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With the climate crisis hitting Britain, we must build resilience at a local level by rewilding, saving water and fighting floods
Imagine, for a moment, if 2025 was the year that the UK achieved its legally binding targets of reducing dangerous carbon emissions to zero. Imagine if the Extinction Rebellions of 2019 had achieved their goal, and the government had bowed to the pressure of climate activism to meet this target. In this counterfactual reality, the world would be much saner than our own. But as the new year arrives, we’re forced to confront a stark reality. Britain is nowhere near achieving zero carbon in the next 12 months.
When Extinction Rebellion (XR) was founded in 2018, the 2025 target was conceived as a clarion call to action. It was based on the need to decarbonise quickly, to mitigate the worst impacts of climate decline, and to fulfil our historical responsibility as one of the world’s largest polluters. With the new year upon us, it’s clear that decarbonisation at the scale and speed we imagined isn’t a feasible goal within our existing political and economic frameworks. And this failure brings with it some uncomfortable truths that everyone concerned about the climate crisis must face head-on. And that means, in effect, everyone: for even if you don’t feel affected by this crisis, it still affects you.
The key lesson we must draw is that we urgently need a mainstream, inclusive climate movement that goes beyond activism and enters everyday life, engaging everyone from businesses and professionals to ordinary citizens. If we are to have a hope of flourishing during the coming climate breakdown, we need a movement that invites people to share in its determination to act. One of the best ways of achieving this is by channelling our energy into practical solutions for adapting to the climate crisis that’s already here. That is how our actions will speak in a manner that makes sense to the majority, who care but have as yet been inactive.
At the same time, climate activists and thought leaders need to stop clinging to the fantasy of decarbonisation as the sole answer to our predicament. As well as thinking about preventing and decarbonising, we need to start thinking about coping, adapting and preparing. The good news is, there are many ways that ordinary people can do that:
At a local level, people can get involved in retrofit programmes that make buildings more resilient against weather extremes. Community-led initiatives can help to avoid flooding, for instance, by planting instead of paving front gardens, or if front gardens must be paved then let it be with water-absorbent materials, so that water doesn’t run off. A team of neighbours might get together to work on a food-growing scheme or on rewilding a local churchyard to support wildlife and create more shade and moisture to help combat coming heatwaves. Small-scale grey-water systems would strengthen local water security – and a good start would be persuading more people to invest in water butts, or simply to put watering cans under their bathwater outflows. And the beauty of it? When we centre adaptation, people get it. It’s the ultimate wake-up call.
We’re already living with the consequences of our collective failure. Extreme weather events such as flooding, wildfires and heatwaves are no longer distant possibilities, but actual realities. It’s time to let go of the illusion that we can stop the damage stone dead at its source, and instead pivot towards protecting ourselves from the impacts we can no longer avoid, crucially while doing so in low-carbon ways. As we step into 2025, it’s time to put our focus on resilience building at all levels: from reinforcing infrastructure where necessary, to supporting communities on the frontline of climate impacts.
In 2024, we all saw that climate breakdown is a global emergency that demands local solutions. That’s why in 2025 the Climate Majority Project is launching our new #SAFER campaign – that stands for “strategic adaptation for emergency resilience”. We want to strike a balance between being clear about the great risk to our future without making people feel that the emergency is so great that there is nothing they can do. Because there is plenty we can do.
As we face into 2025, let’s make it the year of local climate action – of real, practical steps towards preparedness. Start small. Talk to your neighbours about how you can adapt together to future climate risks: the reality of the average annual UK temperature now being about 1.2C warmer than the preindustrial period: the fact that our chances of experiencing yearly hot summers like in 2018 – the joint hottest on record, when temperatures in Kent reached 35C – have doubled in recent decades and are now about 10-25% a year. Talk about the implications of the UK average sea level having risen by 16cm since 1900 and what that direction of travel means.
Organise community resilience initiatives, working with your neighbours to study and ameliorate local risks. Pressure your local and ultimately national government to invest in green infrastructure, flood protection and disaster preparedness.
It’s not too late for this. The fight for a survivable future isn’t over, but it will require a huge shift in approach. It’s time to stop fantasising about a decarbonised utopia and start acting on the resilience-building strategies that can protect our communities and steward a path through the rising tide of trouble that is coming our way.
That is not to say decarbonisation doesn’t matter, or can be sidelined in a mood of complacency. It means a recalibration of our thinking. For if we so act, the chances are that we will grow climate consciousness among the public as never before, thus contributing to a growing momentum for greenhouse gas reductions. It’s a new year. New thinking could be good for us all.
Dr Rupert Read helped launch XR before moving on in 2020 to found and co-direct ClimateMajorityProject.com. He is the co-author of Transformative Adaptation: Another World is Still, Just, Possible
At Extinction Rebellion, we aimed for UK net zero in 2025. That won't happen – so here’s what to do instead | Rupert Read
