There is resilience to be found in community.
We have crossed seven out of nine planetary boundaries. Global heating is accelerating. Fossil fuel extraction is at a record high.
At the same time, we are witnessing a rise in reactionary politics and a backlash against climate policy, as well as new wars and genocide.
Read the report now.
Climate activists and land defenders are being murdered in the Global South and increasingly imprisoned in the Global North. The situation is bleak and the fronts are multiplying. What is to be done?
Distilled
To reflect on this and related questions, we organized a five-day Lorentz workshop on “Understanding and Accelerating Collective Climate Action".
The workshop brought together experienced organisers and high-level strategists from the climate movement as well as social movement scholars, historians, social, behavioural, political, and complex systems scientists to reflect on the current situation and discuss promising ways forward.
While several participants came from global majority countries, including South Africa, Mozambique and the Philippines, most participants came from Europe and some from the United States.
Taking place during a heatwave in Leiden, the Netherlands, and across Europe, participants first worked in groups to “take stock” of the current moment and the status of the wider climate movement.
From this joint assessment, topics that were deemed particularly important were distilled, which participants worked on throughout the week.
Elites
Towards the end of the week, we again came together and discussed the work of the groups in the context of how to move forward as a climate movement and in the different terrains of struggle that we inhabit.
We have now released the summary report of the workshop. The report does not, of course, present a 10-point plan to save the world.
That does not exist. Instead, it distills participants’ discussions and insights into a readable format that we hope will help climate action groups better reflect on strategic questions in a changing context.
We provide short snippets of a few main points below, and refer to the full report for more details.
One of the workshop’s shared diagnoses was that the climate movement must broaden its struggle beyond carbon. This means organising around people’s material realities while confronting the elites and corporations driving destruction.
Extractive
Connecting climate to everyday struggles, including housing and labour, is critical to building the mass movement we need.
Disruptive protest remains important, but needs to move beyond symbolic, public disruption towards targeting sites of real power and fracturing elite alliances.
Similarly, the climate movement needs to explicitly integrate anti-fascism into their strategies and build alliances with groups attacked by authoritarianism.
There is resilience to be found in community.
Unless it also becomes an anti-fascist movement, the climate movement risks being crushed by the very forces accelerating planetary breakdown.
Participants also stressed the need to pair resistance against fossil fuels and fascism with creation: building community-owned energy systems, cooperative housing, and solidarity economies that meet people’s needs while reducing dependence on extractive corporations.
Fragmented
Such initiatives, already widespread in the Global South, show how climate justice can be rooted in daily life rather than abstract targets.
Strengthening South–South collaboration, from renewable energy partnerships to debt cancellation and ecological reparations, was seen as essential to delinking from the Global North’s economic dominance and advancing a genuinely just transition led by those most affected.
Academics, for their part, were urged to abandon extractive research practices and instead work alongside activists to co-create research questions, study the enemy’s tactics, and strengthen collective strategic capacity.
Participants emphasised that the knowledge infrastructure of the fossil economy, from think tanks and media networks to universities, is vast and organised, while climate movements’ capacity for learning and coordination remains fragmented.
Solidarity
Building stronger interfaces between movements and engaged scholars was seen as an important step to shift this balance.
As a heatwave scorched Leiden, we found strength in each other’s company – in the laughter, the late-night discussions, and the shared sense of purpose that cut through the despair of our times.
There is resilience to be found in community: in coming together across disciplines, geographies, and movements to face what one cannot face alone.
Let us not go gently into that dark night. Instead, let us rage against the dying of the light – together, in solidarity, with courage and with care.
These Authors
Fabian Dablander is a postdoctoral researcher at SEVEN, the interdisciplinary climate institute of the University of Amsterdam. He helped set up the climate action group Scientist Rebellion in the Netherlands.
Oscar Berglund is Senior Lecturer at the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol and Co-President of the University College Union at University of Bristol.
Dipti Bhatnagar is an environmental scientist by training and has worked with environmental, climate, and social justice movements globally for almost 25 years, and is currently with Justiça Ambiental / Friends of the Earth Mozambique.
Julia Steinberger is Professor of Societal Challenges of Climate Change at the University of Lausanne and was a Lead Author for the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report with Working Group III.
