2025 in Review
10,000+ mobilise for adaptation, questioning assumptions of the climate movement, and deepening bonds of collaboration: CMP’s 2025 in brief.
With 2026 freshly begun, we are reflecting on a whirlwind year of collaboration, research and courageous climate conversations. Two landmark CMP campaigns were born, 10,000+ supporters mobilised to press Government on climate adaptation, and subtle signs emerged that wider climate discourse is opening towards hard realities. This was also the year the CMP became part of the Climate Coalition: connecting with over 130 other organisations with around 20 million members.
Lionel Constable, Landscape at Hampstead, with Harrow in the Distance, c.1849-1855
Campaign Updates
SAFER
Strategic Adaptation for Emergency Resilience
Climate breakdown is no longer tomorrow’s problem. It’s happening here, today: bound up with a growing wave of crises transforming life as we know it. As global shocks reach our doorsteps, we need a serious national plan for local resilience: strengthening communities, protecting what matters, and building the collective courage needed for deep global action on emissions. 2025 saw the official launch of SAFER: our campaign for locally-led adaptation. By late December, over 10,000 voices had joined the call to Government for a national plan.
In early April we welcomed Campaign Managers Ed Jarvis and Nick Drew, who this year have led a formidable working group of experts and volunteers, committed to placing adaptation at the heart of the climate conversation. Jennie Savage and Anya Bomber joined the team to support admin and comms.
Former Green MP Caroline Lucas hosted the impactful launch event for our flagship report, offering advocates the logic and language to challenge existing mindsets, reframing ecologically sound adaptation as a foundational form of climate action. Next, our largest ever CMP Thinks event introduced a second report in collaboration with the Glacier Trust. We need to talk about adaptation highlights the growing depth of the adaptation conversation within the UK environmental movement - and the urgent need for more honest media coverage.
A dedicated team developed and piloted the SAFER experience: a powerful, facilitated community gathering, tailored to specific localities. It’s a space where groups can workshop emerging threats together, find courage and meaning in uncertainty, and move from overwhelm to agency and action.
By the end of the year, we saw encouraging signs that the case for adaptation is gaining wider traction. A Guardian editorial echoed SAFER’s core messages with striking clarity:
“A recent report from the UK’s Glacier Trust and Climate Majority Project argued that charities and politicians should seek to…promote an “action-oriented public understanding of climate risk”. All must recognise that adaptation cannot simply be left to market forces because the economics of climate risk make private finance retreat just as danger rises…”
Meanwhile, our petition, demanding that the UK Government fund a National Climate Resilience Plan attracted almost 11,000 signatures! The petition is now closed, and we expect a response from Parliament by the end of January.
Adaptation is the vital work of looking ahead, getting ready, and taking care of each other as our world changes - and it hasn’t received anywhere near enough public attention. There’s so much more to do, and we need your help. If you’d like to volunteer, please get in touch.
Want to contribute? Donations are welcome here.
Thank you also to Guy Ducker, an award-winning filmmaker, for imagining and volunteering to put this short together^^
Climate Courage Schools
A movement for honest, emotionally attuned and empowering climate education.
2025 was a year of exciting growth for Climate Courage Schools, with new Campaign Manager Josephine Lethbridge and Community Coordinator Les Gunbie, kicking off a new phase of clarity and momentum. We significantly expanded stakeholder engagement and partnerships, with over 17 endorsements now including Imperial College London’s Climate Cares Centre, the Ministry of Eco Education, the Climate Psychology Alliance and the PSHE Association. Together we’ll support teachers to help students meet climate reality - and work with difficult feelings to find connection, resilience and meaningful action.
Following six months of consultation with teachers, climate-education initiatives, mental-health experts, academics and unions, we welcomed 200 guests to the formal launch of the campaign and mini-report. Attendees expressed overwhelming support for our practical, hopeful approach to climate education, centering honesty and emotional literacy.
