Tx: Treatments for a Changing Planet
We have many ways to reduce the pollution heating the planet and protect the living systems on which we depend. The treatment list reaches across the places we live and the systems we use every day. The next question is how to put those treatments into practice.
A place to start: Project Drawdown
Project Drawdown evaluates climate solutions and helps people understand where action can make a difference. Its work shows the breadth of the treatments available to us.
Some are familiar household changes. Others involve farms, factories, utilities, public buildings, and entire transportation systems.
The examples below are an introduction, rather than a ranking or a complete plan for any particular community. For the evidence, practical considerations, and current assessments, explore Project Drawdown's work.
Energy and buildings
We can generate electricity with wind and solar. We can reduce the energy buildings need through better insulation, windows, lighting, and controls. Heat pumps and better refrigerants are also part of the treatment list.
A household may be able to make some of these changes. Public institutions can make them too. Solar panels on a home, a library, or a community center involve different decisions and different opportunities for people to participate.
Getting where we need to go
Public transit, walking, cycling, carpooling, and electric alternatives to combustion-powered travel all belong on the treatment list.
These choices depend on the world around us. It is easier to walk when there is a useful, safe way to get where we need to go. Transit has to serve the places and times people need. A cleaner vehicle has to be accessible to the person expected to use it.
This is familiar territory for public health: build conditions that support the behavior we want to make possible.
Food, land, and living systems
The treatment list includes reducing food loss and waste, improving agricultural practices, restoring forests, and protecting ecosystems and the carbon they store.
It also includes specific changes in nutrient management, rice production, and how crop residues are handled. These are decisions made across food and land systems, with people whose work, knowledge, and livelihoods need to be part of the conversation.
Caring for the living world belongs in climate action. The forests and other healthy places we want to preserve are part of what makes our own lives possible.
Industry and waste
Other treatments happen farther from the household shopping list: changes in cement production, industrial hydrogen, landfill methane management, composting, and recycling materials.
Their presence on the list is useful. It reminds us that climate action involves institutions, infrastructure, and collective decisions as well as personal behavior.
Protection while we change
We also need adaptation: understanding local climate impacts, preparing communities, and making programs resilient to changing conditions.
Reducing the causes of warming and responding to its consequences are both necessary. The people dealing with the consequences now need our care now.
Having a treatment is only part of the work
Imagine handing everyone a training plan and telling them to run 26 miles. Now imagine organizing a marathon and a group that trains together.
The task changes when people have a way to prepare, participate, and support one another.
The same question applies to climate solutions. What structures help people take part? What policies support the work? Who has been left out? What will make it possible to keep going?
Public health has experience with the distance between knowing what could help and making it happen. That brings us to the prescription.