My name is Skyler Knight and I'm a senior communications manager at Project Drawdown. I know many of you are familiar with Project Drawdown and what we do, but for those that are not familiar, Project Drawdown is the world's leading guide to science-based climate solutions. What that means in practice is that we're a team of mostly scientists, some communicators like myself, as well as people who work on stakeholder engagement. And what we do is the science on what solutions are available to stop climate change and we do all of the research and guidance necessary to direct key actors like policy makers, investors, business leaders toward those solutions. and our goal ultimately is to stop climate change as quickly, efficiently, and effectively as possible.
We got our start there, you see in the center with a book that was the first compendium of climate solutions. it was 100 solutions to the climate crisis. And since then, we've expanded quite a bit. There's a lot more solutions out there today., and we also wanted something more dynamic. So, I'm going to talk in a minute about our new flagship product that shares more actionable intelligence about climate solutions. And lastly, we put on events such as the webinar you're attending right now, but also in-person events, blog posts, media engagements in order to elevate the awareness of those solutions more broadly.
So, if you, like us, are worried about climate change, this slide has all of the solutions you need. So this is representative of some of our early work and these are all of the solutions for that initial assessment that if implemented can stop climate change. and as you can see there's various solutions that have various levels of impact based on the size on that outer ring of the chart.
But one thing that some of this early work didn't do was give us more actionable intelligence about the locations, the timing, the other benefits of these climate solutions that can help people implement them more effectively. And so that's why recently, just last year, we launched our new flagship product which is called the Drawdown Explorer. The Drawdown Explorer is a climate solutions platform that illustrates all of the solutions that can help stop climate change. There's currently around 150 or so solutions and by the end of our time assessing it'll be closer to 200 but much more so than some of our previous work.
This is a living breathing resource. We're constantly updating it with the best available science in order to guide decision makers towards the solutions that are most effective. Just a little bit about what's behind the draw down explorer. there's 24 subject matter experts that have worked on it. So two dozen PhD level researchers who were doing all of the research behind the scenes. Together between all of them they did over 20,000 hours of research on these solutions. In the process they collected trillions of data points and they used that to assess around 150 solutions and as I mentioned closer to 200 when it's all said and done.
For perspective, this is sort of like doing a PhD dissertation level project on each individual climate solution. So, it's a tremendous amount of work that they've been able to do. And then where my team comes in and the work I do is helping to package it into really nice, easy to use interfaces to make it as useful for POS as possible for folks like yourselves on this call and also for other decision makers in the climate space. put together.
All of this work results in the world's most comprehensive climate solutions platform. And specifically, one of the cool things that it does is it allows you as decision makers or people looking to take climate action to pinpoint climate solutions based on geographies, the benefits that they bring, not only to the climate, but to other issues that you might care about, and something we're going to be talking about a lot in today's session, which is time.
time
So like I mentioned a lot of the solutions allow you to pinpoint action by geographies. Most of the highly recommended solutions have some sort of map-based elements and layers that allow you to see geographically where those sources of emissions are and importantly where those solutions can be most readily and most effectively implemented. Each solution also has you'll see on the bottom right on the main page for any given solution a list of the additional benefits.
So, as a lot of you might already know, climate solutions don't just help the climate. They also improve human well-being, human health, gender equity, many other issues that funders or people looking to take climate action might care about. And so, for each solution that's highly recommended, we dive into depth on how that can actually benefit things such as income and work equity, health, gender equality, and other issues. And what we're going to be talking about a lot today and in my opinion one of the coolest things about the drawdown explorer is the ability to parse through solutions based on their speed of action.
For each draw down solution that's highly recommended. We have three different speeds of action. The first and you could say slowest but again all of these solutions are necessary are delayed solutions. These are things that take time from implementation to actually have a measurable impact on the atmosphere on the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions. So examples of delayed solutions might be replanting a forest. It takes time for those trees to mature enough to have a measurable impact on emissions. Gradual solutions are the ones that get a lot of attention both from media, from funders, and from the general public. These are the types of solutions like heat pumps, electric vehicles that the longer they're out there, the longer they've been adopted, the bigger an impact they have. So the more miles you put on that EV, the more heat pumps offset emissions that would have come from a more polluting fuel source, the bigger that impact is on the climate.
