At the end of July, 38 experts from governments, international organisations, civil society groups, private sector and academia from all over the world came together to attend an interactive workshop about how to make the most of ‘bottom-up’ change actions.
There has been a recent surge in mitigation and adaptation actions at local and regional level - cities, regions, companies and other groups have been forging ahead, often linking to each other and to governments and international organisations through coalitions and joint initiatives.
These ‘bottom-up’ actions have enormous potential to supplement and help catalyse the next climate agreement, so it’s important to support, engage with and track them, perhaps with a global platform. But what would it look like? What goals could it achieve and how could it be designed?
‘Designing a global platform for climate actions’ was organised by the Blavatnik School of Government’s Dr Thomas Hale, the Global Economic Governance Programme and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) with the aim of answering these and other questions. The ultimate aim was giving policymakers ideas for how to move ahead in advance of the UN Climate Summit in September and the multilateral climate negotiations in the next few months.
The primary conclusion of the workshop was robust agreement on the need for some way to recognise and build on the phenomenal groundswell of climate action we see in every sector of society. Participants also shared a sense of urgency and committed to a number of concrete follow-up actions to continue working toward a platform to aggregate and catalyse climate actions.
The workshop was possible thanks to Craigmore Sustainables and the Sir Peter Elworthy Grant scheme, as well as the Ford Foundation, the Holloman Price Foundation, and the Global Economic Governance Programme at Oxford University.
A summary and two background memos from the workshop are available below.
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