Expert Sessions | Leadership Development with Chad Frischmann

Earlier this year, we hosted a series of expert learning sessions to help shape a long-term strategy for Work on Climate — one that’s grounded in the realities of an ever-evolving political, social, and economic landscape. These sessions brought together practitioners who have driven real impact by building climate-focused ecosystems, communities, and workforces across a range of sectors and scales.

We’re joined by Chad Frischmann, a regenerative systems strategist whose track record includes leading Project Drawdown, and now RegenIntel and its Global Solutions Alliance. 

This interview with Chad will focus on the evolution of his work from Drawdown to RegenIntel and GSA.

Integrity is not a luxury; it’s the foundation of transformation.

Can you tell us about the inception of Project Drawdown?

When we began Project Drawdown in 2014, the central question was simple: what are people actually doing to solve climate change? We knew climate change was a systemic challenge, but there was no clear picture of the concrete technologies, practices, and social shifts that could not only stop global warming but begin to reverse it.

At that time, the concept of “reversing global warming” was buried deep within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models and reports. In fact, most of the IPCC scenarios that held global temperature rise to 1.5–2°C included a net reduction in atmospheric greenhouse gases leading to temperature decline. Yet this remained hidden in technical models, untranslated for policymakers, investors, businesses, or communities. The word ‘drawdown’ was never used in this context until we coined the term.

The climate discourse was dominated by a narrow focus on decarbonizing the energy sector. Renewable energy, while critical, was often treated as the whole story. But nearly everything we do as a species—how we grow food, manage land, move people and goods, build our cities, run industries, even how we educate and care for each other—contributes to emissions. The solutions had to be as multidimensional as the problem.

The spark for Project Drawdown came from Amanda Joy Ravenhill, who was then teaching at Presidio Graduate School. She asked: where is the comprehensive list of solutions? The technologies, practices, and behavioral shifts that, taken together, could actually reverse global warming? It didn’t exist. Climate action was fragmented, siloed, and often competing with organizations advancing their own initiatives without a systemic view of how solutions interconnect. Amanda’s provocation became the genesis of Project Drawdown.

Our aim was to bring the concept of ‘drawdown’ into the public imagination as an open meme anyone could use; not as an abstract scientific outcome but as a practical, inspiring pathway. We wanted to translate rigorous science and data into something accessible, actionable, and hopeful. To show policymakers, communities, corporations, and citizens alike: here are the solutions; here is how they work; and here is how, together, they can add up to reversing global warming.

It’s important to note that Project Drawdown was never just the work of climate scientists. Paul Hawken brought vision as an author and entrepreneur. Amanda brought systems thinking and coalition-building. My own background was in Indigenous rights, sustainable development, and biodiversity conservation—fields that taught me that climate is inseparable from human well-being and justice. Many people don’t know that my thesis was on well-being economics and Indigenous wisdom!

So from the beginning, we were not just asking how to reduce emissions. We were asking:

• How do we solve the existential challenges facing people and planet in ways that go beyond climate?
• How do we design a system of solutions that regenerates ecosystems, strengthens communities, and creates cascading benefits across society?
• How do we use the urgency of climate as a catalyst to redesign the future we actually want?

That was the inception of Project Drawdown: not a single breakthrough, but the weaving together of people, disciplines, and questions into a shared conviction—that humanity already has the tools to reverse global warming, if we can see them as a system and act together.

Instead of treating climate change as an endless list of dangers, we showed that humanity already holds a portfolio of solutions—practical, proven, and scalable—that can stop global warming and begin to reverse it.

What happened in the world because of Project Drawdown? In retrospect, which choices in design and execution enabled those outcomes—and which were counterproductive?

When we launched Project Drawdown, none of us anticipated the scale of its impact. Yet within a few years, it had become one of the world’s most recognized resources for climate solutions. By the time I stepped away in 2022, we estimated the work had reached more than half a billion people.

