Constructive engagement is the right response to a time of deepening calamity and constant crisis.
In 2024, we made a decision to rename and reorient CCI as Climate Civics International. Our aim, as we pursue a broader range of climate-related issues and modes of empowerment, is to highlight the importance of civics as one of the solutions to the worsening global climate challenge.
We believe everyone’s chances of success, including governments and industry, are enhanced when the design of our world is shaped by the needs and aspirations of all people. To honor this reality, we are orienting our citizen empowerment and high-level policy work toward four core program goals:
- Goal 1: Build and empower networks of climate civics advocates
- Goal 2: Enhance climate diplomacy and international cooperation
- Goal 3: Advance sustainable, just and inclusive, food systems
- Goal 4: Accelerate decarbonization and resilience-building
Advocacy Networks
In 2024, our team supported volunteer policy advocates in 76 countries across 6 continents. They helped to train and activate new groups of volunteers in places like Rio de Jaineiro, Brazil; Cairo, Egypt; Monrovia, Liberia; Budapest, Hungary; Adamawa State, Nigeria; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Kathmandu, Nepal; and others.
In 2025, our work to empower networks of climate civics advocates will continue, with new information, strategic initiatives, and organizing opportunities. 2024 saw important new examples of citizen organizing and direct advice to policy-makers. This year, we will build on that success by helping volunteers replicate state-level successes seen in Nigeria and elsewhere, and learn from the efforts of volunteers in Europe who advise a high-level commission of the European Union.
Climate Diplomacy
Our work on enhancing climate diplomacy saw many breakthroughs in 2024, including the launch of the Climate Value Exchange—a partnerships platform aimed at supporting implementation of Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement.
- Article 6.8 invites bilateral and multilateral cooperation across a wide range of issues and challenges related to climate change and which can foster sustainable development and peaceful shared prosperity.
- We held the first Interparliamentary Exchange, in Washington, DC, in June.
- In 2025, we will organize a larger Climate Value Exchange Conference, to bring together leaders, stakeholders, institutions, and experts, to think through and explore new modes of multidimensional climate cooperation.
The Earth Diplomacy Leadership Initiative will also enter a new phase, with expanded opportunities for year-round engagement and tailored trainings. The People’s Pavilion digital platform—which in November facilitated global remote engagement with the annual climate negotiations, with support from VoLo Foundation—will play a key role in this work.
Food Systems
In 2024, we expanded our work on food systems transformation by joining the Good Food Finance Network and becoming a coordinating core partner organization. We finalized and published the Good Food Finance Blueprint on Data Systems Integration, in May, and will continue to carry that work forward, with the aim of making climate value in food systems an observable reality for stakeholders, food producers, policy-makers, and investors.
In 2025, CCI will support implementation of a six-country Green Climate Fund Readiness grant, administered by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. This work is linked to the effort to create a new global co-investment platform for food systems transformation. Such a platform could unlock important new investment in the expanded (and climate-safe) development of rural and front-line communities.
Decarbonization & Resilience
Our goal of accelerating decarbonization and resilience covers a diverse range of policies and sustainable development objectives.
- We will continue the work we have long done to build political will for solid, predictable, fair, and effective pollution pricing that delivers climate income to households.
- This, along with advancing awareness of Article 6.8, will be part of our work with the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition in 2025.
- We will also continue and expand our efforts to support a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is such an important missing piece of the international legal landscape.
- We will also build on the 2024 Reinventing Prosperity Report, Beyond the Horizon: Priorities for a Livable Future, which drew on more than a year of detailed stakeholder inputs from around the world.
A note for the new year
As we start the year 2025, one quarter of the way through this decisive century, global heating pollution is still expanding, global heating is rapidly getting worse, and the impacts of climate change are causing more harm and cost in every region of the world.
- The number of people facing chronic and acute food insecurity is at record levels, globally—meaning every day at this moment constitutes a humanitarian emergency.
- Food production in already food-stressed regions is being cut back by climate change, with devastating effects to farming communities and the stability of nations.
- Developing countries subject to extreme climate vulnerability and massive costs for disaster management and rebuilding are made more vulnerable by crushing debt burdens.
- Los Angeles, California, and the surrounding region, are suffering catastrophic, out-of-control wildfires, made worse by conditions making dangerous fires more likely to spread.
Beyond the geophysical and human impacts of climate change, disinformation is also spreading, as political and economic frustrations elevate populist politicians more focused on hardline messaging than solving multigenerational challenges. This atmosphere of calamity only underscores the foundational importance of responsible climate civics.
In this new year of worrying trends and spreading threats to human security and wellbeing, we invite our friends and allies to put aside despair and disinformation, in favor of responsible civics to shape our world. We can overcome backward forces by working together to help communities and leaders solve problems and map the path to a livable future.