Cooling the Planet … How bold ideas like carbon capture and rewilding, engineered clouds and regenerative economies … can solve the climate crisis faster than we think
June 5, 2025
The climate crisis has long been framed as a story of restraint — of cutting back, consuming less, flying less, wanting less. For decades the narrative has been one of limits, sacrifice, and slow adaptation. Yet a new generation of thinkers and innovators is turning that story on its head. What if the solution is not to shrink our world, but to redesign it? What if the answer to a warming planet is not paralysis, but possibility?
Around the world, engineers, entrepreneurs, and ecologists are no longer asking how to avoid disaster but how to cool the planet. Their thinking is bolder, their timelines shorter, and their tools more ambitious. They are drawing from nature’s own playbook — regeneration, restoration, and feedback — and combining it with the power of exponential technologies, circular economies, and creative human cooperation.
The Shift from Reduction to Regeneration
Paul Hawken’s Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation has become a touchstone for this new mindset. Rather than framing climate action as damage limitation, Hawken invites us to see it as a design challenge — to restore the living systems that sustain life. His central insight is both scientific and spiritual: carbon is not the enemy, but the element of connection, cycling endlessly through plants, oceans, and soil. When we burn it, we break that cycle. When we restore it, we rebuild balance.
Hawken’s work has inspired a wave of regenerative thinking that transcends traditional environmentalism. Instead of merely “sustainability” — maintaining what we have — regeneration seeks to make the world better, richer, and more resilient. It’s a shift from doing less harm to doing more good; from neutrality to positive impact.
Across sectors, this regenerative logic is now shaping strategy and innovation. From companies reimagining materials and food systems, to cities investing in biodiversity and resilience, the emphasis is on circular, restorative growth — a new economy that works with nature rather than against it.
Cooling at Speed and Scale
If regeneration is the philosophy, then cooling the planet is its practical expression. Scientists and entrepreneurs are exploring interventions that actively lower global temperatures — not in centuries, but in decades.
Some of these efforts are strikingly direct. Carbon capture and storage, once a fringe idea, is now moving into the mainstream. In Iceland, Climeworks operates the world’s largest direct air capture plant, using geothermal energy to pull CO₂ from the air and mineralise it underground. In Canada, Carbon Engineering is building facilities capable of extracting a million tonnes of CO₂ per year.
Others are taking inspiration from the Earth’s own systems. Enhanced weathering projects, for example, accelerate natural rock processes that absorb carbon. In Kenya and Scotland, researchers are spreading basalt dust on farmland, turning agricultural soils into massive carbon sinks. Forest restoration, mangrove replanting, and seagrass regeneration — all old ideas — are being turbocharged with AI mapping, drone reforestation, and data-driven ecosystem management.
Then there are the moonshots: approaches once considered unthinkable. Stratospheric aerosol injection — mimicking volcanic eruptions to reflect sunlight — is back under serious study, as are marine cloud brightening projects off the coasts of Australia and California. These “solar reflection” techniques remain controversial, but the urgency of climate feedback loops has rekindled debate about whether we can afford not to explore them.
Nature as Technology
Perhaps the most profound innovation is rediscovering that nature itself is the most sophisticated technology we know. Photosynthesis, microbial metabolism, ocean currents — these are the planet’s original carbon management systems. Modern science is learning to harness and amplify them.
In Finland, a startup called Solar Foods produces protein from hydrogen and CO₂ using microbes — a process that turns air into food with minimal land or water use. In the Netherlands, researchers are engineering biochar systems that convert agricultural waste into stable carbon, improving soil health while locking carbon underground for centuries. In the United States, companies like Living Carbon are developing genetically enhanced trees that capture carbon faster than their wild counterparts.
These solutions share a radical optimism: that human ingenuity, guided by ecological intelligence, can not only stop the damage but reverse it.
Cities That Heal
Urban areas — responsible for 70% of global emissions — are becoming laboratories for planetary healing. Singapore is weaving greenery into its skyline with vertical forests and cooling corridors that lower city temperatures. Copenhagen aims to be the world’s first carbon-neutral capital, powered by renewable energy and circular waste systems. Paris has pledged to become a “15-minute city,” reducing car dependence while increasing local vibrancy.
London, too, is experimenting with a regenerative urban future. New heat networks, powered by underground and waste energy, now provide low-carbon warmth to thousands of homes. The city’s “superloop” of electric buses and expanding cycling infrastructure signal a broader cultural shift — from linear consumption to living systems design.
