Climate Week NYC  2021, The Earthshot Prize Announces 15 Finalists, Carbon Conversations TO, and Carbon Conversations UK

CLIMATE WEEK 2021-REVIEW

Guess what blew right past us last week? 

Climate Week NYC, took place September 20-26, 2021 with a focus on fulfilling and increasing commitments made by businesses, governments, and organizations. Climate Week NYCis where the world gathered to showcase leading climate action and discuss how to do more, fast. 

Hosted annually by international non-profit the Climate Group in conjunction with the United Nations, and in partnership with the COP26 and the City of New York, Climate Week NYC is a global opportunity to come together to accelerate climate action and assess progress ahead of COP26. 

Climate Group is an international non-profit founded in 2003 whose mission is to drive climate action, fast.

Speaking of Climate Group, its presentation is one of the two main takeaways for our listeners. In addition to hosting Climate Week NYC, it also sponsored The Nest Summit. What was the Nest Summit and why does it matter to us?

The Nest Summit brought 60+ speakers from leading organizations and the climate community together during Climate Week NYC 2021 for two full days of education, inspiration, and collaboration, and to spark climate action with the many innovative solutions and pathways to a sustainable planet.  Their shares are available at the link in the Deeper Dive section at the bottom of this show’s transcript. Just visit theclimate.org/episodes and click on the today’s show.

The second takeaway was the premiere of “Resilience Engineered: Preparing for an Uncertain Future.” It’s a three-part series, the trailer of which is available online at the link in our Deeper Dive section.

DEEPER DIVE: Climate Week NYC 2021, The Nest Summit, Resilience Engineered,

THE EARTHSHOT PRIZE ANNOUNCES 15 FINALISTS

Launched in 2020 by Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Sir David Attenborough, the Earthshot Prize focuses on harnessing optimism and urgency to find solutions to some of the world’s greatest environmental problems. The winners will be selected by the Earthshot Prize Council, a global team including the Duke and Attenborough, spanning six continents.

The goal of The Earthshot Prize organization is to find inspiring solutions from  five Earthshots annually. These “earthshots” – simple but ambitious projects, each with goals underpinned by scientifically agreed targets, which if achieved by 2030, would improve life for us all, for generations to come. No big deal, right?

 The goal is for The Earthshot Prize to discover and award 50 solutions by 2030. Each of the five winners will be awarded one million pounds (roughly $1.37M) Earlier this month, HRH Prince William announced that the field of 750 nominees from over 200 nominating parties had been narrowed down to the first-ever Earthshot final 15.

Those 15 Shortlisted nominees will also be given tailored support and opportunities to help scale their work, including being connected with an ecosystem of like minded individuals and organizations. The five winners are scheduled to be announced in a live stream on October 17th. We here at The Climate Daily will keep you in the loop. And throughout the next three weeks, we’ll spotlight those finalists here on The Climate Daily.

And we’ll also hip you to the members of The Earthshot Prize Expert Advisory Council because they’re inspiring climate change fighters in their own right.

DEEPER DIVE: Twitter, The Earth Shot Prize

CARBON CONVERSATIONS, TORONTO

Here’s a neat Toronto-based organization I discovered during research for the FFNPT—it’s called, “Carbon Conversations T-O.”

According to its website, Carbon Conversations Toronto (CCTO) is a volunteer-led group founded to help individuals find hope in the climate crisis. Climate change can leave individuals feeling hopeless and unmotivated. CCTO helps people find the ability to take climate action. In other words, the mission of Carbon Conversations T-O is to normalize climate action.

CCTO aims to help people feel more equipped and motivated to talk about climate change and take climate action. We follow a set of seven guiding principles to do just that: ​

1. A focus on responsibility instead of blame. 
2. Personal empowerment. 
3. Actions are stronger than words. 
4. Compassion and respect. 
5. Attention is needed for action. 
6. A focus on individual responsibility and action as a mechanism for collective climate action. 
7. A just and fair transition.

Learning how to master these seven principles takes about six weeks, and it’s based on the work of Rosemary Randal and Andy Brown. Rosemary, a psychotherapist and Andy, an engineer, created Carbon Conversations in the UK.

In the six week sessions,  participants join weekly facilitated discussions about how an area of their lives relates to climate change. Through these sessions, participants gain a better sense of their emotional relationship with the climate crisis. They also learn concrete, manageable steps to reduce their carbon footprint.

Why does what a pair of British commonwealth nations are doing to normalize climate action matter to us? Here are some reasons: In Toronto alone, 78 percent of residents are concerned about climate change, yet 48 percent don’t know what to do about it. Many of us are unwilling to act because of the anxiety climate change can cause.

Post-sessions, participants felt an average of 52% less overwhelmed by climate change. Plus, founder Brianna Aspinall, along with CCTO participants share their climate change stories, some of which may resonate with you.

DEEPER DIVE: CCTO, CCUK, Grief, with Ro Randall

CARBON CONVERSATIONS UK

We can’t talk about Carbon Conversations T-O without paying homage to the original. Carbon Conversations was started by Rosemary (“Ro”)  Randall, a psychotherapist, and Andy Brown, an engineer. Drawing on Rosemary’s therapeutic experience with groups and Andy’s technical expertise they created a unique psycho-social project that addresses the practicalities of carbon reduction while taking account of the complex emotions and social pressures that make this difficult.

Psycho-social studies examine the ways in which subjective experience is interwoven with social life. Psychological issues and subjective experiences cannot be abstracted from societal, cultural, and historical contexts; nor can they be deterministically reduced to the social. Similarly, social and cultural worlds are shaped by psychological processes and intersubjective relations. Like how climate change shapes the whole of our experience.

Ro and Andy think that Between 2006 and 2017, over two thousand people may have participated in facilitated Carbon Conversations groups in the UK.

Since its inception, the project produced detailed, professionally designed materials on carbon reduction, culminating in the publication of the book In Time for Tomorrow? in 2015. The project also developed considerable expertise and materials on the psychology of climate change and the use of small groups to help people overcome their fears and defensiveness in dealing with it.

Carbon Conversations have been used around the world, including Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland, France, Finland and Spain. 

DEEPER DIVE: Carbon Conversations UK, Psycho-Social Studies