And the solutions we're going to be talking about today are the quickest acting. And these are called emergency brake solutions. So, what we mean by emergency brake solutions is actually relatively specific. It's not a catch-all term for solutions that just act quickly. It's the types of solutions that can rapidly bend the curve on future warming. And the way that they're able to do this is that they focused on fast acting pollutants such as methane, black carbon, or F gases, which are really common in refrigeration or insulation installation.
And so those types of solutions, anything that reduces methane perhaps by better managing oil and gas fields or things that may monitor or reduce the amount of block carbon such as transitioning from dirty polluting cooking sources such as fuel wood or charcoal toward electrified solutions or natural bio gases for cooking. All of those have a fast acting impact. And the reason they do that is because methane, black carbon, and F gases are super pollutants. In the near term, they are many, many times more warming than carbon dioxide.
And so when we act on solutions that reduce those, we're seeing the benefits of that, the reduction and possible warming of our planet much quicker than solutions that solely focus on gases like carbon dioxide.
And the other way that a solution can be an emergency brake and be fast acting is if it prevents a large pulse of carbon dioxide. So this would be something like protecting a forest, protecting a wetland or a petland. Those ecosystems are extremely carbonic and when they're disturbed or deforestation occurs, it results in pulses of emissions into the atmosphere. So the moment you protect a forest that would have otherwise been deforested, you have sort of an instant payback and an instant material benefit when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.
In short, emergency brakes can help us catch up.
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In short, emergency brakes can help us catch up.
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When you're in the drawdown explorer, you can actually sort by speed of action and all of those emergency brake solutions will rise to the top. So you can see a smattering of them here.
Deploy clean cooking, increase centralized composting, rice production, improve diets, and we'll talk about some of these in more depth a little bit later on. But the key point to remember is that they can help us catch up, which is extremely important because we need to catch up.
This data is a couple of years old, but we're still more or less on that dotted line trajectory. So that dotted line is showing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the greenhouse gas concentrations or rather the greenhouse gases emitted per year. And even though climate solutions are expanding and being rapidly adopted, we're still seeing emissions rise. And we are losing time to avert the worst consequences of climate change. We need to take actions today that rapidly bend that curve. And the solutions that can do that are emergency brakes.
Emergency brake solutions can start to rapidly drop that near-term warming from greenhouse gas emissions and buy us the critical time that we need to build infrastructure to implement nature-based solutions that take time to grow and to develop new technologies for things like hard to abate sectors where it's really difficult to remove emissions. All of that's important and we need to be starting on those today. But emergency brakes are those actions that can help us now while those things inevitably take more time. Lastly, not only are emergency brake solutions really important because of their ability to buy us time, they also in and of themselves can have a tremendous impact.
So all of the solutions in the highly recommended section of the drawdown explorer have this impact calculator. And this is just one example from improving diets where you can see at a high level of reasonable adoption about 7% of global emissions could be offset if people adopted a more climate friendly diet and improve their diets. So even beyond just the time savings benefits, there are real tangible emission savings benefits as well to these solutions.
So in short, emergency brake solutions matter a great deal for stopping climate change. And when I learned about emergency brake solutions, as someone who works with media and someone who consumes a lot of climate content, I was pretty shocked by how infrequently I read about these emergency brake solutions in the media I was consuming. And so I started to wonder what actually is the amount of coverage of these solutions and how could we increase it to make them more prominent and more salient in the minds of people who are consuming climate news.
And I know what some people on this call might be thinking, which is that legacy media is dead. Surely social media has killed off legacy media by now. but I'm happy to report at least as a staunch supporter of journalism and climate journalism in particular that the data just does not bear this out. So even today in the day of social media, a recent Pew study found that 65% of Americans sometimes or often get their news from traditional news websites or news apps. So it is still an extremely prominent source of information for most people.
Moreover, a recent Harris poll found that 68% of Americans believe that national news information is a trustworthy source of information. That number is significantly lower in the 40s by some surveys down in the 30s by others for social media. So even though social media is of course having an impact on the way that we consume news and the information that we get, legacy media is still a critical source of not only information but trusted information for most people. And this doesn't even get into the fact that many newsrooms have massive social followings themselves. And a lot of news influencers or creators still rely heavily on legacy media sources for the information that they're sharing themselves.
