Every job can be a climate job – so skill up now
“We’re at the early stages of a technology-led sustainability revolution, which has the scale of the industrial revolution, and the pace of the digital revolution.”
Al Gore, 2018
In August 2022, Askov Finlayson, Etsy and Lyft joined Drawdown Labs – following Allbirds, Aspiration, Copia, General Mills, Google, IDEO, Impossible Foods, Intuit, Lime, LinkedIn, R&DE Stanford Dining, Trane Technologies, and Unity.
Significantly, not only are these leading business innovators entering the regeneration game – there are ALSO 5 key implementation partners who are serious about re-inventing business.
These partners – who will work with businesses to achieve their climate goals – are the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, Evergreen Action, Rewiring America, Seneca Solar, and The Outdoor Policy Outfit. Which means they’re exploring a whole world of opportunity to deliver resilience, equity and regeneration – not just climate mitigation.
So if you care about climate and you care about your career, it could be time to build that into a career advantage.
Some resources for climate career builders
You can’t build a career around climate solutions without understanding today’s climate solutions – so if you haven’t already explored Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration, then now is the time.
Three Project Drawdown entry points
Project Drawdown was founded in 2014 and published its first report in 2017. It was the first ever research to quantify the evidence-based commercial climate solutions currently scaling – using peer reviewed data instead of opinions. It answered the “can we reverse the process with what we have commercially TODAY?” question with “YES”.
- The Drawdown Review is a free PDF download that introduces the thinking behind Project Drawdown and summarises the solutions by sector.
- Drawdown’s Climate Solutions 101 video series is a great way in for those who “listen-to-learn”
- For inspiration and an overview, one of the original launch videos from founder Paul Hawken – such as Radical Innovation from the Drawdown Project (2017)
Drawdown only considers commercial solutions with enough independent, peer-reviewed data to support global modelling. So treat it as a Lonely Planet Guide – a good start but not the whole space.
If you’re working in business and you want a reliable list of the whole-of-economy solutions with a strong evidence base, it’s well worth exploring for career and business development projects.
Three Project Regeneration Starting Points
Project Regeneration was launched in late 2021. It’s a growing online action Nexus that takes the top science-based climate solutions and catalogues the actions that individuals, communities, regions, SMEs and companies can take today that make the world better today.
- Buy the book REGENERATION: ENDING THE CLIMATE CRISIS IN ONE GENERATION. Why? Because the introduction gives you insight into the Regeneration mindset AND the sections give you summaries of the 70+ solutions spaces. Also – because the book is magnetic. Put it on your coffee table or in your reception room and watch people pick it up and browse.
- Listen to Paul Hawken & Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation on Youtube for the spoken version.
- Go to the action nexus at regeneration.org/nexus and browse for the topic that “lights you up and turns you on”.
The Nexus action resources is a work in progress, so keep visiting – lists get updated and new lists get added.
The real skills game is innovating human systems
We can talk across the planet on our smart phones. We’re driving robot explorers around on Mars. Our space entrepreneurs are recycling whole launch rockets.
“It is the nature of human systems to actively resist change – UNTIL a better offer comes along…”
Alan Sieler, Newfield Institute
Knowing the technology solutions is insufficient – to make them happen, you need to be able to innovate the human systems we call “business” and “the economy”.
The good news in 2022 is that we know how to do that, too. There’s a whole knowledge base from Ontological Coaching to Marketing Psychology and Regenerative Practitioner training that you can access.
The better news – for your career and your life – is that the smarter you get at innovating human systems, the better you will do.
You don’t have to get a “climate” job – you can upgrade your current job
There are a growing number of resources for doing some personal career-building – from Slack communities to online guidebooks. So once you understand the solutions, your next step is to find some fellow travelers and useful support structures.
Work For Climate
World-first Australian climate change program, WorkForClimate, was launched in July 2021 with the goal of giving professionals and corporations the resources they need to tackle the climate crisis in their day-to-day work lives. It’s resources include:
- Live, guided Cohort programs
- Comprehensive, step-by-step Playbooks
- An online Slack Community
It’s currently focused on 4 key areas:
- Energy
- Emissions
- Money / Investment
- Influence
Drawdown’s Climate Solutions at Work
Project Drawdown’s 2021 publication Climate Solutions at Work is a free download – and includes some useful communications graphics from their Climate Solutions 101 video series. Depending on what you do and what inspires you, you could take on anything from Business Model Transformation to Procurement.
What about getting a new, climate-specific job?
If you love your current work but your current employer is still firmly tied to “fixing climate is up to the government” then it may be time to hit the job boards. Mainstream job boards like SEEK and LinkedIn have climate jobs listings.
There are also specialist climate job boards like ClimateBase you can check out. I sometimes just scroll through their list of Employers – because there are companies there offering products and services I’d never even conceived of 5 years ago.
There’s SO MUCH opportunity it can be overwhelming – if that’s so, then my Ikigai for Climate Solutions might be useful.
We live in exciting times…
We have all the solutions we need to solve global warming today – and more coming to market every week.
We have the communications and collaboration infrastructure to find out about those solutions and to study them.
We ALSO have high levels of knowledge and skills about innovating human systems to regenerate ecosystems and communities.
The only outstanding question is whether enough of us will adopt them quickly enough to halve our emissions before 2030 and build a regenerative global economy by 2050.
If that sounds fun – but you don’t know where to start – then check out a personal kick-start program at ThinkActRegenerate.com
