Climate Majority Project 2023 Yearly Recap
And sneak peaks into 2024, including an upcoming campaign on adaptation.
Dear Climate Majority,
2023 was such an important, foundational year for the CMP. Firstly, we’d just like to say thank you for supporting us step by step, and for getting involved wherever you could.
As we head into 2024, we’d like to share a recap of milestones reached and projects delivered, and to recognize some of the contributions of our many collaborators.
This year’s achievements (and some sneak peeks of forthcoming projects) are listed here in chronological order. Read on for in-depth descriptions below.
Audience research: investing in intelligent engagement
Formalising our name and brand
The Incubator
Perfecting our Theory of Change
Gathering on Inner Work
Founding Statement
Official Launch
Crowdfunder target exceeded
Securing funding from the Open Society Foundation
CMP at Anthropy festival
Forthcoming Business Campaign
CMP collaborator People Get Real releases report
Our take on COP28
The Climate Majority Project Book release
New in the CMP incubator: SAFER – Strategic Adaptation for Emergency Resilience
Audience Research with CMP collaborator This is Agency
We’re collaborating with This Is Agency to better understand how to communicate the realities of the environmental breakdown in a way that generates engagement, support and ultimately action among the broadest possible UK demographic.
Formalising our name and brand
This year we said goodbye to ‘the Moderate Flank’ and officially became the Climate Majority Project, a name we landed on also thanks to our audience research.
The Incubator
Since 2021, Wildcard has challenged high-profile landowners in the UK to take responsibility for British nature by rewilding their land. We were their first funders in early 2022. Since then they have been successful in petitioning the Royal Estates – (the Church of England and colleges of Oxbridge are next!), inviting them to step fully into their role as traditional stewards of the land and national leaders - by rewilding and restoring this nation’s depleted habitats and carbon sinks.
This article reports some of 2023’s rewilding wins: “this summer the Duchy of Cornwall agreed to our petition to expand Dartmoor’s temperate rainforest. The crown estate announced its first ever beaver release. And now, the unthinkable: even the king’s beloved Balmoral, once a bastion of bloodsports, is set to get its first rewilding project.”
General Counsel Sustainability Leaders
GCSL (former Lawyers for Net Zero) engages general legal counsels of major multinationals — individuals with extraordinary unseen influence in society — to accelerate transition. They support in-house lawyers to use their uniquely powerful positions to deliver significant and rapid climate action.
Founder and CEO Adam Woodhall was awarded LexisNexis Legal Personality of the Year (2023) for his work with Lawyers for Net Zero. The initiative has worked with over 100 in-house lawyers through their Leaders Programme, including the global GCs from Rolls Royce, WPP, BUPA, Centrica, National Grid and Specsavers.
Community Climate Action (CCA)
Based at iFarm in the largely conservative county of Suffolk, Community Climate Action organises climate action at the local (parish council) level - including writing and implementing ambitious local net zero plans via a replicable process. Community Climate Action also creates a space for rural conservatives who care about stewarding their land.
In a year, this initiative has expanded their reach from 3 Parishes to over 100 (most of Suffolk county). Their greatest success has been to engage very different and more conservative communities than those normally engaged in local climate action.
Many of our MPs are unaware of the urgent need for action before irreversible climate tipping points are breached. There ARE policies to address the crisis, but they aren’t being implemented fast enough. MP Watch groups scrutinise our representatives so constituents can hold them accountable for their crucial responsibility on climate – paving a new way of engaging in politics as active citizens.
MP Watch has accelerated from 3 to 36 local initiatives in 6 months, and plans to surpass 100 by the next election. Many of these aim at potential swing seats in parliament.
Refining our Theory of Change
Following Lewin’s wisdom that “there is nothing more practical than a good theory,” early in 2023 we redrafted the CMP’s theory of change. This isn’t a theory of change in the sense normally used among NGOs, which lays out planned actions, their hypothesised effects and key performance indicators. Rather, it describes overall conditions that can support mainstream serious climate action to emerge, and the specific actions that the organisation is taking to help create those conditions in the UK and more widely. In 2024 we’ll be working on a more widely accessible version of this document.
Gathering on Inner Work
In early March, we brought 23 people together to engage with the importance of personal and collective psychological and spiritual (‘inner’) work; and the cultivation of resilience as a necessary, tangible effort to address the climate crisis. We discussed the challenges faced by those newly awakened to the environmental crisis, including the individual pressure to find "the solution", the risk of burnout, and the communication challenges in supporting demographics where therapy and support groups are less common.
These topics (among others) are key in supporting a culture of resilience within the emerging Climate Majority.
CMP Founding Statement
Making the Silent Majority aware of itself
Ahead of our official launch in June 2023, our founding statement was co-signed by many prominent personalities from across the political divide, achieving significant media coverage. The statement set out to give a voice to a ‘silent majority’ of people who care about climate but aren’t drawn to radical activism. Supported initially by a coalition of household names from across the political spectrum, from Swampy to Carice Van Houten and Lord Deben, it has continued gaining notable support. Recent signatories include: Caroline Lucas (former leader of the Green Party), Jon Alexander (author, ‘Citizens’) Ben Margolis (former CEO of The Climate Coalition), Sophie Dembinski (Head of Policy & Climate Action, Ecosia search engine), Jeremy Lent (Author of ‘The Patterning Instinct’) and Andri Snaer Magnason (Icelandic writer and documentary film director)
Official Launch
On June 29, at Essex Hall in London, the Climate Majority Project held its official launch. We had representatives from most of our incubatees on the panel, and James Dyke was our keynote speaker. Watch the highlights of the event here, ITV News’ feature on us, as well as further articles and media appearances.