Moreover, traditional media or legacy media not only is still an incredibly important source, it's also an incredibly important avenue that we can tap into if we want to increase climate action. So study after study has shown that journalism on climate solutions in particular, not just climate but on climate solutions can increase policy support for environmental policies, increase people's inclination to take individual climate action and also increase the amount and likelihood that they give to environmental causes. So legacy media is not just critical for our information infrastructure, it's critical if we want to have people take more effective climate action and ultimately stop climate change. So, if emergency brake solutions matter for stopping climate change, and I hope that I've shown that they absolutely do, legacy media still matters a lot for emergency brake solutions and for increasing awareness of them, but also the actions that people take in order to implement them in the real world. So, are they being covered?
That is the seemingly simple question that I had over a year ago. and so I wanted to really get to the bottom of it. Fortunately, I knew of a great research team out of Arizona State University that did exactly this type of research and I reached out and they were excited about the prospect. And so now I'm extremely thrilled to hand it over to the lead researcher on that project, Cody Hayes. and I will just give Cody a a short introduction. so Cody is the founder of Marketing Mission, which is a nonprofit marketing agency, and they are also a doctoral researcher at the Walter Kronhite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Their research focuses on climate communication, public understanding of science, and the role of misinformation in shaping environmental attitudes. Their current work examines how ideological worldviews and trust in scientific institutions influence responses to politically divisive issues like climate change. Cody brings over a decade of experience in nonprofit advocacy and science communication, having led campaigns that have secured more than $25 million in funding. So all of that is a really long way of saying Cody was the perfect researcher for this project. and I'm extremely excited to pass it over to them so they can share more about what they uncovered.
C: Thank you so much, Skyler. I really appreciate that. I am thrilled to be here today everyone to share the findings from the research that we did that is revealing some striking patterns and some gaps in how mainstream media is covering the climate solutions that we need most urgently. So as Skyler said I'm Cody Hayes. I'm the founder of Marketing Mission. I have over 10 years of experience as a nonprofit marketing strategist now as a researcher and a published author and I'm part of an award-winning team that yes has raised $25 million and supported advocacy campaigns for nonprofits like the waterkeeper alliance, Miami waterkeeper, orange county coaster and more. So I partnered with over 50 nonprofits to really work on streamlining their marketing efforts, reclaim valuable time and now also incorporating research into their strategic messaging. So my work helps climate focused nonprofit founders, executive directors, communicators etc. So the main question slide please. the main question driving this research was straightforward.
To what extent do US newspapers cover different types of emergency brake solutions? to answer this, we conducted a landscape analysis examining the coverage of 18 emergency brake solutions across three major news outlets. So the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardians US edition. And that time frame was between June 2021 through December 2024. slide please. So we investigated these solutions across three broad categories. So these behavioral solutions like improving diets, increasing composting, reducing food waste and then naturebased solutions. So like protecting forests or coastal wetlands, petlands and grasslands and then more of that technical and agricultural solutions like deploying methane digesters, alternative refrigerants, improving manure management, oil, gas, methane, things like that. Slide please. We used Mukra to search for articles using comprehensive keyword list developed with project drawdowns framework. Thank you all. For each solution, we captured not just the article counts, but also the engagement metrics, the reach, and then the journalist amplification. This kind of gave us a picture of not just what is being covered, but what actually was resonating with the audience as well. Slide, please.
So, here's what we found. Coverage is incredibly concentrated. So the three solutions alone are accounting for nearly 80% of all articles and that's improved diets at 862 articles, increased composting at 318 articles, and then protecting forests and woodlands at 233 articles or 219 articles, excuse me. And these solutions share something in common. They are behavioral. They're nature-based. They're more visual and compelling. and they offer individual agency. They're the kinds of climate actions that we can actually see and do ourself. They're tangible. Slide, please. So, when we look at these outlets, The Guardian is leading by a mile. They cover climate a lot. So, with a over a,000 1,051 articles, they are pretty much the primary driver of climate solutions coverage. New York Times is following with 608 articles and together those two outlets produced 86% of all coverage. The Wall Street Journal significantly trails behind. And when we're looking at the who is writing these stories, the top three authors are Damian Carrington. They wrote 37 articles, Patrick Greenfield wrote 34, and Fiona Harvey wrote 32. I know some of you in your questions were asking what news outlets and which journalists could we pitch. So there's a little snippet for you. They're very interested. this underscores the Guardian's institutional commitment to climate journalism. So they really stood out in that regard. Slide, please.