Read our mini report ^^
Conversations with teachers and Unions have sharpened our campaign focus this year: reminding us that while leadership, practical adaptation projects and curriculum reform remain crucial, nothing changes without proper support for teachers. Right now, these front-line workers are being asked to teach climate change without the tools or time to do it well. They need far better training, guidance and dedicated time to communicate this difficult reality in a way that is honest, empowering and emotionally attuned. In the coming year, policy strategy and parliamentary engagement will focus on teacher training and support as the gateway for wider system change.
We partnered with award-winning production company Spindle to produce a flagship campaign film – a powerful, cinematic portrayal of the emotional pressures facing teachers. In parallel, our new series of case studies profiles the pioneering teachers and schools already integrating emotionally informed climate education, nature connection, community adaptation projects and whole-school culture change.
What’s next?
This year, volunteers have played a pivotal role in getting the campaign to launch - and in 2026, a new set of structured volunteer roles will enable supporters to directly shape core campaign elements. If you’d like to volunteer, please fill out this form.
With the launch of our film, crowdfunder and case-study platform, and renewed strategy focused on teacher training and systemic support, we want 2026 to spark a national conversation about the emotional reality of climate education – and what it will take to prepare every young person to adapt and thrive in a rapidly destabilising world.
To follow the campaign’s evolution and be first to access our case studies and film in January, sign up for our regular newsletter.
Regulate Us. Better
Uniting business voices, to demand Government action on the crossing of Planetary Boundaries.
Business leaders call for regulation
Our new research shows that the time has come for business to find its voice and lead on climate policy. Last year, CMP and Regulate Us. Better commissioned Obsurvant and YouGov to survey over 500 business leaders and 100 members of the UK Parliament on their attitudes toward climate mitigation, adaptation and regulation. Our report presents their views with detailed analysis, advocates in business and parliament insights and evidence to support their urgent case for better policy and regulation.
Insurance working group
As a crucial leverage point to mobilise the business majority, we’re investing in engagement with the insurance sector - working with a growing, confidential group of insurers, actuaries and other industry insiders. With these specialists, we’ve developed a range of scenarios to illuminate the effects of a post-1.5°C world on the insurance sector, its leaders, their customers and investors, and the communities they serve. As part of our collaboration with Chatham House, we co-organised an event on The Future of Insurance.
Produced in collaboration with Joseph Harrington, this new video short, An Uninsurable Future? tackles the issue of insurance retreat head-on for the first time.
Inner Climate Response Alliance
We’re thrilled to announce that thanks to players of the National Lottery, the Inner Climate Response Alliance (ICRA) has been awarded almost £1.5m by the Climate Action Fund, to support communities with the emotional impact of the climate crisis over the next five years.
Established by CMP in partnership with the Mindfulness Initiative (MI) and Climate Psychology Alliance, ICRA is a groundbreaking UK community of practice for people holding the inner dimension of our planetary crisis; connecting inner transformation with collective action. We aim to create a powerful public conversation about courageous and compassionate living in a time of ecological breakdown:
Increasing the profile and visibility of this vital work
Supporting and connecting communities who face similar challenges around climate breakdown
Facilitating learnings and exchange of best practices between local innovators
Helping the field of inner response become more fundable and financially sustainable
We look forward to welcoming a newly recruited team in 2026.
Gatherings
Climate Majority Forum
The first Climate Majority Forum took place in March. The historic Limehouse Town Hall framed a weekend of focused conversation and collaboration, plus some amazing food and music (see Dizraeli’s bespoke live rap below!) Engaged citizens from across the UK gathered to begin shaping a growing community, committed to practical, grounded climate response. Since the forum, several new working groups have formed, and volunteer efforts are energising many areas of work.
Residency with Iain McGilchrist
Guests joined Iain McGilchrist and members of the CMP core team at a special gathering in Llanngmarch Wells (mid-Wales) in May, organised under the auspices of the Raft. The group explored how Iain’s insights might inform the cultural shift our times demand. You can find more in-depth reflections on this time in this post - but among the themes we continue to reflect on are openness to mystery; the value of chaos to living systems; and the cultural waves that can ripple from a small, dedicated core.
