Climate Majority Project

So, we have reached 2025. In the last year, we blasted through the 1.5°C warming limit, and remain far from the net zero by 2025 goal XR had set. Yes, we are out of the safe zone ... so is it time to relinquish hope? “The fight for a survivable future isn’t over, but it will require a huge shift in approach. It’s time to stop fantasising about a decarbonised utopia and start acting on the resilience-building strategies that can protect our communities and steward a path through the rising tide of trouble that is coming our way.” This is what our #SAFER (Strategic Adaptation for Emergency Resilience https://lnkd.in/dSFACBg5) campaign is about. Read more on this latest The Guardian article by Rupert Read: https://lnkd.in/dDRBzWns Claire Bonello, Bonnie Grotjahn, Chantal Burns, Rob Harrison-Plastow, Stan Kohler, Anja Rekeszus, Jelger Kroese, Alexia Netcu, Jack Cooper, Richard Delevan, Islington Climate Centre, James Broadley, Maria O'Connor Ph.D., Yvonne A. Mazurek, James Beale, Wild Card

As we all prepare to unplug for the holidays, we’d like to leave you with a provocation: just like the silent majority concerned about the environmental crisis, another silent majority subtly senses that  consumer society is operating on broken values. Speaking our true values out loud can feel risky when we sense we’re going against the flow - but it can feel like magic when we ‘find the others.’ And there are more like-minded others around us than we typically believe.  So, don’t be afraid to ‘go there’ with your family and friends this year! Who knows, they might just be longing for change, just like you. This is one of the most exciting things about activating the climate majority, which is not just a way of tackling the environmental crisis, but an effort to bring people together around our deep, shared humanity. As a team, we are taking a couple of weeks off for the holidays to fully restore and connect with our loved ones after a very intense year. We look forward to reconnecting with you all in 2025! Speaking of which, keep an eye out for our inaugural CM Forum, organised by Maria O'Connor and Ivo J. Mensch on March 15-16 in London! More details in our latest newsletter below. Check out https://lnkd.in/deD44Msv Dr Siobhan Currie, Dave Hampton, Rupert Read, Sam Bowen, Helena Farstad, Uzma Zahid, The Working Class Climate Alliance, James Broadley, Jamie Bristow, Zoe Cohen, Linda Aspey, John Gray, Les Gunbie, Josephine Lethbridge, Richard Edwards, Cathy-Mae

"We strive for the best outcome possible at a given time, without 'letting perfection be the enemy of the good'. Loss and damage payments from rich, high-emitting countries to those vulnerable to climate impacts are essential, yet total global or climate justice is unlikely – in current timeframes, perfect righting of wrongs is an unrealistic goal ... Without acknowledging the aspect of human nature that instinctively protects family and kin before the rest, it will be difficult to work towards a more just society for everyone. Most nations and societies have perpetrated murder and abuse of ‘outgroups’ over millennia - including nations and peoples currently in less powerful positions. Fortunately humans also possess remarkable capacity for care and collaboration. To reach global agreements widely accepted as fair and just, we need to speak honestly to both the altruistic impulses that underpin the world’s great moral/spiritual traditions, and to enlightened self-interest." https://lnkd.in/d3uxjQ9w Ivo J. Mensch, Rosie Bell, Andrew Simms, Carolyn Sims, Naresh Giangrande, Richard Millington, Helena Farstad, Sam Bowen, Vincent Nolan, Luke Tryl, More in Common, Steve Willis, Anthea Lawson, Ed Gemmell

#Adaptation does not mean giving up on reducing #emissions. Rather, it is the way to prepare communities and nations to the disasters caused by our lack of mitigation thus far. Adaptation also means #rewilding and agrirewilding our lands, making the most of nature’s buffers against floods and heatwaves. Is is thus a way of including planetary boundaries beyond CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere in addressing environmental degradation. Adaptation is something that can be done on a local scale much more effectively than mitigation — adequate flood defenses will protect a limited geographical area, while reduced emissions from a community will mean nothing unless most of the world does the same. Thus, adaptation is a way communities can be truly take climate action — in a way that would make the climate threat much more real, this stimulating mitigation…as denial comes from a sense of powerlessness and that people out there are not as uneasy as we are about the way the world is unfolding. Chantal, Bonnie Grotjahn, Rebecca Gibbs, Cadence Roundtable, Paul Bodenham, Wild Card, THE DARK MOUNTAIN PROJECT LTD, Dr Morgan Phillips

