TAKE COLLECTIVE CLIMATE ACTION AND ADVOCATE IN YOUR PROFESSIONAL FIELD.

Academia

Academia has the power and responsibility to steer society in a positive direction.

The Climate Framework for Higher Education, developed for Swedish universities to deliver their fair share of the Paris Agreement, outlines best practices for universities to reduce emissions and leverage their strengths in 13 key areas, from business trips and commuting to procurement to education and research.

For more resources, the comprehensive All European Academies (ALLEA), the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities report, Towards Climate Sustainability of the Academic System has advice for conferences, academic air travel, funding organizations, policymakers, and more.

Asset Management

Science-backed climate solutions must be part of every organization’s financial strategies. And it’s no longer just a moral or sustainability-focused argument – it’s just good business sense. Climate change represents both major financial risks to avoid and incredible opportunities to seize.

1. Underscore how climate change poses major financial risks to your firm’s portfolio. Addressing both physical and transition-related climate risks is essential for fulfilling fiduciary duty. By the 2050s, the physical risks associated with climate change could cost companies in the S&P Global 1200 on average 3.3% – and up to 28% – per year of the value of their real assets. Use a climate-risk lens for research and evaluation, and engage your portfolio companies, clients, and firms on the importance of minimizing climate risk.

2. Discover and share opportunities within mitigation and adaptation. The climate solutions supply chain is expected to grow to a value of US$5–11 trillion by 2030, representing a colossal opportunity for investors. Use a climate-opportunity lens for research and evaluation by identifying technologies and industries that will be needed in the green transition.

3. Encourage your firm to be more engaged, specifically by developing a climate action plan, joining investor support groups, and increasing policy advocacy efforts.

Learn more about how you can use your current profession for climate action by reading Project Drawdown’s Asset Management Action Guide.

Engineering

While engineering jobs range from software to mechanical, all engineers have one thing in common: you take a product vision and turn it into a reality. Engineers can help make sustainability the industry standard by constructing products that use less energy and are made of low-carbon materials and by designing efficient, circular systems to meet human needs.

1. Measure product impact and focus on hot spots. Conduct life cycle assessments to understand your product’s impact. Determine your product’s “hot spots” – the components or usage that have the greatest potential to contribute to climate change. Focus improvements where they’ll make the biggest emissions reductions.

2. Assess digital products for energy and hardware efficiency. Use energy-saving procedures, monitor real-time power consumption, adopt greener server architectures, and avoid planned obsolescence. Utilize carbon-aware computing, such as scheduling large batch jobs at data centers that use renewable energy. Check out the Green Software Foundation’s official training for more ideas on developing software sustainably!

3. Assess physical products for sustainability. Use the four principles of a circular economy: narrow (use less materials and energy), slow (use longer), close (use again), and regenerate (make clean and non-toxic).

Learn more about how you can use your current profession for climate action by reading Project Drawdown’s Engineering Action Guide.

Finance

Finance is critical to avoiding a climate crisis: the world needs to mobilize US$8–9 trillion annually by 2030 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. This is why you, as a finance professional, can make a big difference. You can direct corporate finances and investments toward climate solutions while at the same time divesting from sources of the problem.

1. Money isn’t neutral. Learn more about your company’s banking relationships and direct decision-makers toward banks that are minimally financing the fossil fuel industry, shifting their financing to climate solutions, committing to anti-fossil fuel policies, and calculating their financed emissions. (See this great example of reevaluating corporate banking from Patagonia, and check out this analysis of banks still financing fossil fuels after the Paris Agreement).

2. If your company works with an insurance broker, consider not only evaluating policies and pricing during each insurance renewal, but also the sustainability of insurance carriers.

3. Encourage decision-makers to switch all possible services to banks that are fossil fuel-free (like many local credit unions or those listed here) or B Corp certified. If large established banks are needed for your company’s financial services, lower impact services and excess cash can be held with highly value-aligned banks.

4. Offer borrowers and suppliers better terms and rates when they reach certain sustainability milestones (see examples here and here).

Learn more about how you can use your current profession for climate action by reading Project Drawdown’s Finance Action Guide.

Government Relations and Public Policy

Advocating for climate policy is among the most important actions a company can take. A company’s ability to meet its climate targets is dependent on governmental policies and regulations. You can use your position to ensure your company is keeping up with changing policy landscapes and using its voice to advocate for climate action.

