Does it feel like we have lost the momentum on climate leadership and action? At a time when extreme weather is increasing and global records are being eclipsed yet again, how could this be so?

The reason, quite simply, is that the anti-climate movement has outplayed us, the climate movement.

I’ve been working on designing an unstoppable climate movement for some time now. It’s a slow process of understanding the complexities at play, distilling them down to the simplest of elements, then piecing the solutions into a pathway for success. Each new iteration is better than the last. Each is still a work in progress.

In one sense, I have been working on this challenge for my entire career, starting with a provincial organization called the Conservation Council of Ontario in the 1980s. With 25 organizations and 50 individual members, the Council worked to build consensus around conservation issues, including nature, forestry, agriculture, land use, water, and the overall concept of a conserver society. We also worked on special projects to demonstrate innovative solutions, such as community forestry, urban stream naturalization, community planning, and energy conservation. Many of the seeds of what I am now proposing lie within the work of that Council. It was truly a tremendous organization to work for, and it may yet serve as a model for future collaborative transition efforts.

The Conservation Council was founded in 1951, a decade before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and two decades before the rise of the environmental movement and the creation of first Ontario Ministry of the Environment. By 2010, it had lost its relevance as lobbying replaced consensus building, and collaboration between government and NGOs became the exception rather than the norm.

We have always been a policy movement.

Ever since its inception in the early 1970s, the environmental movement has largely been a policy movement. It has focused on securing government commitments to regulations, standards and programs that set the boundaries around exploitation and pollution. When it worked, it achieved wonders. It helped stop whaling, mercury pollution, acid rain, ozone depletion, and the destruction of sensitive ecosystems.

Environmental organizations, by and large, measure success by regulatory action, and their outreach and engagement is focused on securing public support for their campaigns.

The climate movement, which began to take shape in the late 1980s, is an extension of the environmental movement. The climate is, after all, the ultimate environmental cause. It is the reason we have life on this planet, it is being threatened by the exponential growth in GHG emissions, and it represents the ultimate battle between insatiable growth and the preservation of all we cherish. This is the main event.

Similar to other environmental issues, the movement set its sights on climate policy based on climate science. It worked in the past, so it should work again. And for a while it did - the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement, the annual Conference of the Parties, and all those national and subnational climate plans complete with targets, regulations, carbon pricing, and incentives.

But, of course, the fossil fuel industry was not going to phase itself out willingly. There have been numerous tactics, but the one I want to focus on is their activities in public engagement. The anti-climate movement has been dancing circles around us with advocacy messaging aimed at shifting public sentiment, while we have been trying to educate people that climate change is real and convince them that they should support government leadership. They have been successful at portraying the climate as a single minor issue instead of the wholly connected and important issue that it is. In the world of economics and policy, public sentiment is everything.

The anti-climate movement is currently winning the battle for the public mandate. It's not that the majority of people are anti-climate - quite the contrary. It's that other issues like the cost of living and community safety take priority. We've been isolated and sidelined.

Not every government is relaxing its climate commitment, but it sure feels like it.

We must become a social movement.

If we wish to be successful - and I assume we do - we need to rebuild the climate movement around building the social mandate for change. This is my theory of change. It starts and ends with people, and with forging a social mandate for leadership and action:

An unshakeable social mandate, expressed through our values, voices, votes, and actions, will lead to a universal commitment to leadership from governments and companies, thereby empowering process to develop integrated solutions and pathways to success that will result in solutions people want, which in turn will reinforce the social mandate.

It may help to look at some examples of successful social movements to understand how this can help us be successful. The core causes of the 1960s and '70s were civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, and peace. This was a time of great social upheaval and conflict that gave rise to some of the most powerful and transformative social mandates. There were common themes and messaging across all four of love and equality that gave rise to the social mandate for government leadership. The goal for the social movements was to get society as a whole to say, "Hell yeah. This matters," That mandate empowered the process of change - imperfect, always under attack, but making progress that laid the foundation for what we take for granted today. The mandate made policy possible.

So the challenge for today's climate movement is to find the themes and messaging that can build an undeniable mandate for change. Which means the entire climate movement needs to shift from selling policy to selling solutions people want. Yes, the science matters. Yes, government leadership is crucial. Yes, we need public support. But the path to a strong social mandate lies in designing and promoting solutions that work – solutions that address our economic woes, job security, energy security, the cost of living, urban gridlock, safe streets, and our health and hope for a better future.

In our darkest hours, we need to give people hope. And we need to empower them to help build the future we want.

A strong social mandate is what will get us the leadership, the policy, the pathways, and solutions to a cleaner, resilient, and better future.

What can governments do?

Building a better movement is complex, yes, but it can be distilled down to four key actions:

1. Think like a movement: Become a social movement. Focus on solutions people want rather than polices we want, based on a foundation of common values, principles and goals

2. Mobilize the movement: Build community and solutions networks. Mobilize for success, locally to globally, through collaboration and networking to identify and implement solutions.

3. Market the movement: Sell our values, vision and solutions. Market the climate and our solutions using our combined networks and common messaging.

4. Be the movement: Make change happen. Put the pieces together into collaborative, movement-based campaigns, starting with a global campaign to promote global leadership on the climate.

These are actions we can all incorporate into our strategic planning, whether we be a community group, a company, institution, or a government. For this forum of government thinkers, my suggestion is to look at ways that your government can shift to a collaborative model, where we can focus on building relationships and finding allies; developing integrated solutions that incorporate social benefit and address other social priorities; and developing collaborative transition pathways that focus on the roles each partner can play in facilitating the smooth transition to a clean, resilient future.

If you want more details, please check out my website.