Zopeful is 1 year old!

Wowzer! Zopeful Climate is 1 year old today - May 25th 2022! Happy cake day to us! 🎂

The original premise was: faced with such a complex and huge challenge as human-caused climate change, is it possible to look it right in the face and still act with hope, always focused on making positive steps forward?

The answer feels like a big “yes”. Learning and doing stuff, particularly in things that feel outside of your influence, creates agency. To build a path over the noisy FUD. One foot at a time. Eyes-open progress. Big or small.

Does that make it any less daunting? Not really. Are there still reasons to be angry? Of course. Does progress beat perfection? Yes.

Is it complex? Often. Does it need to be complicated? Nope.

Having agency gives you choice. You get to choose.

In the last year we’ve:

- Launched 3 easy-to-read courses (the fourth is in production now)

- Reached people in about 60 countries (strong lean to Europe + US)

- Maintained a high completion rate (between 60% to 70% depending on the course)

- Ran a campaign about embodied carbon & the difference between removal vs avoidance

- Removed all our carbon from operating + more (we over estimated & kept tweaking our site to lower its emissions. Will share more on this later)

It’s been a labor of love to dig into all things climate and carbon, meet so many amazing people and contribute in our way towards making a dent in tackling climate change. The focus, positivity, co-operation, generosity, hope & action from those interested in, and working on, climate is truly inspiring.

We think that collaborative spirit comes from sharing such an audacious goal, one that will define our lives as well as everyone's futures. That shared future each and every one of us has a stake in.

It’s never plain sailing, of course. There’s been plenty of ups and downs. A thing that always helps, when the motivation ebbs, or it’s a final push, or life takes over in some way, is hearing feedback from the humans you set out to create a conversation with. These are some of our favourite quotes from folks who’ve joined Zopeful over the last year:

“You’re doing the grunt work so others don’t have to! #climatehero”

“I loved it. It was informative, approachable, hopeful and empowering”

“I’ve been finding it a super easy way to spread the word and to get more people joining our mission”

“If you're feeling a bit overwhelmed and hopeless about the climate crisis, you're not alone. But here's something that can help!”

It was hard to pick just these 4!

If the initial premise was to find and spread hope that we’re collectively up to the task ahead, then it’s been a winner. Absolutely 100% still as hopeful (maybe even more!) as at the beginning.

Yes, we still need to do more. Every part of the challenge + opportunity is a “yes, and…” situation. Whether you’re thinking about large scale global decarbonization or emerging removals to balance the books as the “net” in net zero. As the IPCC said last year, “every tonne matters”.

So much has evolved in the last 5 years or so since we started digging into climate, we can only see that trend speeding up a lot over the next 5. If that’s not a cause for cautious hope we don’t know what is.

In these sort of posts it’s often said “we’re just getting started”. Maybe that’s true for this too. We’ll see!

What’s next?

We’re working on some interesting - and exciting - things that are launching soon (ish), all about carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and how it fits in the science-backed path forward.

This feels like a nice capstone on the year. A missing piece, rounding off the other courses: Intro to Climate (how we got her e, hidden carbon in stuff & where reduction in emissions needs to come from), Code Red for Humanity (breaking down the IPCCs AR6 climate science report) and Climate Companies (their role & how to build orgs with climate at their core).

Thanks, everyone, for this last year. Let’s keep going!

Have hope, make progress! 💚

Pretty miraculous to write this whole thing without saying “gigatonnes”, right?