Led by the Science: A Personal Climate Change Action Plan

How should we prioritize climate change action?

The Five Drawdown Roadmap Principles:

1. Maximize co-benefits for nature and human well-being
2. Prioritize across time
3. Focus on key regions
4. Minimize barriers to deploying solutions at scale
5. Prioritize climate solutions across sectors, aligning efforts with climate science

All of these five areas were factored into the development of the ReWrite Our Story initiative and, as a result, the Drawdown Roadmap serves as science-based guide to the efficacy of the personal climate change action plan that is being adopted through the program.

Here’s a snapshot of some of the key alignments:

2. Prioritize across time

The second part of the Roadmap reminds us that time is probably the most important variable when it comes to tackling climate change. In order to get to net zero sometime by the middle of the 21st century, we need to bend the curve by reducing and removing emissions immediately before generating even more significant progress in the next two decades if we are to have a chance of averting the worst impacts of climate change. So, we need “waves of climate action” all starting now but going out into the future at varying speeds and cresting at different times.

The Roadmap calls for “Emergency Brake” solutions, which are actions we must take today to slow down emissions and immediately bend the curve on greenhouse gases. It highlights the importance of “social interventions”, which help people first but also work to help the planet later, and provides two specific examples, both of which coincide with the Recruit & Restore strategy that is being adopted at the ReWrite Our Story projects.

Climate Change Action: Deforestation 

For example, preventing trees from being burned around the world at pace would make a significant and immediate impact on climate change. In this context, it points out that helping indigenous communities, especially in the tropics, to protect their land and have land ownership serves can serve as a direct incentive to reduce deforestation. Prior to the launch of the ReWrite Our Story project locations in Madagascar and Tanzania, the important legal process of empowering the local communities to establish land tenure was undertaken as a vital platform for protecting their lands. Not only does this foundation ensure potential long-term benefits for local inhabitants but the lowering of deforestation rates around the world helps global climate action, too!

Climate Change Action: Supporting Women and Girls

Similarly, the Roadmap identifies that helping women and girls around the world gain more equitable access to education and healthcare supports moral principles of equity and justice today and also has an economic and demographic impact in lower emissions globally over time.  Not only are a high percentage of ReWrite Our Story community team members female but recent surveys indicate that one of the ancillary benefits of increased family income at Recruit & Restore locations has been improved access to schools and health services for girls and women.

Our nature-based solutions will start to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere almost immediately, but soils, forests and ecosystems everywhere naturally take time to build up their maximum capacity to sequester carbon. So that’s even more reason to start as many as possible now, in order to impact the drawdown equation even more substantially in the coming decades!  At the same time, the “social interventions and emergency brakes” outlined above will help support vulnerable communities today and also provide greater dividends long into the future for both people and the planet.

4. Minimize barriers to deploying solutions at scale

Given the timeline imperatives of the climate challenge, the fourth Roadmap principle highlights the need to prioritize solutions that are both scalable and the most cost effective. In choosing to focus on large-scale tree planting and long-term forest conservation, The ReWrite Our Story initiative also drew on the latest carbon capture data.

Climate Change Action: Cost Efficiency

Today’s carbon removal technologies encompass a broad spectrum of different approaches, each with distinct costs, maturity levels and challenges. However, the 2024 State of Carbon Dioxide Removal Report confirmed that nature-based solutions, such as forest management and reforestation, remain by far the most cost-effective, with a weighted average price ranging from $12 to $16 per ton of CO₂ captured. In comparison, a mid-range option like biochar, a process in which carbon from biomass is transformed into a stable charcoal-like form, is currently about ten times more expensive.

Purpose on the Planet also views this principle as being synonymous with how effectively a climate action charity uses its own resources to provide a compelling and affordable value proposition for prospective donors. As a 100% “founder-funded” and volunteer-run entity, we minimize our own operating expenses and dependence on extra, third-party intermediaries. So, the actual cost for tree planting need not be unduly inflated (or even increased at all!) to support salaries and operational overheads that are not directly linked to the planting and conservation process itself.

As a result, the ReWrite Our Story program can offer a highly affordable and scalable personal climate change action plan that immediately address climate justice and carbon sequestration. Plus, our coastal restoration efforts also support essential climate resilience and adaptation efforts by protecting vulnerable communities and ecosystems from the future impacts of climate-related extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, floods and land erosion.