1. Ensure that your company has a system for tracking and prioritizing climate-related local, state, and federal policies – and encourage your company to speak out in support of them. Check out coalitions like the Ceres Policy Network that help guide and aggregate business influence.

2. Be transparent about how your company spends its political contributions and lobbying dollars. Allocate more dollars to lobbying in support of climate policy. If your company hires lobbyists, make sure they do not represent the fossil fuel industry. Check out this tool to help identify double-dipping lobbyists at the state level.

3. Companies with solid climate policies might still be causing harm via their trade associations. If your company belongs to trade associations that lobby against climate policy (take note of the worst actors), encourage leadership to push the associations on climate action or leave them all together. You can also check out this scorecard that shows how some United States-based companies are undermining their sustainability commitments by obstructing climate action through trade association memberships.

Learn more about how you can use your current profession for climate action by reading Project Drawdown’s Government Relations and Public Policy Action Guide.

Grantmaking

Because philanthropic capital is often faster, more flexible, and more risk-tolerant than traditional capital, grantmaking can act as a catalytic force for accelerating climate solutions. Whether you work in corporate philanthropy or a family office, your understanding of the grant lifecycle and financial and project management responsibilities can make climate a top funding priority.

1. Elevate climate as a key criterion when awarding grants. Look out for projects that accelerate the adoption of climate solutions, as well as those focused on strategies that make the policy, regulatory, and financing landscapes more conducive to climate action. According to climate nonprofits, policy-based approaches, climate justice, and movement building and mobilization are the top accelerators that need more funding.

2. Integrate climate into the grant administration process. Engage your grantees and give them access to experts, other funders, and other grantees focused on climate solutions. If your objective is to fund solutions for impacted communities, ensure they are included early on in the planning and decision-making process.

3. Reassess your organization’s financing strategy. If your organization has an endowment, work with the finance team to ensure assets are not tied up in investments in industries and activities causing the climate crisis.

4. To help address disproportionate climate impacts and lack of historical inclusion, support organizations run by Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and other historically marginalized identities, as well as organizations devoted to grassroots and community-oriented action. Try to match funding allocation with needs and climate impacts, including globally. Only about 25% of total climate funding flows to low- and middle-income countries, which are disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

Learn more about how you can use your current profession for climate action by reading Project Drawdown’s Grantmaking Action Guide.

Healthcare

Healthcare professionals are excellent climate messengers and effective changemakers. Here are five ways you can make a real difference for climate, based on a research article by Seth Wynes, Ph.D, Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo:

1. Advise patient lifestyles

Encourage plant-rich diets and active lifestyles (like living close to work and walking or biking there).

Recommend replacing gas stoves with electric (especially for new parents; the fumes are especially harmful to developing kids) and replacing gas furnaces with electric heat pumps.

2. Role modeling

Expert advice is more persuasive when it comes from those who walk the talk themselves. Imagine puffing on a cigarette while telling your patients to quit smoking. You can help your patients adopt climate-healthy lifestyles by taking high-impact climate and health actions like biking or taking transit to work, getting an electric car, and eating a plant-rich diet.

3. As a professional

As Seth Wynes wrote, “Health professionals can do a great deal to reduce the sector’s carbon footprint by changing workplace norms and policies, purchasing and personnel practices, and facility and clinical operations.”

Reduce flying and switch residency interviews to digital or a centralized location.

Work to reduce supply chain emissions by better measuring and managing the climate impact from facilities like clinics, schools, hospitals, and vehicle fleets.

4. Make your trusted voice as an expert heard in local politics

Lobby your city council for policies that support your patients in replacing driving with human-powered and public transport:

– Support compact, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods.
– Support initiatives that disfavor cars and promote pedestrians and cyclists, like congestion charges, reduced city parking, and infrastructure for walking and biking.

5. National politics

Support policies to power electricity and transport with clean energy that will be passed and implemented quickly.

Appropriate policies depend on context, but generally make fossil fuels less convenient and more expensive and subsidise, encourage, or require renewable energy production, storage, or transmission. Healthcare professionals can let policymakers decide on the best mix of incentives and regulations, but should “side forcefully against [doing] nothing.”

Want to up your impact even more? Share, discuss, and implement these tips with fellow doctors, nurses, paramedics, physiotherapists, and other health professionals.

Human Resources and Operations

As a human resources and operations professional, you play a key role in shaping work operations, culture, and employee behavior. You can shape workplace culture in a way that ensures the workforce is empowered to move climate action forward in the organization. In fact, studies have found that “green” HR practices correlate with greater employee climate concern and action at work and elsewhere.