So let's talk a little bit about what is getting attention versus what's being overlooked. so there's a kind of a clear behavioral bias in climate storytelling. So improved diets has generated over one 1.1 million engagements and reached an estimated 41 billion unique monthly visitors. And then we have food waste reduction while fewer articles at just 42 and averaging about 1,800 engagements per piece. So, with this composting saw similar patterns, these solutions kind of resonate because they're offering this emotional clarity and individual agency and they're translating into everyday action. Again, they're doable. They're depictable. Next slide.
So, nature-based solutions maintain this steady visibility, but not all ecosystems are created equal in the media landscape. So what we found that forest and coastal wetlands these are visually iconic they're emotionally familiar they are receiving substantial coverage but petlands just had nine articles grasslands and savannas two articles these are equally vital carbon syncs but they're kind of lacking the visual and emotional accessibility that's driving media interest it seems.
Next slide. and so this is where the gap becomes most concerning.
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This is where the gap becomes most concerning
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So there's some technical and agricultural innovations like they're essential for large scale mitigation but they're consistently ranking lowest across every metric essentially. So, deploying alternative refrigerants, two articles over a 3-year period, and the alternative insulation, one article. improving manure management, six. And then managing oil and gas methane, zero. So, alternative refrigeration, improve insulation. This has enormous mitigation potential, but it received almost no coverage whatsoever. Next slide. So let's think about why this matters because these three invisible solutions often have the highest impact. So methane digesters, refrigerant management, manure handling, these aren't necessarily sexy topics. Like we don't love talking about poop, but they are scientifically critical. So these media systems or rewarding systems that are relatable, they're visual, morally clear. Digestators, refrigerant transitions, leak detections, like these are things that don't necessarily make sense to the common folks. Like I barely understand them truthfully. They lack this human intersection framing and compelling and imagery that everyday relatability because this isn't everyday conversation with folks. They're not fitting the narrative that structured journalists are also trained to tell. Next slide please.
So what we're seeing is this mismatch essentially. So coverage is tilting towards that doable and depictable not necessarily the highest impact levels. So this is creating a bit of a communication gap and between the scientific relevance and the narrative viability. So in the public and policy makers importantly are primarily hearing about diet change and composting, they may underestimate the urgency of this industrial methane management or industrial refrigerant transitions.
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So the media is shaping coverage what feels most important and actionable and that's actually really a deflection against industry and putting it onto consumers. Next slide. So what do we do with these findings? So for journalists there's enormous opportunity in the uncovered space. So stories about methane digesttors, refrigerant management, and agricultural innovations are waiting to be told. There are stories there. People work in these industries. We are there. And they desperately need champions who can translate technical complexity into compelling narrative, which is what journalists and communicators do. So for communicators and advocates, we can develop these better storytelling frameworks for these invisible solutions that we talked about. and go out and find those human stories. Find the visual hooks. Find the moral stakes that are going to help them brake through. That's what we're trained to do. For all of us, awareness is the first step, but it's not the last step. So, we need to understand how this coverage gap is actually helping us become more discerning consumers of climate information and more strategic advocates for the solutions that need implication. So, next slide, please. As we move into Q&A, we want to just I want to leave you with a few questions. So as you are working on this, I want you to think through you know what role should solution journalism play in addressing these coverage gaps and how are you working to balance the position in your role and how can you apply what we talked about today in these uncovered areas to your advocacy work that you're doing as well. So thank you. will pass it back to you, Skyler, for leading Q&A. Thank you so much, Cody. Yes, and I I echo echo your sentiments at the end there. I think oftentimes it could be hard to say what to do with this information. Indeed, some of the questions we got were how can I make this actionable? So, I love that you included that. And I think a key part to remember is each of these solutions has stories. Just like you said, there's people who are working on these. There's the refrigeration technician who's learning how to use alternative refrigerants because they care deeply about climate change. So, there are compelling human focused angles to this. They're just not maybe as readily available for journalists as some of the other solutions that get more coverage. And so, as we think about what we can do, I encourage you all, especially if you're plugged into the climate space, to look for those stories. expose yourselves to situations, to conferences, to meetings, to interactions with people in those spaces. and you might be surprised by the incredible stories you stumble upon that then you can share either by pitching it to a journalist or find another way to communicate it yourself. so