The MAKE.EARTH Roadmap

Update November 26 20222: MAKE.EARTH was an attempt at launching a community organisation centered around climate solutions. I still think the idea is pretty good and may revive it one day. The Roadmap as presented here is definitely useful so I’m leaving this here fore

Last week we launched the MAKE.EARTH manifesto which describes what we think is missing in the race to solve the climate crisis. Today, we publish the first part of the infrastructure we believe is necessary to coordinate a global movement of Earth Makers: The MAKE.EARTH Roadmap (in the following just “Roadmap”).

WHY

MAKE.EARTHs mission is to create a global movement of citizens worldwide who want to participate actively in building the technical, political and social solutions to solve the climate crisis.

We believe that only the people can build the actual solutions to solve the climate crisis. It’s the citizens that needs to replace existing industries with new ones. It’s the citizens who needs to drive political change, through activism, lobbyism and information.

What we’re trying to do with MAKE.EARTH is to mobilize the largest amount of people towards a common goal since World War II. For World War II there was a clear goal. MAKE.EARTHs overarching goal is also clear: Solve the climate crisis. But how to do that might be intangible to most people. So to mobilize a large group of people effectively we need direction. The Roadmap we’re launching today is that direction.

Fortunately, multiple research projects have already published several plans for what we need to do to fix the climate crisis. The Roadmap gathers all solutions that need to be built to solve the climate crisis in one place and it makes them actionable and measurable. The Roadmap provides the direction for the MAKE.EARTH movement.

WHAT

The Roadmap is derived from existing completed research projects that has attempted to map the solutions we need to solve the climate crisis. Projects like:

• Project Drawdown
• The Lazy Person’s guide to changing the world
• The new report on “Global Energy System based 100% on Renewable Energy” (GESRE)
• This Changes Everything – Beautiful Solutions

These projects describe in great detail the solutions that are needed. But each solution is huge and many of them looks only addressable by governments.

Unfortunately, the governments of the world will never be the ones who drive these solutions, because as discussed in the manifesto, doing so will risk loss of political power through unpopular but right decisions.

So in order to make them addressable by the citizens of the world we need to take each of them and divide them into smaller and more manageable tasks. This is what we attempt to do with the Roadmap.

A hugely successful framework for managing unsurmountable projects are the Objectives and Key Results framework – in short, the OKR framework. Today the OKR framework is being used by a lot of very diverse organizations from Bono to Google.

Watch this great introduction to OKRs for a quick intro:

(John Doerrs book on OKRs is highly recommended btw).

The OKR framework divides work into Objectives and Key Results. Objectives describe WHAT we need to do and the Key Results describes HOW we’re going to do it. Objectives must be significant, concrete, action-oriented and inspirational. In other words, they must be huge and almost insurmountable, exactly like the solutions from for instance Drawdown. But the solutions in Drawdown is not concrete and action-oriented enough to be Objectives in OKRs. That’s why we took all solutions in Drawdown and converted them to Objectives in the Roadmap. Taking these huge tasks described by the Drawdown and make them concrete and action-oriented is the first step in building them.

An example: “Refrigerant Management” from Drawdown becomes “Remove F-gases sustainably from residential and industrial ACs, refrigerators and freezers to prevent release of powerful greenhouse gases”. Converting the topic “Refrigerant management” into an Objective makes it more clear what we must do and it is clear what the success criteria is: The removal of F-gases in a sustainable way.

HOW

Now we still have an almost insurmountable Objective, now just formulated in a different way. Next, we must add Key Results to each Objective in order to slowly break it down into manageable and concrete chunks. A Key Result therefore must be specific & time bound, aggressive yet realistic and finally, measurable & verifiable.

It is important that Key Results are even more specific than Objectives and describe exactly how we want to work towards achieving the Objective. The Key Result itself also must be aggressive. You have to make an effort to complete a Key Result but it mustn’t be so hard that you end up with just another Objective. Finally, you must be able to measure a Key Result, such that you can tell for sure how well you’re doing and give an exact percentage of how far along you are in achieving the Key Result.

