Ashoka and the Skoll Centre launch the Climate Changemaker Playbook
More than ever before, people understand that climate change and biodiversity loss threaten the places, people, and things we love. And they care – deeply. But change isn’t happening at the speed and scale required, leading to feelings of powerlessness and despair. Wider systemic changes seem too slow, and our individual contributions feel too insignificant.
And yet, things are shifting, because our individual contributions do matter. So how can we rapidly increase the number of people closing the gap between caring and acting so those shifts accelerate?
The Climate Changemaker Playbook is based on research that studied the work of hundreds of Ashoka Fellows and leading social entrepreneurs from around the world. With applications for business, government, and civil society, the playbook sets out three actionable strategies for how to get more people to play an active role in the systemic shifts needed to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss.
“People care about climate change, although research shows they consistently underestimate how much other people around them care. We wanted to know what practical strategies were effective in activating people to build solutions. When everyone is a changemaker, then we start to see that energy being used where they work, where they live, and in how they show up as citizens.” - Pip Wheaton
The research shows that as a collective, people are most effective when they can contribute in ways that leverage their unique strengths, positions, and passions. The Climate Changemaker Playbook highlights three strategies climate changemakers are using to do this across a wide diversity of contexts:
Make it personal: connect the climate and ecological emergency to a person’s specific context, role, values, and identity – the things they care about and the actions in their sphere of influence. Doing so builds internal motivation, a key ingredient for agency.
Gather support: working with others can increase people’s capacity to drive climate action and overcome barriers. Bringing people, and their resources, together can help overcome the smallness of individual action in the face of a truly global problem.
Create enabling conditions: tackle the existing structures and systems that constrain individuals’ ability to contribute effectively. This is particularly important for ensuring a just transition in which the shift to a decarbonised society and economy doesn’t further entrench existing inequalities.
In this Insights for Action seminar, co-authors Marya Besharov and Pip Wheaton were joined by Sue Riddlestone OBE to launch the joint Skoll Centre and Ashoka Climate Changemaker Playbook.