There is a lot of overlap between the climate majority and the football majority -- the sort of people who silently sense something is off, but feel they can't do anything about it ... all the people in line at Tesco who know we live in a rigged system but can't see the way out. Mobilising the football majority who also cares about nature and the environment is essential. Thank you so much James Beale for taking the lead on these efforts. Dave Hampton, Champions for Earth, Etienne Stott, Football For Future, James Atkins, Planet League

"While being on the frontline of building the foundations for a new society is incredibly exciting at times, there are times in which I feel swallowed up by doubt, the burn of responsibility, the feeling that things aren’t happening quickly enough. I get annoyed with colleagues and people in the wider environmental community. People competing for funding bids, taking credit for other’s work, being attached to bad creative outputs, elbowing each other to get in front of cameras, or simply being unreliable. It’s a human mess! This, combined with the widespread experience of being overloaded, also means that after too many days of work! Work! WORK! I begin to lose myself, and to lose touch with why I am here in the first place. And I want to give up. Fantasies take hold of returning back to my homeland, Italy, growing my patch of vegetables and making a living as a therapist – retreating to a beautiful little life sounds amazing … until I remember that in a decade or two that little garden might become a patch of desert, go up in flames, or undergo severe flooding. In approaches to our crisis I often notice a dichotomy which is reflected in myself: go all in and try to change the world until one burns out, or try and embody the way one would like to live within our current societal boundaries. This can also be found in the way psychological work (inner change) often remains far from action, and action is seldom guided by inner transformation. Mainstream clinical psychological approaches focus far too much on our individuality, which can be paralysing." Words by Operations Manager Jadzia Tedeschi for the Climate Psychology Alliance digest. Find the full text here: https://lnkd.in/dAeHtyCV Dr Siobhan Currie, Dr Gareth Morgan, Josephine Lethbridge, Les Gunbie, Dr Louise Edgington, Laureline Simon, Megan Stillwell, Alan Heeks, Rupert Read, Mystaya Bremaud, Tony Li, Valentine Reltien, Heena Dave, Rachel Musson, Jack Cooper, Ava Langridge

The University of Exeter convened a panel to advise the university on how to use carbon offsets in its ambitious net zero target. Our conclusion is that all offsets should be ditched. We very much hope other universities will do likewise. This is going to effectively throw a huge spanner into the university's 2030 net zero target. But much better to do that than continue with the fantasy that carbon offsets will get us there. The climate crisis demands rapid & deep decarbonisation. Offsets can be counterproductive to such efforts. There are compelling reasons to protect forests from destruction, giving out efficient cookstoves & other ways that generate carbon credits. But these often have very little to do with climate impacts. Ditching offsets doesn't mean giving up on these important projects. We propose that money earmarked for offsets is used to further accelerate our decarbonisation, help implement nature positive schemes, work with suppliers & communities on their decarbonisation. The challenge we face is huge. Don't let carbon offsets fool you otherwise. https://lnkd.in/gDSGGzki

"In planning a strategy for the future, how does your organisation hope to face what is coming down the track? What uncomfortable realities need to be accepted? What do you need to factor in about the global fragility of supply chains, the strength (or otherwise) of local infrastructure and of global markets, and the likely impact of a +1.5 degree warmed world on your customers and stakeholders?" "No plan fully survives contact with reality. But it is possible to be pragmatic about what is possible and desirable, once we accept things as they currently are - and, that not everything we want may be possible to achieve." We believe that strategic planning needs to be done in a thrutopian spirit. #Thrutopia is based on an assessment of how things are at the present time, taking both internal and external variable into consideration. They are exercises in facing truth and accepting reality as the starting point. Thank you to John Gray, Helena Farstad and Rupert Read for this latest CMP blog. Continue reading here! https://lnkd.in/dpaAqF4j Mike Clark, MBA, Mike Barry, Valentine Reltien, Manda Scott, Nick Hajdu, Sam Bowen, Ayesha Mehrotra, Ian Sneath, Jamie Bristow, Jamie Beck Alexander, Wendy Robinson CPsychol, Stuart Pickles, Kimberley Hare, Chantal Burns, Climate Coaching Alliance