with that, let's move into the questions because we have a ton of questions and we have ample time to cover them. So,, we can start here, which I think is more of a question for Cody, but I have some thoughts, too. So, the first question is, why do you think technical solutions get so little coverage even when the science shows they have an enormous impact? And you address this a little bit, but maybe just reiterate it. Yeah, absolutely. So, these media systems are essentially rewarding stories that have emotional clarity and individual agency. So it's the digesttors and the refrigerants aren't offering that because individuals aren't individual consumers aren't necessarily working with that. So journalists are also trained in these structures that need a human face like a villain, a story arc, a possible outcome. and technical solutions rarely provide that hook. And it's not just it's not like a failure of intent. It's this like structural bias. based into how newsrooms are assigned to pitch stories and are designed for what is conceived newsworthy. And so,, if low coverage means low public familiarity, that kind of makes it harder to pitch as newsworthy, that's where the strategic,, storytelling and finding those, unique angles and those right journalists that cover these topics will come in handy. And sometimes that isn't necessarily starting at the national level. That's starting at the local level and gaining traction there and building up to the state level and then up to national level. Yeah, I love that you stressed that because in that survey where I shared national news being a a source that people trust a lot, the the pe the media that was above that is local news. local news is often rated as more trustworthy for most readers, American readers at least in the surveys I've seen, than national news. And there are a lot of outlets out there. So definitely finding the right story for the right outlet. the one other thing I would add is that you know, when we talk about what makes something newsworthy, one of the things is impact. What kind of impact can it have? And I think that's where emergency brakes are a really good opportunity. We actually had a a journalist from the Washington Post who I believe is still there despite the horrendous cuts that recently happened to their climate team. they reached out a couple of weeks ago because they saw on the draw down explorer just how big of an impact alternative refrigerants can have and yet they noticed that almost no one was covering that topic. So that was one way that someone used the draw down explorer to say, hey, what are the really high impact solutions that are not being discussed and then working from that topic, how do we find the story that makes this applicable or interesting to a larger readership. So I I would say as you're looking through the explorer, if you see something that has a lot of scale, a lot of impact, there's usually an opportunity there to make the case to a journalist that it's newsworthy. all right so the next question one of them is how do you think the current policy environment is affecting coverage of these solutions? Very interesting. Cody, do you have thoughts on that? Yeah. So roll backs are creating this like defensive media posture where coverage is shifting towards what's being lost rather than what's being built. And so I think it's important in these moments to as journalists and as we are pitching journalists as well on both sides of this to bring the solutions and continue to bring the solutions and those positive stories and those positive outcomes rather than just focusing on crisis communication. And so the risk is that audience is can kind of come away feeling like climate action is retreating when we're only focused on the roll backs when the opposite is true in many of the sectors that we're talking about. There still is progress being made. Yeah, absolutely. there there absolutely is still progress being made and when we think about the policy environment we want to see especially as Cody mentions at at the local level you know there's that kind of axiom that politics is downstream from culture and they're really much more tightly linked they're almost the same circle you could say if you were thinking of like a vin diagram but it just means it's more important to get these types of story into media outlets because if you can find ways to effectively communicate it can help shape policy maybe at a local level despite what's happening at the federal level to to ensure progress still happens. another question I think is really interesting, especially right now, is what's the most effective way to combat blatant mis misinformation around this and other solutions? Yeah, great question. So when it comes to misinformation, the research behind it shows that direct rebuttal of information actually rarely works. And so it shows that correcting a false claim can actually reinforce it because you're repeating that false claim first. You're saying not this, this, but people are still only focused on the first half of your your part point. So the more effective strategy is replacement and we do that by giving people a better more compelling story to hold on to. And so that's again where solution journalism and finding these unique individual humanistic stories can be really impactful here. You can kind of tackle two things at a time. The misinformation and the solution by focusing on that solution. So misinformation is spreading because it's emotionally res resonant. It's simple. It's sharable. And we have to bring that same approach to climate solution coverage. Yeah. here's a recent question that just came in. And also there's a ton of questions, so we're not going to be able to get to all these, but I love that that people have posted these. And please do keep an eye out for the resources that we send in the follow-up email because some of those resources are likely to help answer some of these questions if we don't get to it. but the question that that