On the Road to Paris, we need everyone on board

In 2009, the Copenhagen climate conference was billed as “the last chance to ‘save the world’”. Six years on, politicians, campaigners and diplomats are gearing up once again for another go – this time in Paris, at the end of the year.

In a new essay, COIN’s Research Director Dr Adam Corner argues that Paris 2015 needs to be part of a much wider narrative joining the dots between climate change and people’s lives.

The essay is a contribution to “Bringing it home – making a global deal on climate change a reality”, published by the Fabian Society. The new pamphlet explores what the Paris negotiations mean and could achieve in the context of a changed political climate. Overall, it argues, Paris cannot be seen as a single event – but a critical staging point on a longer journey.

COIN’s contribution argues that climate change has been trapped in a box marked ‘environmentalism’. Moving it out means talking to more than the usual suspects and mobilising cultural imagination in new ways – like COIN’s ‘seven dimensions of climate change’ collaboration with the Royal Society of Arts. It means engaging with the centre right. And it means telling a consistent, coherent, story about climate impacts.

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By Robin Webster

Robin led the Advocacy Communications programme for Climate Outreach until April 2023, focusing on providing civil society campaigners with knowledge, tools and research to help them engage all sorts of people on climate change. She loves working with campaigners for their resilience and positivity even when facing up to the world’s biggest challenge. She has been knocking around the environmental world for twenty years as a researcher, journalist and campaigner, first becoming interested in the disconnect between political debate about climate change and how we talk about it in real life whilst working as campaigner for Friends of the Earth. She helped to start up Carbon Brief when it began life as a climate science and energy blog and has spent more time than is healthy digging into the intricacies of climate policy, including as a researcher for the European Climate Foundation.

Robin has a Masters in Conservation from UCL and an undergraduate degree in Biology. She is the author of Climate Outreach’s #TalkingClimate handbook amongst many others, and has lived in the UK, USA, Uganda and Austria. In her spare time Robin hikes, swims, cycles and teaches and plays at comedy improv, which she thinks is the best art form in the world.

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On the Road to Paris, we need everyone on board

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