The real breakthrough was shifting the narrative, substantiated by one of the most rigorous and comprehensive studies on climate solutions ever. Instead of treating climate change as an endless list of dangers, we showed that humanity already holds a portfolio of solutions—practical, proven, and scalable—that can stop global warming and begin to reverse it. That message landed and gave people—from policymakers to students to investors—permission to imagine a future not just of survival, but of thriving.

And it didn’t just change minds. A colleague, Eric Berlow at Vibrant Data Labs, has been tracking global investment flows. His analysis showed that philanthropic and investment capital in climate solutions was essentially stagnant before 2017. Then, right after Drawdown was published, the graph bends upward. We saw a surge of climate investment—from corporate sustainability officers to impact funds to heads of state to students the world over. I’ll never forget learning that Emmanuel Macron kept a copy of Drawdown on his desk at the Élysée, or the number of graduate students clutching the book as if it was their bible.

Looking back, the design choices that made this possible weren’t just technical—they were cultural. We refused the “great man” myth. There was no lone founder, no ego-centered hero at the center. Project Drawdown was co-created, intentionally, by weaving together diverse superpowers: Paul’s storytelling, Amanda’s coalition building, my research and systems approach, and the contributions of over 80 researchers and scientists across disciplines, generations, and geographies. That global collaboration was the secret sauce, and one of my proudest accomplishments. It created something rigorous and data-driven, but also inspiring and accessible.

What decision was counterproductive? After much debate and disagreement between the co-creators, we decided to trademark the word ‘drawdown’. As I mentioned, it was our intention to keep this in the public domain to be a meme for the world–a concept anyone in the movement could use freely to come together around. With the success of the book, however, we were advised to protect it from misuse. While it was open, I personally helped dozens and dozens of organizations, communities, and initiatives form using this word, and the movement was starting to take root. Yet, after trademarking it, fewer and fewer people were adopting it; and, now the brand is tightly controlled. I think this was counterproductive to creating far more impact worldwide.

You started RegenIntel and the Global Solutions Alliance to carry forth your original intention behind Drawdown, and they were informed by some things you thought Drawdown ended up not quite getting right. Say more on how your learnings from Drawdown informed the design of RegenIntel and GSA.

From the very beginning, my intention behind Project Drawdown was bigger than climate. We always asked: how can we use the urgency of climate as a catalyst to design a regenerative future? That vision was always about co-creation and collective effort.

But as the organization grew, the realities of funding began to pull us off course. Fundraising required control, and control meant moving away from the principle of ‘drawdown’ as a shared commons, a concept everyone could use freely. The trademark became more restrictive, the focus tightened, and some of the original values that animated the project gave way to the pragmatism of organizational growth.

Project Drawdown has since evolved into a different organization, with a particular lens and new values. I was the last of the original creators to stick around, but when I stepped back after open sourcing all the research and models, I knew I wanted to return to the original intention: a collective coming together of humanity, grounded in integrity, to build the future we actually want. That’s why I created Regenerative Intelligence (RegenIntel, for short) and the Global Solutions Alliance (GSA).

With RegenIntel, we hold fast to co-creation. We look not just at carbon, but at the system of solutions that address climate, biodiversity, health, livelihoods, pollution, and equity simultaneously. We emphasize multidimensionality because real solutions don’t exist in silos—they cascade benefits across human and planetary well-being.

With GSA, we are building an open, collaborative platform to make solutions a true public good. Rather than centralize control, the Collaboratory enables a distributed community to contribute knowledge, data, and tools. It is designed for interoperability and reciprocity—the very principles we compromised on at Drawdown in the name of fundraising.

Perhaps the most important lesson I carried forward is this: you cannot achieve systemic change if you bend your values to please funders. Integrity is not a luxury; it’s the foundation of transformation. RegenIntel and GSA are experiments in finding new, collective ways of creating a truly regenerative economy and society in ways that free us from the grip of wealth, power and prestige, so we can stay true to the principles that make regeneration possible.

In short, these new initiatives are not departures from Drawdown, but a continuation of its original spirit: rigorous, collaborative, and dedicated to making humanity a planet-positive species.

---

Related Content

Read the latest blogs with our other Experts.

Watch more interviews from our Expert Learning series