CALL FOR A CLIMATE MOVEMENT RESET: FROM CLIMATE TO LIFE
What will make a broader majority of society begin to engage with the green transition and actively respond to the fossil fuel disaster? For a start, the Australian climate action movement needs to reassess how we invite people in. A shift in focus – perhaps even a total reset – is required. Away from talking about ‘climate’ as an abstract concept, and towards talking about something personal, shared, and worth protecting: life.
To mobilise society, we need more than warnings. We need a clear and convincing plan, and we need a language that resonates with how people actually live and care.
For more than three decades, climate communication has been dominated by a single storyline: rising emissions, frightening projections, and warnings of collapse. The science is firm. The numbers are real. But when the goal is mobilisation rather than alarm, our strategy must expand beyond charts, thresholds, and catastrophe.
We do not need to soften the truth. The heating is accelerating. The impacts are already here. Lives and livelihoods are being upended. That reality is not in dispute.
But there is another way to talk about this moment. One that does not dilute the science, yet draws far more people into action. It begins by shifting our focus from ‘climate’ to ‘life’.
LIFE is what we care about
Most people do not get out of bed because of atmospheric metrics or parts-per-million. They move when something touches their sense of purpose, dignity, and belonging. When it feels like a pathway to a better life, not a narrowing tunnel of sacrifice.
Ask people what they value most and the answer rarely begins with emissions trajectories. It begins with their children, their health, their community, their sense of safety, and their hope for a good future. When climate communication ignores this emotional reality, it loses the very people who need to be involved.
Life is a holistic story that resonates. The life we want to protect. The life we want our children to inherit. And the deeper question beneath it all: what a good life actually is.
When we speak about life, we are no longer asking people to care about an abstract system. We are inviting them to care about what already matters to them.
The green transition makes economic sense
There is a simple truth that deserves far more attention. The most effective climate actions are also the smartest economic actions.
They reduce household bills, improve health, strengthen local resilience, and keep money circulating in communities rather than flowing to multinational fossil corporations.
Cheaper, cleaner energy. Healthier, more comfortable homes. Lower living costs. Local jobs in every region. More reliable food and water systems. Communities that can withstand shocks.
This is what the green transition looks like in everyday life. Not ideology. Not sacrifice. Not doom. Practical improvements that make life better while cutting emissions at scale.
When climate action is framed as an upgrade to daily life rather than a moral burden, people respond very differently.
Fear wakes us up – meaning keeps us moving
Warnings have their place. They can jolt us out of complacency. But fear is a weak long-term motivator. The human nervous system cannot live in sustained alarm.
When all people hear is that collapse is inevitable, many retreat into whatever offers stability and comfort. Routine. Work. Consumption. Denial. Not because they do not care, but because it all feels overwhelming. It feels safer to shut off, to stop watching the news.
Meaning works differently. Meaning taps into agency. Meaning invites participation and connection. Meaning transforms despair into contribution.
If we want people to stay engaged, we must communicate both the peril and a credible pathway towards a society that is more humane, more connected, more local, more resilient, and more alive on the other side of the transition.
A better story of who we will become
The climate emergency is a crisis of destabilisation, but it is also an opening. It forces us to reconsider how we live, how we treat one another, what we value, and how we define progress.
When we widen the lens beyond atmospheric indicators and ask what kind of civilisation creates flourishing life, the answers become more engaging and more human.
This is a moment to build communities where resilience is normal, where kindness is not exceptional, where local food and energy strengthen relationships, and where people feel capable of shaping their future rather than fearing it.
Societies mobilise not only when they are warned of danger, but when they are invited into purpose.
The message we need now
We can speak clearly about escalating risks while grounding the conversation in what we gain by changing course: health, stability, connection, pride, belonging, and a renewed sense of what a good life feels like.
Science tells us what happens if we fail. Meaning determines whether we succeed.
The task before us is not simply to warn. It is to kindle agency, courage, and connection. Life is the story that can carry us into the green transition. Meaning is what will keep us moving.
Call for a national climate emergency reset
In 2020, more than 3,000 delegates gathered in Melbourne for Australia’s first National Climate Emergency Summit. There were mayors and politicians, climate scientists, cultural nobilities and climate activists, and they all expressed their concerns and worries. The summit offered a stark assessment of escalating risk and warned that Australia was dangerously unprepared.
Five years on, many of those risks are no longer projections. They are materialising faster and more severely than forecast, with increasingly unacceptable consequences for communities, infrastructure, and national and regional security. Recent days have once again underlined this reality, as climate-driven impacts impose growing costs on Australian lives and livelihoods.