I see that I think is really interesting and something we think a lot about a lot at project draw, given the lack of government support for environmental solutions in the US, is there an opportunity for philanthropy to get involved here and make a big impact? I will answer that specific to sort of the context of this webinar, which is yes, there's a huge opportunity for philanthropists to help support and bolster independent newsrooms. There are incredible nonprofit newsrooms that are doing some of the best reporting on climate change. And that nonprofit model actually helps them be a much more trusted source even for people who are maybe a bit more bristly about climate change information. because when you're a nonprofit, you're often either reader supported or you operate a little more independently than the for-profit news outlets that sometimes people are a bit more skeptical of. So a as a philanthropist I think when philanthropists are giving money or resources to organizations whether it's it's project drawdown or folks working on the ground to implement these climate solutions baking in funding that supports their efforts to tell these stories is essential. if it were up to me every grant would have a carveout for communication because it's so important to get the story right and to get it out there. but also we need more philanthropists who are funding journalism specifically. so if you are a philanthropist journalism is an essential part of the ecosystem for climate communication and climate action and it is struggling. I know I mentioned that it's still an incredibly important source of information but as an industry it is struggling and so there needs to be more philanthropic support. all right. here's a technical question for you, Cody, about the research., did you count reporter articles separately from opinion articles? We did not. Yeah, I I think because I was helping bulldoze as well. Mukra does have an option to do that, so that would be interesting to look at. my I I suspect that they're a relatively small fraction of the overall news output just because they are in general. And so I don't think that would be much different for climate, but I think that's an interesting point from whoever asked that. It would be interesting to see if opinion articles are maybe a good avenue for getting emergency brake information out there a bit more. Yeah. especially on that diet coverage because we had talked about how much of that was published by like more because there's some yeah how much was covered in more of a human lifestyle approach rather than a climate coverage approach. just one question to address really quickly. I see a lot of questions about sort of methane and the warming over a hundredyear versus a shorter time horizon. So on the draw down explorer for each solution you can actually toggle that impact calculator that I showed. You can toggle between a 100redyear and 20-year to see the difference. So that's baked into the explorer. it's also part of the basis for emergency brake solutions is the fact that there are pollutants that are much more warming in the short term but they don't last extremely long in the atmosphere and so they can be a a prime opportunity to help us catch up. so I just wanted to address that because I saw that a lot. this is one maybe for you Cody but for both of us which is did any of these findings in particular surprise you? Ooh, I think yeah, the sheer number of the like improved diet section, I think that stood out as just being so much aligned with culture in America that that it it stood out as like a reinforcement. Yeah. I I think one thing that jumped out to me is we know that improved diets is really difficult to get people to adopt. It's it's an extremely difficult behavioral hurdle. And so I was a little struck and there's a lot of research showing that vegetarian and veganism is not necessarily on like a extremely exponential adoption curve or anything like that. So, I was really interested to see that that was out of the emergency brakes the one that's most covered and perhaps not the one that's having the most progress, which leads to an important question about how it's being covered or what else needs to happen. Coverage alone is not enough necessarily to drive to drive a particular climate action. So, it's a part of the ecosystem, but not the whole ecosystem. all right, I think we have time for a couple more. we have longer in the webinar, but I don't want to take up too much time because we were extremely efficient with the webinar. so I'll ask a couple more questions and then I just have some parting thoughts and I know Cody does as well. so one of the questions is oh I think this is an interesting one. it has to do with how how do you understand indigenous systems thinking and design being a part of the response to this and to climate solutions? Cody, do you have thoughts? Good question. Can you repeat the question for me? Yeah. How do you understand indigenous systems thinking and design being a part of the response and solutions? And I think that's maybe more broad about climate solutions than specific here. Although I will say that there's a lot of really great indigenousled journalism outfits that are focusing on climate solutions and when we talk about human stories a lot of indigenous communities are on the front line and so when you need to put a human face to climate change both the impacts but also the solutions indigenous communities are often those that are leading implementation of those solutions. And so I think indigenous communities are are a ripe opportunity for for really powerful human- centered stories about these solutions. But I don't know if you want to add to that either related to this or climate solutions more broadly. Absolutely. I think so indigenous knowledge systems have been tracking the ecological relationships and managing this land-based relationship for generations and specifically with petlands and grasslands and coastal wetlands. So these are the exact