Should the climate movement organise around extreme weather events? New discussion paper

Debris lines the streets of Tacloban, Leyte island, following Typhoon Haiyan, November 14, 2013. Photo: Trocaire from Ireland. Licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic license, via Wikimedia Commons.

As Nicolo Wojewoda wrote in 2023, Europe's climate movement feels "fractured and stuck". The hopeful years of 2018/19 seem a distant memory. State repression has intensified. Authoritarianism is on the rise. The movement is currently neither large enough, diverse enough, nor loud enough to have significant impact. 

So what tools does the movement have that could create renewed momentum?

We've started a series of discussion papers exploring where it might focus its energy and resources. Each paper examines a different frontier for climate organising: taking on the insurance industry, calling for taxes on the super rich, making polluters pay, or building alliances with the AI safety movement. We're developing these papers in collaboration with thinkers and strategists from across the movement, and our goal is to spark debate and help organisers make choices about where to invest limited resources. 

Our first paper, co-authored with Maciej Muskat from Greenpeace International, examines an often neglected area: activism around extreme weather events.

Every day, floods, wildfires, and storms are creating a new generation of climate activists - people whose homes have been destroyed and for whom climate change is no longer abstract. These are real communities, from across the political spectrum, facing immediate crisis. And they're in the headlines with increasing regularity. 

We looked at three places where communities organised around extreme weather and won concrete victories. In Vermont, consecutive floods galvanised a bipartisan coalition that passed America's first Climate Superfund Act, requiring fossil fuel companies to pay for climate damages. In the Philippines, typhoon survivors spent a decade building legal and political infrastructure that's now delivering results, including a landmark lawsuit against Shell. In Spain, mass protests after the Valencia floods led to a National Climate Emergency Pact with real policy commitments.

 Volunteers cleaning up in Sedaví following the devastating DANA floods in Valencia, Spain. Photo: Pacopac 2 November 2024. Licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

These cases share common elements that hold lessons for organisers everywhere: act fast while public attention is high; centre affected communities rather than professional activists; use attribution science to connect disasters to specific corporate actors; build coalitions beyond the usual suspects; and make concrete, specific demands. 

We think there's real potential here for the climate movement to make headway, circumventing the paralysis and polarisation of the current context. Extreme weather events reach beyond the climate choir to everyone whose insurance rates just spiked or whose neighbourhood was just evacuated. 

Read the full paper here. 

We'd love to hear your thoughts - what tactics have you used? What have we missed? What other frontiers should we explore? Get in touch.