MULTISOLVING
change lives for the better & protect the climate
Aiming to increase racial or economic equity while fighting climate change?
Interested in helping your city invest in cycling infrastructure as a cost-effective way to improve public health and cut emissions?
Frustrated by the barriers to cross-sectoral collaboration?
Want to learn skills, capacities, and facilitation techniques that allow groups to make progress on multiple goals at the same time?
These are all questions about multisolving—finding solutions rooted in justice that reduce fossil fuel use and produce co-benefits in health, resilience, and well-being.
Maybe you’ve instinctually multisolved for a long time and called it something else. Maybe you are searching for new, innovative approaches. Whether you’re a new multisolver or a seasoned veteran, exploring our content will help you learn more about multisolving, employ it where you live and work, and connect with other multisolvers.
Research & Practice
When done well, multisolving naturally contributes to a more equitable world. The multisolving policies and practices we have found lead to short-term and long-term benefits of climate action.
Through our work with the Just Growth Circle in Atlanta, Georgia, we’re learning what successful multisolving looks like on-the-ground. Our experience from Atlanta and lessons from our years of policy research, including our report on the intersections of health and climate and our series of climate resilience case studies can inform similar endeavors in your own community.
In response to the current global pandemic, we are working to gather examples of Covid-19 recovery plans that also include measures that could improve racial, gender, and economic equity, as well as help combat climate change. Visit our list and contact us if you know of other examples we should include.
Four reasons to multisolve:
Ethics
People today are suffering from poverty, inequality, violence, poor health, and other problems. Even in the face of dangerous climate change these other causes of suffering deserve response.
Financial practicality
Solving multiple problems with the same investment of time or money makes good fiscal sense when budgets are constrained and needs are high.
Politics
A broad, strong base of people committed to climate action has the best chance of overcoming the power of vested interests that hold the current fossil fuel intensive economy in place.
Systems logic
In an interconnected world, designing to optimize a singular goal – such as carbon emissions – can lead to poor systems-level performance.
Collaboration Resources and Tools
Use our tools and insights to build winning coalitions and increase your climate impact for the same dollar and amount of effort. We’ve put together a suite of educational tools that illuminate methods of effectively connecting with others.
Multisolvers are:
ROOTED IN PLACE
Living and working at the intersection of multiple impacts, they see connections between issues that others often miss.
PERSISTENT
Seeing a complex big picture and entwined root causes, they believe that change takes time and sustained effort.
SYSTEMS THINKERS
Focusing on structural change, they look for leverage points and often link micro and macro scales. They have a visceral sense of interconnection.
CONNECTORS
Emotionally intelligent and often visionary, multisolvers connect people with each other, often just by listening, empathizing and translating across silos.
CREATIVE
Recognizing the need for new solutions, they combine tools and ideas in fresh ways.
REFRAMERS
They define problems in ways that include more people in the solutions and success in ways that optimize many variables rather than maximizing a single one.