ecosystems that we found are pretty much invisible on mainstream coverage. So actually thank you for bringing up this question and it shocked me and I made the connection. So thank you. So that's not a coincidence that is happening here. The solutions that are getting overlooked are often the most ones that are tied to land stewardship and it doesn't necessarily fit into indust western industrial or technological frames that we're talking about. And so solution journalism and that can center indigenous perspectives can actually produce more equitable stories and produce more accurate and complete ones because that knowledge is irreplaceable and it's been proven over a millennia. I love that. Thank you. and and thank you to the person who asked the question. Yeah. And on that topic as well, I just remembered I don't want anyone to get their story scooped, but we did just get a great press request that one one of one of the solutions that is not really covered that we talked about is managing oil and gas. So oil and gas facilities are often quite leaky and just capping those and stopping those leaks can be an incredibly impactful solution. Part of that is capping abandoned wells. There's lots of abandoned wells littered across the United States that are freely emitting methane and there's readily available solutions to cap them so that they're not spewing that into the atmosphere. And we recently got a press request because a lot of those wells are located on indigenous lands and a lot of indigenous organizations are starting to figure out how to work together, share information and resources in order to take action and and cap those wells. So just on the topic, we just got a press request. So that's a perfect example of kind of tying those two things together and finding really human- centered stories of communities on the front lines. So so we'll end with this question because it's also one of my favorites and a few different people asked it in various ways which is how can we get emergency brakes more attention? and I think I saw someone mention it more from the perspective of someone who works at kind of a smaller climate or but I think broadly we can speak to a few different ways but I don't know Cody if you have some initial thoughts. How can we get emergency brakes more attention? Absolutely.
So I think again that goes back to making them visible, making them local and making them personal. So the data is showing this that solutions are kind of losing this media visibility contest. They should be winning on their impact alone. So we have to change the terms of this competition. And so that means building story packages that journalists can use with the face, with the community stake, with the visual hook, the person that was in the chat talking about photography and they want to use their photo skills and video skills. Partner with someone here that's in this chat that's also working on this and approach it from a a team effort. There's collaboration that can be done. don't have to work in in silos which is why I appreciate the collaboration that we did here with project draw down and it means kind of connecting as communicators we have to connect the dots for everyday people between these invisible infrastructure that's happening around them like the refrigeration system the gas lines these agricultural operations and connect that to individual's own health their energy bills their neighborhoods and emergency brake solutions then stop feeling more abstract and start feeling like something that's already happening here on the street when they get that immediate attention that follows. I love that. Yeah, it makes me think of a a great presentation I saw from the head of of George Mason's climate communication program. which is oftentimes people think of climate as distant in time, space, and species. And that's certainly true of emergency brakes. It's something that's happening elsewhere. it's going to impact us later on. It's not going to impact us now. And it's mostly harming other ecosystems, not necessarily humans. And so I think finding stories for emergency brakes, but for all climate solutions that make it locally relevant, show how it's impacting us today, but also show that there's solutions available can can have a tremendous impact. I'll also just say that there's great orgs doing work on emergency brakes. we partner with some such as the global methane hub and project drawdown. We are also a 501c3 nonprofit. and a big part of our work is raising awareness and getting people to take more strategic climate action. And a major way that people can do that is by diverting more resource and attention more resources including attention toward emergency brake solutions. So, for those of you that are able, supporting organizations like Project Draw Down or others working in the space is also an effective way to to get the word out and increase adoption. so I think that is it. We will, I think, cut it off there. Cody, is there anything you'd like to say or how can people support you and the great work that you do? Absolutely. Thank you so much, Skyler. Really appreciate you all for sticking on here and through this. And if you're working in climate communication, environmental advocacy or working on research like this or working on messaging, that is the kind of work that I do at the agency and in research. So I want to offer a free consult call. I'll put the link in the chat. There's not going to be a pitch or pressure. I just want to have a conversation about what you're working on and if I can be helpful, I would love to be. So, I'll put that in the chat now. All right. Thank you all so much. And please keep an eye out for that follow-up email. It'll have a recording, some key takeaways, and additional information. but with that, thank you so much., and I hope you all have a great rest of your day. Thank you. ***https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wPUKNUD6Lw&t=1509s
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