Climate

What's at stake

Climate change is the major environmental challenge of our time, with the potential to impose tremendous disruption and damage to people and the environment. We’re already seeing its impacts in the form of extreme heat, raging wildfires, supercharged storms, and repeated flooding. And it will continue to get worse unless we take immediate and substantial action. We are up against the clock. 

According to the United Nations, global temperatures are now all but certain to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels in the next few years. Our goal is to minimize the magnitude and duration of that overshoot in order to limit the destruction and suffering caused by climate change. This will require us to fully leverage and expand the climate action tool kit—including by accelerating our efforts to lower the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the crisis, as well as developing and scaling carbon dioxide removal solutions. We must also invest in resilience and adaptation to prepare for the impacts that are already unavoidable and ensure that the benefits of these approaches are shared equitably. Fortunately, we have the technologies and the ingenuity to decisively rise to the challenge.

How NRDC is making a difference

By leveraging the full breadth of its policy, legal, and scientific expertise, NRDC is advocating for and implementing solutions in the four economic sectors that contribute the vast majority of emissions in the United States: transportation, power, buildings, and industrial manufacturing. The power of coalition building linked with strategic communications is also helping us build the political will to clear the roadblocks holding back our transition to a clean energy economy. 

More specifically, we’re working to support the build-out of clean energy—the most cost-effective and fastest-growing source of electricity and an industry that has been creating millions of jobs and billions in economic opportunity. Part of that entails bringing the power grid into the 21st century and breaking through transmission bottlenecks. We’re also working to bring more electric vehicles (EVs) and trucks onto the road to prevent pollution and benefit drivers at the pump. This includes our advocacy to speed up the deployment of EV charging infrastructure and boost solutions like public transit that make communities safer and healthier. We’re engaging with states to put incentives and programs in place to electrify homes and move away from costly gas infrastructure as the default for heating and cooling. And we’re charting sustainable pathways to restore America’s manufacturing of materials like steel, aluminum, and cement. 

On top of these pathways to mitigate emissions, we’re working to accelerate carbon dioxide removal (CDR) solutions to pull greenhouse gases directly from the atmosphere. Carbon removal will be a critical tool to meeting our climate goals, and NRDC brings essential assets to these efforts: technical and policy expertise to guide responsible CDR development, a deep understanding of public health and community concerns, trusted relationships with a diverse set of allies, and a proven ability to build coalitions. We are also supporting responsible research into solar radiation management (SRM) technologies, which are intended to reflect a small fraction of incoming sunlight back into space so that global average surface temperatures temporarily decline. NRDC launched the Solar Geoengineering Research Governance platform alongside other science and environmental groups to provide practical guidance, ensuring that future decisions about SRM are informed, equitable, and aligned with broader climate, environmental, and public interest goals.

Finally, we are championing solutions to help us adapt to the impacts that climate change is causing here and now. This means advocating for greater investment in public health infrastructure, standing with frontline partners demanding support for climate resilience and adequate funding for disaster relief, fighting for occupational protections for workers facing extreme conditions on the job, and shaping planned relocation efforts for communities that can no longer stay in their homes. Most critically, we must prioritize adaptations for people directly grappling with the effects of our changing climate, a global undertaking that requires financing and collaboration at all levels of society.