Securing funding from the Open Society Foundation
In August, we were very pleased to have funding granted for a phase of work entitled Reimagining Our Civilisation in the Face of the Climate Crisis: Beyond the Progressive Bubble. This initiative will explore widespread disaffection with ‘business as usual’, and the diverse ways in which this is felt. We aim to integrate ideas from across the political spectrum to enable reimagination of an ecologically sound civilisation, and social environments that will allow more people to turn the truth of our predicament into motivation.
Crowdfunder target exceeded!
In September we launched a crowdfunder, aiming to raise £25,000 to resource the CMP incubator (read more about the initiatives these funds will support below.) Thank you so much for the contributions that helped us exceed our target. Your support is already allowing us to take onboard more incubator projects and fund other initiatives.
Anthropy
CMP was present at Anthropy this year and audiences showed a lot of interest in our work. Most importantly, we talked about the Business campaign that will become a central focus of our work in 2024. Anthropy was an important platform for this work: key campaign objectives include putting the importance of regulation and policy in decarbonising our economy on the agenda of similar business-focused conferences and, out in the public domain.
Business Campaign
The CMP Business Campaign’s goal — tentatively titled “Regulate Us”— is to speed the transformation of our economic and social systems towards sanity by widening and accelerating citizen climate action among business leaders. The business community must be part of limiting further ecological damage if we are to minimise the potential for eco-driven economic and societal collapse. Science-based regulation and policy is critically needed for the UK economy to align with the Paris agreement and this view is broadly shared by business leaders as per recent polling. Our forthcoming campaign seeks to galvanise business itself to actively drive and lead lobbying for such a regulatory and policy environment.
Climate Anxiety Campaign
Anxiety, denial, depression are sensible responses to learning the truth about climate – leaving millions of young people overwhelmed, and their teachers unfairly burdened. We’re building a coalition of climate scientists, mental health professionals, educators and youth activists to call for access to resources and support to properly address our climate anxiety crisis – starting in the classroom. Help kickstart a national conversation about climate anxiety by signing our open letter today, and join a growing coalition including Bill McKibben, Charlie Gardener, Renee Leertzmann, members of the Climate Psychology Alliance, British Psychological Association, leading Dark Matter physicists, climate science professors, student groups lobbying for better educational policies, and hundreds more.
Reflecting on COP28
As the latest instalment of the annual COP circus began, many of us rightly felt demoralised at the thought of more non-binding agreements, propping up business as usual. In their article for DeSmog, Liam Kavanagh and Rupert Read suggested that this hopeless COP contained a grain of hope: now it’s so obvious that the system is failing that progress may finally be possible.
Truth Telling by People Get Real, a CMP collaborator
CMP collaborator, People Get Real (PGR), published their debut report late last year which highlighted the urgent need for truth-telling. Based on an exclusively commissioned UK climate poll, the report concluded by that by refusing to call time on implausible climate targets such as staying within the 1.5C limit, trusted messengers – such as climate scientists and environmental charity leaders – are providing inadvertent permission for the public to continue minimising the reality of climate breakdown. PGR, like the CMP, believes there is much that can be done to address the lack of agency that people can feel in the face of climate breakdown, and through more realistic storytelling there are opportunities to locate a deeper sense of resolve. Download the report and poll responses here.
Looking to the New Year:
The Climate Majority Project Book
We’re thrilled to announce that the launch of our first book was released on January 3. Created as the early story of the CMP was itself unfolding, it explores the thinking behind this urgent project, and introduces our theory of change. If climate action remains marginal at this late hour, it will fail. The rapid, system-level change that we need to escape catastrophe will take unprecedented public mobilisation. A majority of citizens are now concerned about human-made climate change – and as ever more people wake up to the crisis and ask ‘What can I do?’ they need a climate movement that welcomes them unconditionally.
Edited by Rupert Read, Liam Kavanagh and Rosie Bell, with a foreword by Lord Deben (former chair of the UK’s Climate Change Committee) and contributions from Helena Farstad, Chamkaur Ghag, Anthea Lawson, Marc Lopatin, Joel Scott-Halkes, Jessica Townsend, Joolz Thompson, Ben McCallen, Bel Jacobs, Carolyn Dare, Anna Hyde and Ruth Allen, this anthology features guest chapters from collaborators and organisers of citizen climate action in the UK, sharing the wisdom of their experience from local adaptation and rewilding to citizenship, climate anxiety in the classroom, and beyond.
Don’t miss your chance to order your copy here!
Welcome to the CMP incubator: SAFER – Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience
Thanks to the resources gathered through our crowdfunder, we’re happy to welcome the latest initiative in the CMP incubator: Cadence Roundtable. In collaboration with Cadence we are organising SAFER, a campaign focused on adaptation. Stay tuned for further developments.
2024 will most certainly be a very busy and consequential year. As the environmental crisis worsens, the ‘safe limit’ of 1.5 more likely than not to be exceeded during this year, our collective work is becoming more and more critical. More than ever, we need to find our agency, deepen our resolve to prepare for and reduce the impact of climate change and breakdown in our natural world. Let’s endeavour together to make this as happy a New Year as possible.
Cheers,
The CMP Team