Drawdown’s Neighborhood, presented by Project Drawdown, is a series of short documentaries featuring the stories of climate solutions heroes, city by city across America. The fourth edition—Drawdown’s Neighborhood: New Orleans—is now available online! The Big Easy. Crescent City. The Birthplace of Jazz. The Paris of the South. N’awlins. Or simply NOLA. The latest installment of Drawdown’s Neighborhood takes us to one of the most vibrant and resilient cities in the United States: New Orleans, Louisiana. New Orleans is more than a city rich in culture; it is a place of resilience, where people live, work and play on the frontlines of climate change with hurricanes, oil drilling disasters, and shrinking coastlines due to sea level rise lingering as not-too-distant concerns. It is also home to a diverse network of people and organizations working on climate solutions. Often, the communities most immediately and severely affected by climate change—including Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color—are excluded from dialogues about solutions. Drawdown's Neighborhood: New Orleans features the stories of eight change-makers working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create a healthier, more just future for all.

It’s Net Zero Buildings Week! Time to celebrate the progress we’ve made in making buildings better for people and for the rest of life on this planet. And time to get real about where the net zero concept is useful and where it’s not. At Project Drawdown, we count net zero practices among our proven solutions in the buildings sector. We advocate moving toward a future where buildings support human communities and the communities of life outside of them—and where everyone has a building they can call home. So it might seem like an odd time to tell you that pushing for every individual building to be net zero is not how we get there. Net zero is a story about what we want for the world—and in particular the atmosphere that wraps around the Earth. We want an atmosphere to support both people and all of the flora, fauna, and funga that make up the web of life. To protect and preserve life on Earth, we have to quit dumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere so quickly that they hang around and cause havoc. The global net zero concept is simple: We’re currently emitting greenhouse gases much faster than nature or humans are able to take them out of the atmosphere. We’ll reach net zero when natural and manmade systems remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere as fast as we emit them. That means the current sources of emissions shrink down until they’re no bigger than the existing sinks. Project Drawdown illustrates this system with the rainbow graph below. (Happy Pride Month!)

It’s time to elevate and expand corporate sustainability from the often siloed, underresourced work of small sustainability teams to the work of every team—harnessing the passion and expertise that every employee has to advance climate action. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) especially have a unique opportunity to engage their entire organizations. That's because their flexible and innovative natures can orchestrate cross-functional sustainability strategies much more easily than a large corporation. SMBs can leverage their existing employee responsibilities and knowledge to create meaningful impact—without exhausting already limited time and resources. Every business function can help make a difference: Finance: Make sure you’re banking with a bank that is fossil fuel-free. Government Relations and Public Policy: Keep up-to-date with local legislation and voice your support. Human Resources and Operations: Provide your employees with climate-friendly 401(k)s. Legal: When you work with external counsel, choose climate-committed law firms. Marketing: Nudge your customers to take their own climate action. Procurement: Give preference to sustainable suppliers.  Sales: Integrate climate action into your sales models. Dive deeper and read the full article HERE!