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Miriam Wilson, Fossil Free campaign coordinator, People & Planet, Oxford, UK, @FossilFree_UK
Build momentum for fossil fuel divestment: The top five fossil fuel companies in the US – Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron and ConocoPhillips – spend $440,000 a day lobbying US congressmen. They are strangling democracy; using their enormous wealth and power of influence to disseminate confusion about climate change, and prevent our leaders from taking action.
Jamie Henn, strategy and communications director, 350.org, New York, USA, @agent350
Use social media to mobilise people: We need to keep combining online engagement with offline action. The two amplify each other. With the People’s Climate March, we didn’t just get hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, we also had incredible traction online. Over 600 million people in 70 countries saw tweets about the march in the last week.
Find local ways people can act at scale: Each local victory is a win on its own and builds momentum for the broader campaign. Your work is amplified 1,000 times over. Our biggest problem isn’t convincing people to care about climate change, it’s convincing them they can do anything about it.
Take actions that reverberate on many levels: Don’t just install a solar panel; organise your entire block to install them, make a video for social media about the experience, crowdfund some additional money to support others to do the same, and then send a photo of you and your solar panel to David Cameron and tell him to get on with it already!
Wagaki Wischnewski, programme officer, UN Convention to Combat Desertification, Bonn, Germany, @unccd
Empower young people to be leaders: Youth are the drivers of change, both political and social. Young people in developing countries are imitating the lifestyles of young people in developed countries. Young people need to be the model green lifestyle for their generation, much like the baby boomers defined their generation by rights.
Masroora Haque, communications manager, International Centre for Climate Change and Development, Dhaka, Bangladesh, @masroora
Educate governments to increase understanding: We organise workshops with the government to increase their capacity, understanding and knowledge of climate change issues. This establishes a direct communication with them and ensures that climate change issues are taken into the planning process.
Share knowledge with the media: We have a collaboration with a daily newspaper. We send them articles written by our researchers and staff, and conduct training sessions with their journalists. In turn, they train our staff to look for angles that will resonate with the public and help us to improve our journalistic writing ability.
John Crump, senior advisor on climate change, GRID-Arendal, Ottawa, Canada
Realise that we are part of the problem: We need to see ourselves as part of the problem as well as part of the solution. Until we connect our way of living, our expectations, and the idea of limitless growth to climate change, and what see around us, we won’t be able to influence policy in a meaningful way.
Unify with people most at stake: The trick is to recognise that this is not an “us v them” issue. It’s important to amplify the voices of those most affected, because what they’re experiencing will be experienced by us all in one way or another. This is the idea behind Many Strong Voices which highlights the voices of people who live in the Arctic and small island developing states.
Yeb Sano, climate commissioner for the Philippines
for the Philippines, Manila, Philippines, @yebsano
Turn attention to the grassroots: We can start crowdfunding the real solutions, like renewables, typhoon-resilient homes, electric cars, and mass transport systems. We can even crowdfund people’s initiatives and community-based climate action. We have proven that the crowd can be powerful. It will change the global market once we start crowdfunding what matters to us. This battle will be won or lost at the grassroots. If world leaders do not address the climate crisis, the crowd will.
Provide evidence for action: Typhoon Haiyan was not an isolated case. It was the third Category 5 storm in a row that coincided with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting. I have immersed myself in the communities affected by these storms and they tell a common story – humans are paying for our neglect of nature. Climate activists should tell these stories of real people whose lives and livelihoods are affected.
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