As we head rapidly into biophysical and cultural collapse, how do we adapt and transform to the changing realities? This week sees the launch of a new book: Transformative Adaptation: Another world is still just possible. The main editors and contributors are friend of the podcast, author, activist and co-founder of the Climate Majority Project, Rupert Read and – new to the podcast – Dr Morgan Phillips who is an educator, currently working for Global Action Plan, an environmental charity that mobilises people and organisations to take action on the systems that harm us and our planet. Full disclosure, I’m also a contributor – the book is published by Permanent Publications, the book-publishing arm of the Permaculture Magazine, and Maddy Harland, who edits the magazine and has published the book, brought together the five articles I wrote on Thrutopia: what it is, why we need it and how we get there, and fitted them into the mix. The book launch has been timed to coincide with the end of #COP29. At the time of recording, we have no idea how that will go, but if it’s like all the previous 28 COPs it will be a triumph of obstructionism and irrelevancy masquerading as action. We might be surprised. We hope we are. But even if the nations who truly understand the magnitude of the meta-crisis somehow manage a worldwide diplomatic miracle and succeed in making it clear that we need total systemic change – we still need guidelines that help us see how this can happen: ideas of what to do at local and national levels, examples of the kinds of deliberate democracies that we’ll need to bring everyone on board; templates of how the world can be if we actually bring all our creativity to bear on the single most important issue of our time. This is exactly what this podcast is for – the whole of it – and this particular episode lays out the detail, from the concept of a 6th Mission for the UK government (and any other national government that wants to take it up) to examples of how we might shift our educational focus, to why building flood defences is really not enough, never going to be enough and how we could shift our communities to stop reacting and start…adapting. None of this is easy. We do know this. But we can at least start the important conversations. This is what we’re doing here – and we hope you find it inspiring enough to buy the book and read it, give it to your friends, family and colleagues – do whatever it takes to help your local community to find creative, flourishing, inspiring ways to meet the chaos of our world. https://lnkd.in/eNCqKNDF #TransformativeAdaptation #TrAd #ClimateMajority #ClimateEmergency #ConsciousEvolution

#COP has dropped the ball, and almost everyone knows it. For three decades the world has been cheering on a circus that has never been fit for purpose, and that is a distraction: There will be no breakthrough agreement because delegates have never had the power to deliver one and never will, until the majority of #citizens in their home countries demand it. We've been saying this for years. This 29th edition of the global #climate circus saw the president of its host country clearly state oil and gas are ‘a gift from God’. On these premises, negotiations actually moved backwards. This conference is a distraction from what would constitute actual #mitigation and #adaptation on climate. This year, long-standing COP insiders have come to denounce this unfitness too in this letter to the UN (https://lnkd.in/epRK8MAU), stating that the conference's "current structure simply cannot deliver the change at exponential speed and scale, which is essential to ensure a safe climate landing for humanity. This is what compels our call for a fundamental overhaul of the COP. " "It might seem that there could be no more depressing state of affairs. But we believe the opposite: This is the most positive climate moment in years. Our institutions have already decisively failed us, and the sooner we realise it the better. As it sinks in that the crucial 1.5C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement will certainly be missed, an incredible opportunity for progress emerges. The COP insiders who feel responsible for maintaining an artificial sense of suspense can relax and tell the truth..." Here is a throwback to an article Liam Kavanagh and Rupert Read published on this topic, which if anything holds even truer: https://lnkd.in/ez-gZQqN Big thanks to Viktória Fehérvári for volunteering this graphic! Dr Siobhan Currie, Charlie J. Gardner, Phoebe Barnard, Kimberley Hare, Jack Cooper, Jessica Townsend, Jamie Bristow, Laurie Laybourn, Andrew Simms, James Broadley, James Beale, John Gray, Maria O'Connor Ph.D. Juliet C. Adam Lent, Rachel Musson