1. Integrate climate action into employee benefits, such as by offering employees financial support for their own individual climate actions, creating programs for employees to take on sustainability projects within working hours, and providing volunteer opportunities with climate organizations. Make sure your company offers a climate-friendly retirement plan option to employees (better yet, make it the default). If you’re curious, learn more about the campaign to divest from fossil fuels. If you are ready to explore climate-friendly investment options, check out Carbon Collective.

2. Find out whether your company’s insurers finance carbon-intensive projects. If so, create a policy that gives preference to divested insurance companies.

3. Embed climate into employee recruitment and professional development. Add climate-related requirements in job descriptions and performance reviews, and institute mandatory climate training as part of onboarding and ongoing employee education.

4. Foster a work culture where employees feel comfortable and are able to bring up climate concerns to leadership and take on climate at work. Create consistent pathways and forums for employees to provide feedback to leadership.

5. Create a policy to minimize carbon-intensive business travel and opt for virtual gatherings when possible.

Learn more about how you can use your current profession for climate action by reading Project Drawdown’s Human Resources and Operations Action Guide.

Legal

Because in-house legal teams advise corporate governance, assess and manage risks and compliance, and keep abreast of changing regulatory and policy landscapes, you are well-poised to help your company actively address the climate crisis.

1. If you work as a general counsel, utilize the corporate governance structure for climate action. Include climate topics in every board meeting agenda and look for opportunities to educate the board on sustainability. Ensure that oversight of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) activities rests with the board.

2. When working with external counsel, choose law firms that are committed to offering their clients services that align and facilitate client decarbonization and do not work with fossil fuel or other extractive industries. (Take note of the best and worst actors.)

3. Utilize legal agreements as a vehicle for climate action. Adopt contractual language that addresses climate risks and impacts, especially as it relates to your company’s supply chain. Familiarize yourself with the physical risks of climate change (e.g., sea-level rise) and, if relevant, adopt contractual language to directly or indirectly allocate risk.

Learn more about how you can use your current profession for climate action by reading Project Drawdown’s Legal Action Guide.

Marketing

By crafting effective campaigns, marketers can convey the urgency of the climate crisis and move people to action. You also likely make important decisions around partnerships, which means you can help ensure your business doesn’t promote or work with bad actors (read: fossil fuel and other environment-destroying companies).

1. Engage your customers, users, and clients on climate change. Use your knowledge of the consumer for climate-related campaigns (like Seventh Generation’s work on climate justice). Find creative ways to nudge consumers to take their own climate action (check out this great example from L.L. Bean promoting reusing clothing.)

2. Weave climate considerations into marketing campaigns. Use climate-friendly imagery and characters in your advertising (e.g., bikes, mass transit, plant-based meals, etc.). Choose creative agencies that have robust climate initiatives. If you work for an agency, avoid doing business with fossil fuel companies and include climate considerations in your client proposals.

3. Measure! Consider the emissions associated with your advertising and media plans. Different channels have different impacts, therefore, measurement and reduction strategies should be evaluated at the channel level.

Learn more about how you can use your current profession for climate action by reading Project Drawdown’s Marketing Action Guide.

Museums

Museums have an important role to play in the climate crisis. Consider how your museum can serve society in the climate crisis with four points from the Declaration of Museums for Future:

1. Support climate strikes and youth climate action movements.

2. Communicate to the public. Museums can use their collections to draw attention to the climate crisis, including by pointing out problematic ties with fossil fuel sponsors.

3. Transform our institutions to be part of the solution. Museums can focus on their own operations, both practically in terms of eliminating emissions and working to support a fast and fair transition.

4. Raise awareness in our networks. Our relationships are powerful. Museums for Future urges museums to “use our voices to spread awareness about the necessity of immediate climate actions” among museums, employees, management, and decision-makers.

Procurement

If you work in procurement, you likely interact and coordinate with teams across your company, giving you a bird’s eye view of your company’s sustainability opportunities and challenges. By changing how you use your purchasing power, you can make your business more climate-friendly, as well as send market signals across the supply chain to green others’ procurement practices.

1. Give preference to suppliers who meet ambitious climate targets. Codify it in a company policy requiring suppliers to adopt Science-Based Targets for emissions reductions (use as a template Salesforce’s supplier agreement for your company’s own binding agreement). You can also apply a climate justice lens by creating guidelines related to supplier diversity and ethical practices (see this example from Apple).