But cities are not only sites of emission; they are also centres of coordination. Urban innovation scales quickly, combining public policy, citizen behaviour, and technology deployment. If the industrial revolution began in cities, the regeneration revolution may well do the same.
A Revolution in Food and Farming
Few sectors illustrate the potential of regenerative design more vividly than agriculture. Conventional farming, dependent on synthetic fertilisers and monocultures, degrades soil and releases vast amounts of carbon. Regenerative agriculture, by contrast, treats the farm as a living ecosystem — integrating cover crops, composting, rotational grazing, and biodiversity to restore soil carbon and fertility.
Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, smallholders are reviving indigenous techniques that store carbon while improving yields. In the American Midwest, large-scale farmers are adopting no-till methods and planting “carbon-smart” crops supported by data-driven platforms such as Indigo Ag.
Meanwhile, the future of protein is being reimagined. Precision fermentation, cellular agriculture, and mycelium-based foods are scaling fast. These technologies promise to cut land and water use while offering new markets for sustainable growth. Companies like Meati in the US and Solar Foods in Europe are showing that innovation and nature need not be opposites — they can be allies in regeneration.
Rethinking Capitalism Itself
But regeneration is not only technological. It is economic, moral, and cultural. The deeper question is: what kind of economy can sustain life, rather than deplete it?
The regenerative model challenges the very foundations of extractive capitalism. It asks companies not how to offset their impact, but how to embed their value creation in systems that restore. That means redesigning business models around circular flows, long-term stewardship, and ecological accounting.
Pioneers like Patagonia, Interface, and Unilever have already shown what this looks like in practice. Interface’s “Factory as a Forest” initiative aims to make each production site a net-positive ecosystem — generating more clean air, water, and biodiversity than it consumes. Unilever’s “Regenerative Agriculture Principles” now extend across its supply chains, connecting livelihoods and land restoration.
Financial systems, too, are beginning to adjust. Regenerative finance (ReFi) is emerging as a movement to align capital with planetary health. Tokenised carbon credits, nature-backed currencies, and biodiversity-linked bonds are early experiments in this new field. The aim: to make the health of ecosystems not an externality, but the core metric of economic value.
The Acceleration Imperative
Speed matters. Every year of delay compounds the challenge. The good news is that exponential technologies can compress timelines dramatically. AI-driven climate modelling now allows researchers to test thousands of interventions virtually before field trials begin. Advanced materials — from carbon-storing concrete to biodegradable plastics — are moving from lab to market at record pace.
Even public policy is learning to accelerate. The European Green Deal, the Inflation Reduction Act in the US, and China’s vast investment in clean technologies all signal a new industrial race — one defined not by fossil fuels, but by the energy transition. Nations are competing not only to decarbonise, but to lead in the industries of the future: batteries, hydrogen, fusion, and synthetic biology.
A Cultural Shift
Ultimately, the climate challenge is as much about imagination as engineering. For decades, we have been told that human activity inevitably harms the planet. Regeneration reframes that relationship: human systems can heal the planet when aligned with natural ones.
This demands a cultural transformation — from extractive to generative, from scarcity to possibility. Artists, educators, and storytellers play a crucial role in this shift. When people can see a hopeful future, they are more likely to build it.
Movements like “Planetary Health” and “Earth System Governance” are beginning to reshape disciplines, connecting climate to health, equity, and security. The younger generation — from climate scientists to startup founders — sees regeneration not as an ideology, but as an organising principle for civilisation itself.
From Despair to Design
The task ahead is immense, but not impossible. Every degree of warming avoided matters; every system redesigned adds resilience. The same ingenuity that built industrial civilisation can now be turned toward ecological repair.
The challenge is to move faster and think bolder — to treat climate not as a burden, but as a frontier for innovation. Whether through nature-based restoration, advanced carbon removal, or regenerative business, the path forward lies in imagination backed by action.
As Paul Hawken writes, regeneration is “the story of life continuing to create conditions for life.” It is not a distant dream but a practical blueprint. What began as a crisis of limits is becoming a movement of creation.
If we act decisively, the 21st century could be remembered not as the age of decline, but as the moment humanity learned to make the Earth thrive again. Cooling the planet, it turns out, may begin with warming the human spirit — to believe, once more, in our collective power to regenerate the world we share.
More from the blog