PROJECT DANDELION
A global, women-led climate justice campaign that shifts the narrative from fear to hope, to ensure the planet is a habitable home for everyone.
A WORKING DRAFT
The climate crisis is personal to every person on the planet. It is the priority. It is our opportunity to imagine the future we want and move urgently towards it.
Imagine, “What if our best times are ahead of us?”
A radical idea. But possible if we connect, activate, and mobilize a 7-year global women led and youth led campaign to meet the targets for carbon emissions.
7 years! That’s how much time we have to ensure the Earth is a habitable home for everyone.
“Half of humanity is in the danger zone [today], from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction. We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.” - António Guterres,
Secretary-General of the United Nations, warning the governments of 40 nations meeting in Germany, July 20, 2022
Today, over 400 companies and countries have pledged actions to get to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. (Source) But, if we do not reduce carbon emissions by 43% by 2030 the world of tomorrow will not be the world we live in today. 2050 is simply too late.
Project Dandelion’s [codename] goal is to elevate and amplify the work of organizations around the world to encourage collaboration and accelerate change.
We are not building another climate organization.
WE ARE BUILDING
WE ARE Lifting
A global brand, activated locally
A global campaign, implemented locally
A global accelerator, recruited locally
Local voices, raised globally
Local initiatives, celebrated globally
Local solutions, scaled globally
we are demanding and leading change to create the future we want to live in.
OUR INSPIRATION
On May 25, 1961, John F. Kennedy announced the goal of landing a man on the moon before a joint session of Congress. In September 1962 he doubled down on it in his famous State of the Union address, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade…not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”
On July 20, 1969 the first man walked on the moon. Scientists, with an average age of 26, rose to the challenge and met the goal - in eight years.
On March 11, 2020 COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic - a global emergency that urgently changed everything about the ways we lived and worked—killing thousands of people every day.
On August 23, 2021 the FDA approved the COVID-19, a life-saving vaccine. Scientists took only 16 months to create a vaccine, a challenge that typically takes 10 to 15 years. The pace of change and response to crises has accelerated.
A seemingly insurmountable “moon shot” that took 8 years in 1961 now takes 16 months.
We commit to rise to the challenge, to elevate the urgency, and to accelerate progress with actionable solutions for individuals, families and communities, companies, and governments.
Our campaign is ignited by a “moonshot” mentality at its core, taking up a seemingly impossible goal of sustaining the life force of air to breath and water to live. “Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”
Not because the science tells us (which it does) and not because data shows that it is happening right now (which it is), but because we believe that the millions of people feeling the impact of the climate crisis today - the majority of whom are women and families in the most vulnerable communities - deserve the same shot at preserving their homes, and we believe billions of people can be mobilized to move urgently towards a sustainable and more just future.
OUR campaign is for climate justice.
Across societies, the impacts of climate change affect women and men differently. Women are often responsible for gathering and producing food, collecting water and sourcing fuel for heating and cooking. With climate change, these tasks are becoming more difficult. Extreme weather events such as droughts and floods have a greater impact on the poor and most vulnerable – 70% of the world’s poor are women.
Our campaign is about rebalancing power with carbon reduction solutions that include a just transition from fossil fuels and that include the one billion people currently living without access to power of any kind.
“Social justice is not a sideshow to the climate emergency. Injustice is the cause. The most complex, radical climate technologies on earth are the human heart, head and mind, not a solar panel. Just as we stand at the abyss of climatic emergency, we stand at another remarkable threshold. The rate of understanding and awakening about climate change is increasing exponentially, even sky rocketing.” Regeneration, 2022
OUR campaign is women led.
“Gender equity and women’s leadership can no longer be an afterthought when drafting climate policy. For decades climate justice movements have been showing how women’s leadership is necessary for climate solutions. Improving predictive models by including gender equity as a driver of change is necessary if we want to create and implement effective solutions to the climate crisis.” - Osprey Orielle Lake, WECAN Executive Director, June 2022
Led by Connected Women Leaders, a cohort of global leaders committed to identifying solutions to the interconnected global threats of food security, access to affordable, quality healthcare, and the climate crisis, we are launching a groundbreaking new global Climate Justice Campaign that will be shaped and implemented by an organic and growing coalition of women and youth leaders from every continent, connecting generations and geographies. Together we will take up a seemingly impossible task - reduce carbon emissions by 43% by 2030.
We know from previous climate negotiations that when women lead they build the coalitions necessary to reach consensus, and often as the most proximate to the challenges - when women lead, action follows.
our campaign will unify in a world of silos.
No one person, organization, company, nation will meet this challenge on their own. We need a coordinated campaign that unifies, elevates and engages women in every community, every country. We need the activism of the world’s youth, who feel the urgency of a 7-year timeline for change and are in the streets demanding action.
We know it can be done. It has been done before.
In 1985, the ozone depletion theory was proven, when a hole in the ozone layer was discovered over Antarctica. International alarm at the layer’s thinning was so strong because the evidence was apparent and the solution so simple. It led to unprecedented multilateral action to ban the dangerous chemicals that were responsible for its deterioration – chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).
Getting rid of the CFCs in spray cans was a very easy thing to understand for governments and the public. Consumer behavior change and International treaties were actioned swiftly. Today, the use of CFCs is outlawed by 197 countries around the world and scientists concur that the ozone layer is slowly recovering as a result.
The big difference:
"We just don’t have that same kind of very easy substitution when it comes to climate change. There are things that a consumer can do, but it’s not that easy to decide you’re going to never drive a car and ride a bike instead. It’s not that easy to switch to solar. This problem requires not just people caring, but government action, changing technologies, a total overhaul of the energy system."- Susan Solomon, scientist and Professor in the Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
In the absence of multilateral action, our goal here and now is to overcome the current inertia that the monumental challenge of the climate crisis has generated. To make the distant threat proximate, the eventual threat immediate and the inanimate threat personal. To create an opportunity to energize and unite women and youth across seven continents to lead, bear witness and demand action. To create a positive catalyst for change.
our campaign is not duplicating efforts.
Project Dandelion is actually what is missing in the fight for climate justice - a global campaign to ignite the public to action, inspire grassroots initiatives to swing for the fences and bring awareness to scalable solutions for motivated funders. Our role is to show what can be done - quickly - when we connect, collaborate and unite.
our campaign will ignite action.
Project Dandelion is about the power of people to move the system. We’ve wasted too much time trying to placate rich countries and rich companies while our resources are depleting.
We are determined. We will be persistent and present everywhere, turning away from fear, embracing the “audacity of hope” that Archbishop Tutu modeled in his life, the radical optimism of Christiana Figueres and Indigenous leader Jade Begay who challenge us to imagine that our best times are ahead of us.