Yet despite this acceleration, Australia’s response continues to fall short of what the moment demands. The manifesto which was announced at the summit went… nowhere. There is still no clear, comprehensive, or credible national picture of the scale of the threat, nor of what is required to manage it.
Global warming is tracking towards 3°C degrees. Emissions trajectories show little decline towards mid-century. Policy responses remain anchored in assumptions that underestimate risk – incremental adjustments and distant targets risk normalising a level of danger that is neither stable nor manageable.
Against this backdrop, the group behind the 2020 summit is now working towards what it describes as a national climate emergency reset. The intent is not another summit for its own sake, but a decisive reset point that confronts the emergency with greater honesty, coherence, and urgency.
The aim is to bring together the best available evidence, grapple openly with high-end risks, and support action at a scale that matches the emergency.
Limits of the current approach
The call for a national climate emergency reset is timely and necessary. But if it is to be effective, it must go deeper than another scientific assessment or policy framework.
For years, climate action has focused on demanding better policy and legislation from our lawmakers in the parliaments, in the hope to kickstart climate action in a top-down sequence:
Policy and legislation.
Implementation.
Public engagement.
Climate safety.
This logic assumes that once the right policies are designed, the rest will follow. Experience tells us otherwise. Even strong policies struggle to gain traction when public understanding, trust, and shared purpose are missing. They stall, are diluted, or quietly abandoned.
At this point, continuing to focus primarily on policy detail risks treating symptoms rather than causes. The uncomfortable truth is this: We do not have a policy deficit. We have a collective readiness deficit.
Reversing the sequence
If we are serious about climate safety, the sequence of change must be reversed:
People engagement.
A shared shift in mindset and values.
Policy and legislation.
Climate safety.
This may look like a harder task that would only delay the urgent action. But in the reality of how politics works, it is the only way to enable it. Without broad public engagement and a shared sense of purpose, stronger climate policies will lack legitimacy, durability, and momentum. They become vulnerable to backlash, misinformation, and recurring political ‘climate wars’. They will not be implemented at the scale or speed required. We have seen enough of this already, ever since Tony Abbott won a federal election in 2013 with the slogan ‘Scrap the carbon tax’.
A genuine reset therefore starts with people. With how we understand the situation we are in, what we value, and what we believe is possible – as a nation.
The word ‘climate’ has become divisive
One reason engagement has stalled is the way the issue itself is framed. Climate has become a technical term, reduced to targets, curves, and models. Essential tools, but rarely connected to lived experience.
In parts of Australia, climate and renewables have been framed as symbols of conflict rather than shared benefit, particularly in regional and rural communities.
What is ultimately at stake is not climate in isolation, but life. The conditions that make life possible and meaningful. Life in communities. Life in ecosystems. Life across generations.
A reset requires us to speak more openly about this deeper purpose. About how societies organise themselves to protect life on Earth, and how we move from systems built on extraction and short-term gain to systems grounded in care, continuity, and responsibility.
From efficiency to resilience
For decades, our institutions have been shaped by an efficiency mindset. Optimise. Centralise. Extract maximum output. That logic is now showing its limits.
In an age of climate disruption, resilience matters more than efficiency. Redundancy matters more than speed. Care matters more than optimisation. Responsibility matters more than delegation.
As a movement, climate activists must show a new level of maturity. A climate emergency reset should be understood as a collective step into adulthood, where we recognise limits, accept responsibility, and act accordingly.
What the reset could offer
A meaningful national reset must reframe existing policy work.
Name risk honestly without normalising danger.
Connect scientific evidence with human meaning and values.
Treat citizens as co-stewards rather than passive recipients.
Support institutions to act with clarity, courage, and legitimacy.
Create the cultural conditions in which decisive action can endure.
This would help shift the story we tell ourselves – from one of incremental adjustment to one of shared responsibility for life on Earth.
If we want to design and implement safer and more effective policies, this is the work now before us. We must first cultivate understanding, readiness, and a shared sense of responsibility across the population. In other words: A climate emergency reset begins with people, not policy.
Let’s make the world wildly better
RECOMMENDED PODCAST EPISODE:
BOOK REVIEW
→ The Guardian – 23 April 2025:
Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman review – why you should quit your job to make the world a better place
“A bracingly hopeful call for high-flyers to ditch corporate drudgery in favour of something far more ambitious.”
→ Rutger Bregman: ‘Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference’, published by Bloomsbury in April 2025
Roger Hallam: “People power remakes the world”
“Young people today are not paralysed by this question of ‘What’s realistic?‘ – they’re asking: ‘What is necessary?’ ”
~ Clover Hogan