Project Drawdown is complementary to En-ROADS. Both efforts help people explore solutions to climate change. 


Project Drawdown is a research organization that has identified one hundred substantive solutions to climate change and published a book about it. According to their calculations, together these solutions could enable the world to achieve “drawdown,” the point when the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere stops climbing and starts to decline. 


Many of Project Drawdown’s individual solutions fit into one of the eighteen En-ROADS slider categories. The table below displays the top 10 solutions as identified by Project Drawdown, organized according to their effect on CO2-equivalent emissions of greenhouse gases for a 1.5°C scenario (Project Drawdown’s “Scenario 2”). This ranking reflects Project Drawdown’s ranking of solutions as of June 2023 and has changed slightly since the 2017 release of the Drawdown book. 



Project Drawdown Solution

Respective En-ROADS slider

Onshore Wind Turbines

Renewables

Utility-Scale Solar Photovoltaics

Renewables

Plant-Rich Diets

Deforestation > Food from animals

Reduced Food Waste

Deforestation > Food waste

Tropical Forest Restoration

Deforestation > Reduction in mature forest degradation; Afforestation

Clean Cooking

Buildings & Industry Energy Efficiency; Electrification

Family Planning and Education

Population

Distributed Solar Photovoltaics

Renewables

Refrigerant Management

Methane & Other Gases > Adoption of best practices for energy, industry, and waste (CH₄, N₂O, & F-gases). HFCs, used in refrigerants, are a type of F-gas.

Alternative Refrigerants

Methane & Other Gases > HFC phase out start year. HFCs, used in refrigerants, are a type of F-gas.


The Related Examples view in En-ROADS can also help you identify which slider to use to model a specific solution. You can access this view by clicking the Help menu at the top of the screen and selecting Related Examples. 



A few of the differences between En-ROADS and Project Drawdown are worth mentioning. 

  • En-ROADS is an interactive simulator—it responds in real-time to different actions selected by the user. The Project Drawdown analysis is static and updated by the Project Drawdown team periodically. 
  • Project Drawdown gives more detailed examples on specific solutions, while En-ROADS provides a more dynamic integrated picture of the different ways climate solutions interact and build on each other. 
  • Project Drawdown does not model policy mechanisms such as a carbon price or keeping coal, oil, and natural gas in the ground. En-ROADS has eighteen main sliders, which means that a single En-ROADS slider likely incorporates the impacts of several Project Drawdown solutions.


The takeaway message of both En-ROADS and Project Drawdown is that there is no single solution that will itself solve the problem of climate change. It will take a combination of many different solutions to keep global temperatures well below 2°C.