Guest post by Jonah Stein
Founder, ClimateResponse.org
Jonah@climateresponse.org
In the two decades since An Inconvenient Truth, coverage of climate change has evolved from the occasional feature piece or scientific article to a deluge of stories about policy, science, solutions, and weather events. This media landscape has been inundated with reports on scientific progress, renewable energy breakthroughs, international agreements, and significant policy developments, alongside over-hyped solutions, greenwashing, and disinformation—stirred with coverage of droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, heatwaves, and the mass displacement of tens of millions of climate refugees.
Navigating this wealth of information has become a significant challenge for investors, journalists, and policymakers. Organizations developing and promoting climate solutions now find it more difficult than ever to capture attention.
Getting noticed is only the beginning. The complex, multifaceted nature of climate change—and the information ecosystem surrounding it—makes establishing trust increasingly difficult. Scientific complexity, media bias, disinformation, and vested financial interests muddy the waters, making it challenging to evaluate the claims of climate solutions companies. For the climate movement to advance in the face of these challenges, it is crucial to ground claims in peer-reviewed scientific and economic analysis, published by well-regarded, neutral experts, and focused on solutions relevant to each sector.
Project Drawdown has created a table of 102 climate solutions across seven sectors. For each, they provide peer-reviewed impact analysis, exploring addressable market size, potential greenhouse gas reductions, required investments, and financial benefits. This serves as a valuable resource for validating and quantifying the claims of climate solutions companies. This research is foundational and should be leveraged by climate voices to ground the discussion and establish the level of trust proposed implementations deserve.
In addition to their research and open-source models, Project Drawdown offers another underappreciated asset that can be leveraged to navigate the information overload facing the climate movement: a defined taxonomy of solutions.
The Project Drawdown table of climate solutions provides a foundation that can be expanded by incorporating the work of other organizations. For example, one of Drawdown’s solutions is to reduce food waste. ReFED, an organization dedicated to food waste reduction, identifies additional solutions that can be integrated into the climate response taxonomy.
Beyond developing a defined taxonomy for climate discussions, Climate Response has incorporated another proven tool for information retrieval in our draft defined taxonomy: the hashtag.
Introduced in 2007 and quickly adopted on Twitter, hashtags have become a standard feature on social media platforms. They allow individuals and organizations to categorize content, increasing its visibility and making it easier to find. Hashtags help organize content by topic, reach a broader audience, and enable participation in global conversations.
Hashtags are powerful tools for organizing and amplifying content, allowing users to discover and contribute to discussions on specific topics. They are especially effective when groups or organizations agree on a standardized set of hashtags to use across various aspects of a conversation. Key benefits of hashtags include:
• Events: Specific hashtags are used during conferences or public events to track related conversations, announcements, and experiences. Beyond general hashtags like #COP28, individual sessions or presentations can use targeted hashtags to extend the conversation beyond the 15 minutes of fame offered to presenters.
• Searching: Typing a hashtag into a search bar returns posts or content tagged with that term. For example, searching for #RenewableEnergy will display content using that hashtag.
• Following hashtags: Many platforms allow users to follow specific hashtags, meaning they’ll see tagged content in their feed, even from users they don’t follow.
• Trending topics: Trending hashtags represent popular, real-time conversations. By clicking on a trending hashtag, users can join or view the discussion.
• Social movements: Hashtags like #MeToo or #BlackLivesMatter organize content around social and political movements, fostering mass participation and visibility.