2. Know where your biggest emissions come from, and look for small changes with big wins in your supply chain. Can you localize production, increase backhauling, or switch to low-carbon transport? Are there particular items you purchase frequently and in large quantities? Can you find climate-friendly alternatives to make a swift, high-impact change?

3. More data! Invest in systems to gather, store, and use data on how your customers use your products to help you deliver on sustainability goals. For example, you can work with engineers to create methods for tracking the use and disposal of your company’s products, helping develop more sustainable products and processes.

Learn more about how you can use your current profession for climate action by reading Project Drawdown’s Procurement Action Guide.

Product Design

Product designers bring a range of skills and work across departments to make critical decisions about how users will interact with a product or feature. This puts you in a good position to advocate for meaningful climate considerations within your company.

1. Integrate climate into product development. Create sustainability-focused KPIs during the design brief stage to ensure climate is a key component of product success from the get-go. Incorporate climate information into the product itself, such as including real-time energy usage, gamifying features to lower energy usage, and encouraging users to select more sustainable options. Get inspired by this article on effective behavioral interventions for climate change mitigation.

2. Design with climate in mind. Design UX/UI elements for minimized energy consumption (read Microsoft’s Green Design Principles) and choose circular material options. Design products using the four principles of a circular economy: narrow (use less materials and energy), slow (use longer, design products to be durable, repairable, and upgradable), close (design for reuse), and regenerate (make clean and non-toxic).

3. Embed climate justice and think in the long term. Elevate sustainability and equity as key criteria in the product discussion alongside value, usability, and feasibility. Think about the potential long-term benefits and impacts, particularly for those communities most vulnerable to climate change.

Learn more about how you can use your current profession for climate action by reading Project Drawdown’s Product Design Action Guide.

Product Management

As a product manager, you may be tasked with conducting market research, developing product positioning, and defining customer success – weaving together business, technology, and user experience. Because you have touchpoints with many stakeholders throughout the product journey, you are well-positioned to effectively communicate the importance of comprehensive climate considerations and advocate for them.

1. Center climate considerations throughout the product lifecycle. Alongside value, usability, feasibility, and profitability, elevate sustainability as a key criterion of product success. Consider how climate risks may impact the manufacture, distribution, sale, and use of your product.

2. Bring the customer along by prioritizing products, features, and enhancements that help them make sustainable behavior changes. Survey and track customer interest in climate and sustainability (this will help you develop a compelling business case for implementing sustainability requirements).

3. Prioritize energy savings and circularity. Ensure your product meets the four principles of a circular economy: narrow (use less materials and energy), slow (use longer), close (use again), and regenerate (make clean and non-toxic). When defining the product roadmap, integrate these principles into product requirements. For hardware and physical products, invest in infrastructure and services that enable circularity, such as take-back and recycling services (like HP) and marketplaces for refurbished products (like IKEA).

4. Pick the right partners! Prioritize vendors and service providers who’ve set ambitious Science-Based Targets climate goals (and are actually on track to meet them). Include climate criteria in RFPs and RFIs when selecting suppliers and partners to assist in product development and delivery.

Learn more about how you can use your current profession for climate action by reading Project Drawdown’s Product Management Action Guide.

Sales and Client-Facing

Salespeople and those in client-facing roles (e.g., consulting, creative industries) have skills and responsibilities critical for implementing climate solutions. You regularly interact with customers and clients to understand their priorities, giving you the opportunity to talk about the importance of climate action. You can gather information on others’ climate goals to take back and use to rally the rest of your team and organization.

1. Adjust pricing and fees. Work with your finance team to integrate the cost of carbon into your products and services (a ‘carbon fee’) and reinvest that cost into climate efforts. You can also offer discounts on your products and services to those who work in climate and social justice organizations, similar to how The IPA Collective offers environmental organizations discounts to outdoor brands.

2. Engage your customers and clients on climate. If you work in a client-facing industry, integrate climate into proposals and serve more clients that work in climate-friendly companies. You can even go as far as getting your organization to pledge not to sell products or offer services to fossil fuel and other extractive companies.

3. Think creatively about what your team can do differently. If you manage a sales team, institute incentives based on sustainability targets (for example, providing bonuses if a salesperson sells to a certain number of companies with Science-Based Targets for climate). Minimize carbon-intensive business travel and opt for virtual meetings where possible.

Learn more about how you can use your current profession for climate action by reading Project Drawdown’s Sales and Client-Facing Action Guide.