For the F-gases Objective from above, a few (but incomplete number of) Key Results could be:

• Design and build a low power residential AC without F-gases and sell 1 million units before 2025.
• Design and implement a “refund system” that enable residential AC owners to hand in their F-gas containing AC and get it retrofitted with a non F-gas and refund and retrofit 1 million AC units before 2025.
• Create a citizen lobby group that aims at educating politicians, the media and the public on the dangers of F-gases and get F-gases banned from 2020.

These Key Results makes the F-gas Objective tangible and approachable. Each of these Key Results could be worked on by a group of citizens of the world. And here another great part of OKRs become apparent: Let’s say that you were running a group that worked on the first Key Result above. This Key Result now becomes the Objective of your group – and you can now create separate Key Results under that in a cascaded fashion in order to break your hugely ambitious Objective into smaller chunks.

Declaring the Key Results for an Objective publicly and in the context of a worldwide community with the same aim has the benefit that everyone in the community knows what is being worked on and everyone thus is enabled to help with network, skills and advice. This is the power of communities that have the same purpose.

In addition, the Key Results we define above could probably be something way more creative that we haven’t thought of. Yet another reason why we need a community. We need the community to help define the different ways to actually solve the Objective. We need the community to define the Key Results. That is one of the powers of OKRs – there will always be many ways to solve an Objective. They key is simply to start.

THE ROADMAP

At last we have the Roadmap: https://trello.com/b/rlgPaMQ1/roadmap

The first research project that we have mapped is the Drawdown, because the Drawdown is the project we have found that has the most direct and concrete plan on what we need to do. However, more projects will be added soon.

We’ve decided to use the task management system Trello to manage the Objectives and Key Results. We divide the Objectives into the same topics as the Drawdown: Buildings & Cities, Electricity Generation, Food, Land Use, Materials, Transport and finally, Women & Girls. That is each of the columns you see.

Each card in each column represent an Objective where the Objective itself is given as the title.

Each card furthermore has a set of labels to make them easier to navigate, filter and sort by the Earth Makers:

• Greenhouse Gas Impact: As defined by the Drawdown this is a measure of gigatons of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases that will be removed if this Objective is solved. (Light green, green, yellow, orange, red)
• Project: Which research project does the Objective come from (so far only Drawdown is represented, but this will soon change) (Blue)
• Problem: Some Objectives are defined by Drawdown as solutions that are not ideal and should be replaced. (Pink)
• Strategy: We have tried to group each Objective into a specific strategy for greenhouse gas reduction. For instance, some Objectives might be focused on abandoning fossil fuels, others might be to control powerful greenhouse gases. (Black)

If you click a card you will see that each card contains a link back to Drawdown, where you can read more about the actual Objective.

Finally, each card has a checklist named “Key Results”. This is where we will enter all the Key Results sourced by the MAKE.EARTH community.

The Roadmap is public, so it is possible for anybody to comment on the cards. If you have ideas for Key Results for individual cards, add it as a comment! If you feel some Objectives are missing, don’t hesitate to ping us! If you’re already working on one or more of the Objectives, please help us define a Key Result for your project so we can add it and your initiative to the Objective. (You do need a free Trello user to comment, please let us know if this is a problem for you)

PRELAUNCH

On Monday May 27 from 18:00 at Klub in Copenhagen we’re going to test whether the Roadmap and the way we decided to approach it makes sense to the community of future Earth Makers and we’re going to talk about what we see as the future of the MAKE.EARTH community. This is our Prelaunch event.

If you’re in Copenhagen be sure to join. We can’t wait to meet you.

If you’re not, but think this sounds cool, be sure to ping us. We’re actively looking for international chapter heads to help us take the MAKE EARTH community to your city.

If you want to help shape the MAKE.EARTH community also don’t hesitate to reach out, we will very soon be needing a lot of volunteers to help run this.

Feedback

But most important – do tell us what you think! We must be missing a lot of solutions. There must be other ways to organize etc. Don’t hesitate to ping us on:

SoMe: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram

E-mail: hello@make.earth