Climate Action as if the Earth Mattered: Restoring living systems as the essential foundation to solving the polycrises we face
Please join us Friday, September 27, 2024 at noon for a lecture at the CUDC featuring Brett KenCairn, Founding Director, Center for Regenerative Solutions.
This event will be in-person and livestreamed on Zoom. Register here
Free and open to the public. A light lunch will be provided.
Brett is the Founding Director of Center for Regenerative Solutions and Senior Policy Advisor for Climate and Resilience in the City of Boulder’s Climate Initiatives Team. He coordinates the city’s nature-based solutions work. Brett has worked across the western US in community-based initiatives in rural, Native American, and other marginalized communities. He is the co-founder of multiple organizations including the Rogue River Institute for Ecology and Economy, Veterans Green Jobs, and Community Energy Systems.
Since the early 1970s, we have known that there were two fundamental causes of climate destabilization—fossil fuel combustion and land degradation. Over the past several decades, the role of land degradation has been largely forgotten in the focus on carbon accounting and energy systems change. Current climate action strategies will inevitably fail unless we reestablish a global-scale focus on restoring the more than 70% of the Earth’s living systems that have been deeply degraded—both in natural, working and urban lands.
The good news is that we have examples of large-scale initiatives of this sort that can achieve remarkable regenerative results in the scale of just a few decades. In this talk, we will walk through the limitations to current climate action approaches and outline a broader strategy that can serve as the foundation for both climate stabilization (and a number of other aspects of the “polycrisis”) and a community redevelopment strategy that can stabilize both urban and rural communities both here and abroad.
