”? Unfortunately, that kind of thinking is paralyzing and contagious.
Start with Communication
You might use different frameworks or points of commonality depending on who you’re talking to—some people will relate more to stewardship of natural resources while others’ prime concern could be the health and well-being of future generations. But you should be talking to all your stakeholders: employees, shareholders, suppliers, customers, and communities. Milestones like Earth Day and Earth Overshoot Day don’t come around that often, so creating a schedule for communication is important. Being clear about your values and goals, taking responsibility, and being transparent about your time horizon and current progress all build trust. We’re all stakeholders on this one shared planet.
Educate to Increase Engagement
Interface Flooring is a great example we frequently refer to. This company has educated its customers so well with vivid storytelling and a shared sense of purpose, their interior design customers want to be a part of that story and share it with their own customers—along with anyone else who will listen!
Material Intelligence created the Climate Positive NOW movement as an educational project for specifiers of the built environment—which is responsible for nearly 40% of annual global emissions. We aim to reduce that number by sharing the environmental and performance benefits of wood-based products with architects and interior designers through science-backed content like:
plain language product and corporate sustainability statements that end consumers, as well as specifiers can understand
certified educational content for architects and interior designers
press releases
case studies
editorial features
Material Guides for architect and design specifiers
Take Collaborative Action
As a side benefit, an engaged audience is more motivated to cooperate on the shared challenge of climate change.
To stabilize global temperature rise to a maximum of 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures, global carbon emissions need to reduce by at least 50% each decade and reach net zero by 2050 while we remove some of the carbon already emitted into the atmosphere.
Companies big or small, from manufacturers to small A&D firms, can and must get in on the action. In 2020, industry and academic partners (including Ericsson and IKEA) came together to create the 1.5°C Business Playbook, designed to provide a 4 pillar framework for “companies of any size to take climate action.”
The four pillars are as follows:
Reduce your own emissions
Reduce your value chain emissions
Integrate climate into your strategy
Accelerate climate action in society
4 pillars of climate leadership. Image from 1.5°C Business Playbook
None of us can do this alone. Small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) can find more resources and join the challenge at SME Climate Hub.
How Manufacturing or Specifying Wood-Based Products is Part of the Solution
Wood is a renewable resource composed of 50% carbon by dry weight. It stores or sequesters that carbon until it decays or is burned.
Replacing fossil-fuel intensive materials like steel, concrete or plastic with wood in the built environment reduces greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. For example, installing wood floors in the place of vinyl flooring can reduce emissions by as much as 20 times! And the domestic composite wood used by the North American kitchen and bath industry in 2021 alone is sequestering over 3 million metric tons of naturally captured carbon.
Complicating the benefits of forest products is an oversimplified term called ‘biogenic carbon neutrality,’” which is used to quantify all North American wood as having net emissions of zero (or less) for LCAs (life cycle analyses) used in EPDs (environmental product declarations) for these products. This means there is no easily accessible data for architects and builders to use in distinguishing between lumber harvested from more sustainably managed forests and those ignoring the carbon consequences of their management practices. Addressing this data gap will help accelerate climate action in the building industry.
Every Action Counts
What we do individually at home matters too. You’ve probably seen these recommendations before. If you haven’t implemented them yet, now is a great time.
“The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago. The second-best time is now.”
—source unknown
Heating and cooling: turn the temperature up in the summer and down in the winter. Even changing your set temperatures by one degree will make a difference. Programmable thermostats make it easy to save energy overnight or when you’re out of the house.
Lighting: replace those incandescent bulbs.
Electronics: put them on timers; use the power management features on your computers.
Laundry: wash in cold water; air or line dry in place of the dryer.
Assess so that you can improve: Get a home energy audit and invest in recommended measures like a programmable thermostat, insulation, dual-paned windows, and insulated doors. You could even be eligible for a tax refund.
Appliances: Look for the Energy Star label. Don’t forget to check for tax refund eligibility for furnaces, Central AC, and hot water heaters.
Recycle: as much as you can, following your local guidelines to make sure you aren’t “wishcycling.”
Plant a garden, maybe even grow some of your own food.
Cut down on food waste and recycle the waste you produce by composting.
Happy Earth Day to you. Don’t give in to climate doom! Instead, use communication and education to encourage engagement, and keep on taking collaborative action. Our future together depends on it.
Developed by Material Intelligence, ClimatePositiveNOW.org is a sustainable materials education project inspired by a combination of Kenn Busch’s research into the properties of wood-based architectural materials, and his two decades of experience delivering educational content to interior designers and architects.