What resolutions have you made for 2024? You might have already committed to living a more climate-friendly lifestyle this year. Eating less meat, using public transport or other low-emission travel options, or installing solar panels on your house.
But when it comes to sustaining a safe and healthy climate, we need change at all levels. We have to create the movements that usher in a new normal and we can do this by changing how we engage, and growing our individual actions and choices into collective ones.
Here are four ways to do the work, bring others along with you, and push the needle on the climate action we need.
#1 Leverage your influence at work
Turn your job into your most powerful climate tool. If you are armed with the right information and toolkit, you can bring your passion for climate action into the workplace and create significant change. We know that corporations and businesses contribute massively to the climate crisis, and research shows that worker activism is the number one driver for employers to act on climate within their organisation. You don’t have to be part of the sustainability team to take action. Make 2024 the year you have your climate concerns heard and addressed in the workplace.
#2 Contribute your skills to the climate movement
Be strategic with your skillset, time and resources. Where can you direct these things that will make the most impact within the climate movement? Are you a designer, a writer or a finance whiz? You could consider joining a local climate group, and contributing your skills. Or, if you’re time poor, perhaps you can financially support grassroots or First Nations climate organisations? “We all have something to offer that can be applied with great impact in really shifting the needle on climate action,” says WorkforClimate’s Head of Experience Laure Legos.
#3 Act now, and bring others along
Make 2024 the year you act – show up at protests, sign petitions, write to your local member – and then ensure that action has a ripple effect. “Each individual action has the potential to be maximised in order to increase its effectiveness,” Laure says.
For example, if you attend a rally or sign a petition, get friends, family or even work colleagues on board too. The same goes for sharing climate content on your own social channels or in conversation around the dinner table – amplifying information and resources is a small but powerful action that helps centre the climate crisis and transform others into climate activists.
#4 Change your information sources
Tune into the right information sources, and out of the wrong ones. This means being armed with, and sharing, the most compelling and factual climate news and dedicating space solely to the issues and people that you think matter the most.
At Stockholm Impact Week last year Daniel Schmachtenberger delivered an inspiring talk on just this, encouraging us all to change the “information feed” coming at us every day: “Change who is around you, and change the information feed coming to you such that what is most true and meaningful is what you’re getting reminded of the most,” he says. “Start thinking about who you know that reminds you of these things that you can start spending more time around and send them messages. What things you can delete off your phone – what social apps you can just delete? What new ones can you add?”
While changing your information flow can feel very personal, it can kickstart a mindset change that makes it so much easier to spark collective change.
Want to leverage your employee influence to drive climate action at work? WorkforClimate will arm you with the information, tools and community to make change possible.
