Climate Action and Coalitions, Alliances, and Networks — Brief Descriptions
Fields of Action Series #14.2
To become the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world we must be together enough, our sixth Movement characteristic/imperative/goal.
This post is part of my Subseries on coalitions/alliances/networks that provides an illustrative sampling of the breadth of these collective entities who help us with the three ways to be together enough: shared goals, action events, and meeting together regularly.
As part of this illustrative sampling, in this post I highlight some of the coalitions out there by providing brief descriptions. These are very straightforward examples.
In subsequent posts in this Subseries I will offer examples that raise questions and discussion about the Climate Movement.
Catching a glimpse of the various coalitions that currently exist helps us see that the Climate Movement is growing bigger and broader, and we can find inspiration and hope from those who are working hard through such coalitions to overcome climate change while creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.
Coalitions, Alliances, and Networks
The Climate Action Network — With over 1,900 organizational members from over 130 countries, CAN International is the largest climate coalition/network in the world. It is also one of the oldest, going back to 1989.
The PanAfrican Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) — As their website states, they are a “consortium of more than 2000 organisations from 54 African countries that brings together a diverse membership drawn from Grassroots, Community-based organizations, Faith-based Organizations, Non-Governmental organizations, Trusts, Foundations, Indigenous Communities, Farmers and Pastoralist Groups …” The PACJA has a “shared vision to advance a people-centered, right-based, just and inclusive approach to address climate and environmental challenges facing humanity and the planet.” The Alliance seeks to create “ecologically-just and locally-led climate action.”
The Africa Coalition for Sustainable Energy & Access (ACSEA) is a fairly recent coalition hosted by PACJA that “envisions a future in which Africa’s energy needs are met through low-carbon, sustainable and decentralized energy access to all, particularly the poor.”
The Women in Global South Alliance (WiGSA) is recent coalition launched in 2022. According to a piece by Rights and Resources, it is “the first Alliance of its kind, integrated by grassroots women’s organizations, groups, and associations in the Global South to directly support the role of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women in achieving climate conservation goals and land tenure rights in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”
In WiGSA’s Call to Action focused on climate finance they state:
To forge women’s empowerment worldwide, governments and donors must take action for gender equality and gender justice to urgently provide direct funding to the Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women’s groups, organizations, associations and collectives in the Global South who have been historically under-supported and under-funded.
A recent report by WiGSA confirmed that “Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women face significant barriers in securing direct funding that intersects with women’s human and tenure rights and environmental and climate justice.”
The Green New Deal Network in the US is “a nationwide network of organizations committed to transforming our politics and economy with policies that address the climate crisis, create good, union jobs, and repair past harm and advance justice.” They list 14 collective entities as members, some of which are coalitions/networks themselves:
the Climate and Community Project,
the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA),
Greenpeace,
the Sunrise Movement,
the US Climate Action Network,
the Working Families Party, and
While their policy agenda is focused on the US, the work of some of these organizations/alliances/networks also work in other countries or internationally.
The Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition or CAAD is a global effort of over 50 organizations and businesses working to overcome what they see as “one of the largest barriers to addressing climate change: misleading and false content that perpetuates false narratives …”
A December 2024 report warns of the climate dangers posed by AI, demonstrating “how the world’s largest tech companies, Google, Microsoft and Nvidia, are abandoning their emissions targets in order to expand artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems.”
The Climate Action Campaign, is a coalition made up mainly of major US enviro organizations. Its members include: Center for American Progress, Earthjustice, Environment America, Environmental Defense Fund, League of Conservation Voters, National Hispanic Medical Association, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, U.S. Climate Action Network, and WE ACT for Environmental Justice.
The Rapid Transition Alliance is made up of over 100 organizations from around the world, with key partners being: Stand Earth in North America; CENIT in Latin America; the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS) in Nairobi, Kenya; the Center for the Study of Regional Development at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India; and New Weather in Europe.
Members of this alliance “are united by the belief that we must act urgently to maintain a habitable climate and that our action must be at a speed and scale to match the challenge.” They are focused on “what we do over the next five to ten years.” To engender what they term “evidence-based hope,” they “share inspiring and varied examples of rapid transition to show what kind of changes are possible, how people can help to shape them, and what conditions can make them happen.”
That so many have joined together in these coalitions from around the world is inspiring. Together we are the hope we’ve been waiting for. By pulling our destiny into the present we are making the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our future come faster. Join us!
Inspiring and hopeful to see all these climate action coalitions and groups!