The Exponential Roadmap for Natural Climate Solutions
For the best part of two years, on and off, I worked with Conservation International on the Exponential Roadmap for Natural Climate Solutions. It's an offshoot of the Exponential Roadmap report, focusing on nature - a guide to what we need to do on wild and working lands over the coming decades to keep warming below 1.5°C, and what businesses, policymakers, finance and social movements can do to accelerate things.
I served as the lead editor for the whole thing, and also worked on most of the dataviz. The brilliant Alex Parrott, who I've worked with a bunch of times, did the layout and design.
At its heart we came up with a simple benchmark called the Carbon Law for Nature. Humanity's use of land releases about 12.5 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases every year. The roadmap lays out a path to bring that down to net zero by 2030, then to turn the land into a five-gigatonne carbon sink by 2040 and a 10-gigatonne sink by 2050. It gets there by protecting carbon-rich places like the forests of the Amazon, Congo Basin and Southeast Asia, managing farms and grazing lands better, restoring peatlands and mangroves, and transforming what we eat and how we grow it.
The report came out in September 2022, and the brief is available in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Bahasa Indonesia. In 2023, it won an Honourable Mention in Fast Company's World Changing Ideas Awards, which I was really proud to see. I learnt heaps and heaps through working on it. It now has a spiritual successor, too - Africa's Nature Transition.
Grab a copy from the Conservation International website.
If you'd like me to help you make something similar for your organisation, head over to my data visualization studio site, Klimat Studio:
