According to a ranking by Project Drawdown, businesses around the world could eliminate 82 billion hours of air travel time for employees by substituting travel to meetings with high-quality video conferencing systems – a work practice with the potential to cut atmospheric carbon dioxide by 1.99 gigatons by 2050. This solution, dubbed Telepresence, is ranked as 63rd out of 100 solutions to global warming in the Project Drawdown study which compares the cost and GHG savings of three adoption scenarios (ranging from 16% – 50%) in the period 2020-2050.
Project Drawdown describes its work as “the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming”. In an April 25 New York Times interview , Paul Hawkin, Project Drawdown’s executive director, states: “A primary goal of Drawdown is to help people who feel overwhelmed by gloom-and-doom messages see that reversing global warming is bursting with possibility: walkable cities, afforestation, bamboo, high-rises built of wood, marine permaculture, multistrata agroforestry, clean cookstoves, plant-rich diet, assisting women smallholders, regenerative agriculture, supporting girls’ ongoing education, smart glass, in-stream hydro, on and on.” The solutions have been proposed and researched by an international collaboration of “ geologists, engineers, agronomists, researchers, fellows, writers, climatologists, biologists, botanists, economists, financial analysts, architects, companies, agencies, NGOs, activists, and other experts” .
The complete list of 100 proposals was published by Penguin Books in 2017 and is available at the Project Drawdown website. Canadian news outlet The Energy Mix is currently posting excerpts from Project Drawdown, and highlighted Telepresence in its May 11 issue.