Project Drawdown is a comprehensive plan proposed to reverse global warming. The project researchers analyzed and ranked scenarios according to the potential reduction in carbon levels, and analyzed the costs.
Project Drawdown will continue the analysis work, but is moving into an additional advocacy and empowerment role of showing governments, organizations, and individuals that global warming can be mitigated and providing detailed guidance on strategies which can work. The audience for the project's work is expanding.
This places new demands on the tools. The tooling needs to be more accessible to people in different roles, and provide multiple user interfaces tailored to different purposes. For example, the view provided to policymakers would be more top-level, showing costs and impacts, while the view for researchers would allow comparisons by varying the underlying data.
The code.earth hackathon in San Francisco September 5-7, 2018 implemented a first step in this, starting to move the modeling implementation from Microsoft Excel into a web-hosted Python process with Excel providing the data source and presentation of the results. This will separate the model implementation from user interface, making it easier to have multiple presentations tailored for different audiences. It will still be possible to get the results into Excel for further analysis, but web-based interfaces can reach much wider audiences able to act on the results.
I was at the hackathon, working on an end-to-end test for the new backend, and plan to continue working on the project for a while. Global warming is the biggest challenge of our age. We have to start treating it as such.