Giving Compass' Take:

• Amsterdam based initiative called What Design Can Do challenges innovators to utilize design in order to battle climate change by building integrative, creative solutions and submit proposals to the Climate Action Challenge. 

• WDCD values collaboration, but thinks that one single idea can create powerful social change, and requires support to see it through. Will sustainable social impact in regard to climate change happen through collaboration or the power of one big idea?

• Read about what other organizations are doing to commit to battling climate change. 

“Make the huge – and for many people abstract – issue of climate change tangible and understandable, while at the same time offering potential and practical solutions.”

When Amsterdam-based research and technology initiative What Design Can Do laid down its challenge in May 2017, they minced no words: “Climate change is inevitable.”

Anthropogenic climate change is here and it’s coming, already baked into the system. What to do? I argue that there are three broad categories of human response to climate change: Abdicate, Reject, and Face It.

Of these responses, the first, untempered, is defeatist and weak; the second, foolhardy and dangerous; the third option sustains hope for that better world, organizing action by understanding and accepting our responsibility as a species, much as we expect of the individual beings within it.

So let’s focus here on the third response: action and opportunity.

What is different than ever before is the scale and nature of the social transformation to which we must apply the power of change. In many cases, we must design our way out of failing designs of the past.

When Founder Richard van der Laken started WDCD, he sought a way to focus the disparate, often diffuse creative energy of visionary thinkers and the preternaturally optimistic perspectives of creative designers. Laken and his colleagues issued its global Climate Action Challenge, calling on designers and creative thinkers to submit their best ideas for confronting climate disruption, especially in the world’s poorest and most vulnerable regions.

One of the biggest impediments to adopting a wholesale global response to global warming is the sheer scale of the challenge. Entire nations, let alone individual citizens, claim that, all by themselves, they are inadequate to the task. They’re right. Human collaboration is the essence of how tackled every existential challenge.

Read the full article about using design to tackle climate change by Thomas Schueneman at TriplePundit