Imagining Thrutopias
Amid the unravelling of global systems, it’s hard to predict the shape of things to come. How bad and good could things really get, at different timescales? What scenarios can and should we prepare for? During this Raft gathering, we gathered at Bidston Observatory to explore the concept of ‘thrutopia’ with Ruth Ben Tovim and Lucy Neal from Town Anywhere, and special visits from Phoebe Tickell and the Moral Imaginations crew. Together we contemplated the narrow space within which a desirable future can blossom from the harsh realities of climate breakdown.
What did we learn from falling off this thrutopian tightrope and getting back on again? Find a summary of insights here.
In the incubator
The Raft
In Spring 2025, we incubated the Raft – a vessel to stay sane in stormy times, where people can gather, connect, transform, and ask the most pressing questions at the root of our planetary crisis. Gatherings have already happened in collaboration with Iain McGilchrist, Town Anywhere and the Scientific and Medical Network - as well as a panel on political generation for the recent ‘Second Renaissance’ online conference. Other inquiries and encounters are brewing for the new year. Stay up to date here.
Our youth gathering in brief^^
In the news
In 2025, the CMP has been featured in and written tens of articles, including in The Guardian, The New Statesman, Aeon, Edie, BBC, Prospect Magazine, The Morning Star, DeSmog, Resilience, Brave New Europe, and more.
Image from the recent DeSmog article Lessons for Climate Advocates From the Bill Gates ‘Climate Hack’ (Credit: Jadzia Tedeschi/Liam Kavanagh)
2025 Reports
Research supported by the Open Society Foundation is a central pillar of our work in 2024-2026. Our small research team is undertaking a deep critique of faulty assumptions that block climate engagement and participation among the majority. In turn, these inquiries have informed our campaign strategies and helped us to identify strategic leverage points for mainstream climate action.
The most comprehensive summary of our theory and practice^^
To date we’ve published Strategic Adaptation for Emergency Resilience, We Need to Talk About Adaptation, Climate Courage Schools, Action for the Majority, Future of Insurance in a Post-1.5°C World, and Beyond the Climate Policy Gap. In 2026, we’ll complete our cycle of reports sponsored by the Open Society Foundation.
Looking ahead for 2026
Reports
This year, we will complete Mobilising Silent Majorities; Plan B (beyond the growth/degrowth debate, with Theo Cox); a response to Stubborn Optimism; a report making the case for the vital role of inner work in the climate movement (foreword by Steffi Bednarek), Truth (which will be launched in collaboration with Mike Berners-Lee), Climate Popularism (co-authored with our own Caroline Lucas), and a Thrutopian Report.
Look out for more details on the Mobilising Silent Majorities launch soon.
This report focusses on the unmobilised, mostly silent, majority of people who are already concerned about climate and societal breakdown and who are likely to eventually give rise to a movement that drives deep societal change. And of course, the sooner, the better.
The feeling is widespread and growing that we live in rising climate chaos, within an excessively consumerist society that needs deep change and to bridge increasingly polarised factions. Even business leaders agree that deep change is needed. Majorities in most countries polled see collapse as a real possibility, and few think our institutions have the answers.
This political vacuum is seldom taken as a sign of hope, but could be, because people yearn for something different.
Rebrand
We’re in the process of rebranding and building a new website, informed by our research on silent majorities. Stay tuned for release later this month!
Climate and the bigger mess we’re in
While a lot of our research and efforts have focussed on climate engagement so far, we have never approached it as an issue that is separate from geopolitical, cultural, economic, educational and other more or less existential challenges that we face in these times. This new year, we will be looking at how the silent climate majority can help us understand and grapple with the wider mess we’re in.
Thanks to all those whose passion and commitment helped make 2025 an amazing year for the Climate Majority Project. Here’s to breaking new ground together in 2026!