Launched in January 2021, this new initiative seeks to alleviate extreme poverty and simultaneously address climate change by collaboratively identifying, promoting, and advancing interdisciplinary solutions-based approaches designed to catalyze positive, equitable change in low- and middle-income countries. Currently, poverty reduction and climate-related research efforts are done in silos despite the overlap and interdependence of these fields. Drawdown Lift will work to break down these disciplinary walls and find solutions that can address climate change, poverty alleviation, and human wellbeing.
Project Drawdown has already identified an important set of climate solutions, such as universal education, sexual reproductive health and rights (SRHR), improved clean cookstoves, Indigenous People’s forest tenure, and sustainable intensification for smallholders which have direct benefits for advancing human wellbeing. Through the Lift Initiative, we will identify poverty alleviation and human wellbeing co-benefits in other existing Drawdown solutions, while also engaging key academic researchers and practitioners to highlight evidence-based high impact practices in the poverty alleviation and human wellbeing fields that also contribute to climate adaptation and mitigation.
Drawdown Lift will accomplish the above through three key priorities: (1) Synthesize knowledge about climate and poverty solutions that already exist, and explore potential synergies among them; (2) Broadly communicate these findings, and the “win-win” solutions they reveal, to key leaders and broader audiences; and (3) Influence decision-makers to deploy these “win-win” solutions to climate change and extreme poverty in their global development approaches.