By Pip Wheaton, Marya Besharov, and Jessica Jacobson 

For so many of the SDGs we have an abundance of proven solutions. This is particularly true when it comes to climate change, clean energy, and the related goals around our impact on the natural world. But getting those solutions to scale is held back by how entangled the underlying challenges are in the systems that shape our daily lives.

Our economic systems, our political systems, and our social systems hold the status quo in place. Systems change feels like an inaccessible goal – the challenge feels too big, and each of us individually can feel too small. Yet individuals underestimate their ability to influence the systems they are part of.

So what does it take for people to recognize their power?

The good news is that people do want to help limit the effects of climate change. Yet, even when they want to take action, they face multiple barriers. The complexity can be daunting, it’s difficult to know what to do, and seeing the impacts of our warming world can trigger paralyzing anxiety.

There is important work to be done in helping people figure out where and how they can contribute, to support them once they start, and to help them be as effective as possible. Call this the work of guides, transition coaches, climate champions – essentially it’s you and me and uncountable others who are already active in this space, activating people in our spheres of influence to become climate changemakers in their own right.

Activating climate changemakers

At Ashoka and the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, we have studied strategies used around the world to identify how people can be activated as climate changemakers in a wide range of contexts.

These changemakers are empowering small-scale fishing communities to champion conservation, supporting leaders in multinational corporations to transform procurement practices, bringing together residents of local UK neighborhoods to retrofit their streets, facilitating diverse, equitable, long-term decision making to transform industry in Malaysian Borneo, and much more.

Key lessons learnt

The Climate Changemaker Playbook is a set of strategies for mobilizing people towards systemic change. Focusing on climate change and the related SDGs – SDG 7 (affordable and clean energy), SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities), SDG 12 (responsible consumption and production), SDG 14 (life below water), and SDG 15 (life on land), we’ve learnt that we can be most effective collectively when people find places to contribute where they can leverage their unique strengths, positions, and passions. This means understanding people’s drivers and motivations, and how to harness them. The three strategies we saw emerge in all our interviews were:

• Make it personal: connect the climate and ecological emergency to a person’s specific context, role, values, and identity – the things they care about and the actions they can take in their sphere of influence. Doing so builds internal motivation, a key ingredient for agency.
• Gather support: working with others can increase people’s capacity to drive climate action and overcome barriers to action. Bringing people, and their resources, together can help overcome the perception of the smallness of individual action in the face of a truly global problem.
• Create enabling conditions: Tackle the existing structures and systems that constrain individuals’ ability to contribute effectively. This is particularly important for ensuring a just transition in which the shift to a decarbonized society and economy doesn’t further entrench existing inequalities.

Canopy: A case study of these strategies in action

Canopy is a global organization, protecting the world’s old growth and high biodiversity forests by transforming supply chains. They work with companies in packaging, fashion, and publishing, from first movers to those who are resistant change, and everything in between. Canopy is one of five case studies in The Climate Changemaker Playbook because their work exemplifies the three strategies we saw across our research.

The Canopy team works as a trusted partner to individual changemakers within companies, supporting business leaders in myriad ways: from providing input into corporate policies to identifying alternative material sources; from building internal capacity and understanding to helping them make the case to boards and de-risking organizational action.

The impact is systems change at the level of the supply chain, created by thousands of individuals across hundreds of companies. What that means practically for the SDGs is that with the help of supporters and conservation allies, Canopy has played pivotal roles in securing large-scale conservation gains in 39 million acres of ancient and endangered forests in Indonesia, Canada’s boreal forest, and North America’s temperate rainforests.

A look to the future: Collective action

If we are to move the dial on the SDGs, every type of organization needs to play a role: non-governmental organizations (NGOs), business, government, think tanks, investors, and more – existing organizations and new alike. We need to move away from the false dichotomy between individual action versus systems change, to understanding the places individuals contribute to systemic change.

Enabling people to use the full range of their influence can accelerate the collective global response to the climate crisis. It’s up to us all now to rapidly increase the number of people closing the gap between caring and acting so that those shifts accelerate for the common good.

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The Climate Changemaker Playbook is a collaboration between Ashoka and the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. You can download it here.

Pip Wheaton is Planet & Climate co-lead, Ashoka.

Marya Besharov is Academic Director, The Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, and Professor of Organizations and Impact, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

Jessica Jacobson is Senior Manager for Research and Insights, Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship.