persuasive speech climate change

How To Write An Effective Speech On Climate Change

Hrideep barot.

• Speech Writing

Believe it or not, climate change is real–and it’s human beings who’re responsible for a majority of it. Despite how commonly known this information is, it’s surprising how little importance people give to the lasting impact of their seemingly trivial actions.

Over the years, so many people have spoken up about climate change. These include world leaders, celebrities, politicians, and even common people like you and me. If you’ve got a speech on climate change coming up, you’re probably wondering how to make your speech stand out from all of the ones before you.

And that’s exactly what we’re going to help you with today.

To write an effective speech on climate change, you need to keep in mind a couple of things. This includes choosing your purpose, keeping your audience in mind & making it personally relevant to them, emphasizing the immediacy of the situation, incorporating humor and stories.

Before we delve into writing down the speech, let’s first understand what climate change actually means.

What is climate change?

In simple words, climate change is a global phenomenon of climate transformation. It is characterized by unusual changes in the normal climate of the planet and is especially caused by human activities.

As a result of climate change, there is a rapidly rising instability in the earth’s weather. This is detrimental to the earth’s ecosystem and the overall sustainability of the planet. Climate change also puts the future of all living things under threat–and yes, that includes you too.

The warning signs of climate change can be easily observed in our surroundings.

Temperatures are rising rapidly across the globe as a result of global warming. Glaciers are melting at a faster rate. There is a tremendous rise in sea levels, which puts multiple communities as well as marine life at risk. Droughts too are occurring more frequently–and lasting longer.

The warning signs of climate change are all around us. Whether we choose to see them or not, however, is something that depends solely on us.

Things To Keep In Mind While Writing The Speech

1. Choose Your Purpose

Like I mentioned before, so many people have given speeches on climate change before. If you wish to stand out from them, you first need to understand your exact purpose behind delivering the speech.

What I mean is, what do you mean to achieve from delivering the speech? Is your goal to simply provide information to people? Are you trying to convince people about the urgency of climate change? Or maybe you’re participating in a debate competition and want to beat your opponent’s point of view?

The content of your speech is going to be vastly different in all three scenarios. So, before you sit down writing, make sure you’ve decided on the purpose of your speech.

2. Analyzing The Audience

Once you’ve settled your purpose, let’s move onto the next step: analyzing your audience. This is because your content will need to vary depending on what people are going to be filling the auditorium seats.

For instance, if your audience mainly consists of primary school children, then you’re going to need to significantly tone down all the complex stuff in your speech. On the other hand, if your audience consists of experts in the field, then dawdling over the basics is going to be unnecessary.

So, make sure to analyze your audience before you sit down to write your speech.

3. Understand The Occasion

Where and when, exactly, are you going to be giving the speech? Are you going to deliver it as an opening speech at a college event? Are you going to be delivering the speech for a school project? Are you a speaker at a climate change conference?

The occasion plays a vital role in determining the contents of your speech. The overall tone of your speech as well as the type of content you might want to include–or exclude– will depend on how serious or leisurely an event is.

4. Emphasize The Immediacy

A lot of people tend to believe that climate change is something that’s probably going to affect the earth in…a couple of centuries, maybe.

But that is not so. Climate change is already affecting us–and if we do nothing about it, the situation will continue to worsen over the next couple of decades.

Emphasize the immediacy of the problem. It’s when people start realizing how imminent the issue is that they’ll want to do something about it.

5. Why Should They Listen To You?

Why should the audience listen to you? What makes you different than all the other speakers before you? What will make you stand out in their eyes?

Before you sit down and start writing, answer this question to yourself.

There are many ways to be unique in the audience’s eyes. Maybe you’re someone who’s excellent with jokes. Why not structure your speech in a funny way? Or maybe you’re a puppeteer, or simply excellent with haiku. Why not include them in your speech?

6. Timing Your Speech

How long are you going to be speaking for? An hour? Thirty minutes? One minute?

If you’ve already been given a time limit, good. If not, then you need to decide how long you’re going to be speaking before you start writing. This will help you better structure your speech, as well as ensure that you don’t need to cut short your speech on the big day because you’ve run out of time.

7. Making It Resonate With Humor & Stories

As long as you do not manage to make your speech resonate with people, they’re going to forget what you said, just like they’ve forgotten countless speeches before you. So, make sure to include elements like storytelling, humor & statistics in your speech.

Is there a personal incident where you were affected by climate change? Or maybe you saw or heard a story from somewhere else and it really touched you. Well, maybe it will touch your audience too.

Adding elements such as these will increase the impact you have on people, and make it more likely that they will remember you–and your speech-even after you’ve finished speaking.

Check out our article on Guide To Use Humor In Your Speech for some inspiration on how to make your speech more light-hearted and enjoyable.

We can also use the Paraprosdokian technique to make our speeches funny. It’s a simple technique which means narrating a story and having a surprise twist at the end. Want to know how some of our most beloved celebrities go about using this technique (and how you can too)? Check out this (entertaining) video we made:

8. How Does It Personally Impact The Audience?

Almost every person in the world is aware of the negative impact of climate change. And yet, only a few are actually concerned about it–or do something to prevent it.

This is mostly because people do not feel a personal need to do anything about climate change, because they feel like if they’ve not been impacted with climate change yet, then why should they bother paying attention to it?

And this is exactly what you need to change. You need to make them realize that climate change does, in fact, impact them directly. In fact, it probably already has in the past.

This can be done in many ways.

For example: Ask them about their summer, and tell them about rising temperatures in their own city. Ask them if they’ve been under the weather recently, and then tell them how there is a global rise in infectious disease as a consequence of climate change.

Structuring The Speech

The structure of a speech on climate change is pretty similar to any other speech that you might give. That is, it consists of three main parts…

1. The Opening

The opening of a speech is perhaps its most important component. Unless and until you grab your audience’s attention right off of the bat, chances are that you’ve lost it for the rest of your speech.

So, it’s imperative to have an excellent speech opening. There are many ways in which you can customize an attention-grabbing opening for a speech on climate change.

You could start off with a shocking statistic, for one. Or you could include beginning with a story. You could also start with a joke. Another great opening would be using a prop: maybe a model of what the earth will look like fifty years from now.

2. The Content

Your content is going to comprise the majority of your speech. It should include all of your most important points and those points must be lined up in a logical sequence.

Your content shouldn’t go on for seemingly forever. Keep it to the point, and discard anything that you feel you can do without.

If you’ve managed to grab the audience’s attention in the beginning, they’ll be intrigued enough to listen to your actual message.

However, presenting your main content in such a manner that it continues to sustain their interest is your responsibility.

To do so, make sure to incorporate elements like humor, stories, jokes, and games. Make sure you’re using proper body language and appropriate visuals and cues like photos, videos, etc  Mix things up and figure out what works best for you.

3. The Conclusion

Finally, you get to the conclusion. While it might sound like a good idea to quickly thank the audience and get off of the stage, it’s not so.

Your conclusion needs to be as impactful as your speech. This will ensure that your speech remains in the audience’s mind. It will also make it likely that they will want to hear you speak again.

There are many ways to conclude a speech. Having a call to action is a must. You can also end with an impactful quote. Or, you could circle back to something that you said in your speech–maybe finish a story you left off in the beginning.

4. Post-Conclusion

Wait, wait…So it’s not over after the conclusion? I mean, isn’t that the entire POINT of a conclusion? To CONCLUDE?

A conclusion wraps up your speech, sure. But if you truly want to make a lasting impact on your audience’s mind and actually make them take climate change–or any other topic–seriously, then what you do after your speech ends is just as important.

Think of it as an added bonus, like Marvel’s post-credits scenes.

There are many ways to go about having an awesome post-conclusion. Networking is a must. Now that you’re off the stage, it’s time to move around the room. Meet the people in the audience & talk to them. Ask them questions, and answer any they might have for you.

You can also make presentation handouts and give them to the audience. This will help them remember your speech. You could even give them a reference list so that they can look in-depth into your topic.

You could also give them a list of steps that they can take to reduce their own harmful impact on the environment. Or, you could even make a funny handout–maybe a couple of memorable lines from your speech–and give it to them.

Whatever you do, the end goal should be to make them remember you–and to actually do something about what you said.

Sample Climate Change Speech

The Sci-Fi Reality of Climate Change

Indonesia’s capital is sinking. Yes, you heard it right. In 2019, Indonesia announced its plans to shift its capital city from Jatarka, largely because the city is struggling to shoulder a giant environmental burden that keeps getting bigger and bigger every year. Air quality in the city has plunged to new lows–the air in the city is now reported to be even more polluted than cities like Delhi and Beijing. And of course, parts of Jatarka–which is home to over ten million people, almost the same as the city of Los Angeles–are sinking as much as 25 centimeters per year. Climate change is making Indonesia shift its capital. Imagine what will it do to your city or town. Because Indonesia is not the only city on the cusp of being ravaged by climate change. Extreme weather fueled by climate change struck every corner of the globe–from Africa to Australia to Asia–in 2020, leaving in its wake a devastating trail of floods, storms, fires and destruction. While for those of us who are sitting in the comfort of our own homes, climate change might feel like a distant dream, for many people, climate change has already ravaged their fragile reality. John Smith, a farmer from Nevada, is one of them. “It was like hell had shifted to earth.” The Smith family has been growing apples in the foothills of Nevada since the 1950s. However, a couple of weeks ago, a seemingly unstoppable camp fire engulfed the forest near their farm–as well as all the three buildings on their property. They managed to escape with their livestock and what little possessions they could gather. Their dog, Hero, suffered third-degree burns while saving their five-year-old daughter from a collapsing roof. The family had to spend the next twelve months in a trailer near their friends’ property. Three years later, and they’ve managed to patch together bits of their old life. And yet, the threat of another careless camper–and another devastating fire–still looms. In the United States, climate change has been a leading factor for a rapid increase in the frequency & extent of wildfires. Rising temperatures, which is a key component of climate change, is the culprit. Elevated temperatures seep out moisture from the ground and dry up the ground. This makes vegetation more flammable. The wildfire season now lasts approximately three and a half months longer. The number of wildfires in the West has tripled–as has the devastation it leaves in its wake. Today, it is John. Tomorrow, it could be you. In almost every sphere of life, change is inevitable. Students finish high school and enter universities, people switch jobs, or maybe someone moves to a new place… Change is a part of life. And like all other changes, climate change is inevitable–at least, until we actually do something to prevent it.  Out of all the planets in our Galaxy, Earth is–so far–the only planet with a climate capable enough to sustain human life. And yet, human beings seem to find it perfectly alright to take advantage of the Earth’s hospitality. I imagine earth to be like an exhausted host and humans those annoying guests that eat up all your food and destroy your brand new carpet with their muddy feet and just-can’t-take-a-hint and, you know, get out. We need to understand that what actions we choose are solely our responsibility, and we are the ones who will have to bear its consequences–many of which we already are. Global Warming and the Greenhouse Effect are the most pressing issues in the current time. And yet secondary consequences of climate change, like the impact of rising temperatures on human lifespan as well as the economic impact of having to deal with secondary damage related to climate change, often go unnoticed. Because, you know, we’ve got more pressing issues to pay attention to. Like, Tiktok getting banned. And whether a metor is going to destroy the earth in the next decade (I’m sure the earth will thank it). Or, the flat earth theory. If Google is to be believed, the interest in both: Flat Earth Conspiracy Theory & Climate Change Skepticism is on the rise. In fact, they’re two of the most popular conspiracy theories today. And yet the interest in the impact of climate change–and what we can do to prevent it–has dwindled to a percentage so abysmal that I don’t find it worth mentioning. Today, we’re on the cusp of tipping into the Sci-Fi movies that everybody loves to binge with a platoon of Doritos packets. And yet, watching a Sci-Fi and actually living in one are two different things.  For one, there is no director or writer shaping the course of our lives behind the scenes. We cannot blame the writer for a plotline going south or a disappointing end–or even the entire show getting canceled. There is no plot requirement or artistic freedom, either. So, just because you’re the favorite of many people doesn’t mean your contract will renew after three seasons and you won’t get killed off.  Unlike directors and authors, nature does not discriminate. When a natural disaster strikes, it strikes everyone and not just a select few. The world has witnessed a tenfold increase in disasters since the 1960s–and unless everybody does something, this number will keep on increasing. And if you’d rather watch a Sci-Fi from the comfort of your home rather than actually living in one, you need to get up from the sofa, step out of your house and do something.  There is a quote from the movie ‘Interstellar’ that I really love. The movie is a Sci-Fi epic from the point of view of a family. Or, more precisely from the eyes of a father and daughter. The quote goes, “Once you’re a parent, you’re the ghost of your child’s future.”  And yet, right now it is you who holds your child’s future in your hands. So maybe in that sense all of us are writers, too: writers of which direction the story of our children’s life will take. Indonesia’s capital is sinking. As is the earth’s future. Now the choice is yours: would you rather let it sink, or will you throw it a life jacket instead?

PS: The above speech can be highlighted much better with the use of visuals and a few Slides. Keep that in mind if you are required to deliver this speech at anypoint.

Powerful Climate Change Speeches

1. leonardo dicaprio at the opening of climate summit 2014.

Key Takeaway: As you watch the speech, notice how Leonardo starts it off. He tries to make a personal connection with the people listening to him by telling the viewers that he’s not an expert on climate change. Instead, he’s just like them.

Throughout the course of his speech, he maintains this stance and uses quotes, anecdotes, etc. to emphasize his point. He makes himself–and his speech–easily relatable to the viewer.

2. Climate Change: Simple, Serious, Solvable By James Rae

Key Takeaway: As you watch the speech, notice how James makes use of visual elements like GIFs and pictures to capture his audience’s attention. The entire speech is peppered with material relevant to his topic, and this addition of visual elements takes the speech to a whole other level. You can use it as a guideline to how to use visuals in your own speech.

3. Confessions Of A Climate Change Humorist: Jim Poyser At TedXIndianapolis

Key Takeaway: As you watch the video, keep an eye on the speaker’s body language. Also, notice how the speaker uses humor to drive forth his point. Humor is a great way to make the audience relate to the topic–and you can make note of how the speaker effectively employs it in his speech to get an idea about how to structure it into your own talk.

To sum up, you can easily write a speech on climate change by keeping in mind factors like making sure you have a distinct purpose, keeping your audience in mind, timing your speech in advance, figuring out what makes you unique, and incorporating humor and storytelling. Additionally, you can skim through the sample speech provided as well as watch Ted Talks to gain an idea of how to write your own speech.

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Four Powerful Climate Change Speeches to Inspire You

To support the running costs of Moral Fibres, this post may contain affiliate links. This means Moral Fibres may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to readers, on items purchased through these links.

Looking to be inspired to take action on climate change? Watch these four powerful climate change speeches, and get ready to change the world.

Climate change is the most pressing concern facing us and our planet. As such, we need powerful action, and fast, from both global leaders and global corporations, right down to individuals.

I’ve got over 70 climate change and sustainability quotes to motivate people and inspire climate action. But if it is more than quotes you need then watch these four impassioned climate change speeches. These speeches are particularly good if you are looking for even more inspiration to inspire others to take climate action.

The Sustainability Speeches To Motivate You

Here are the speeches to know – I’ve included a video of each speech plus a transcript to make it easy to get all the information you need. Use the quick links to jump to a specific speech or keep scrolling to see all the speeches.

Greta Thunberg’s Climate Change Speech at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit

Leonardo dicaprio’s climate change speech at the 2014 un climate summit, yeb sano’s climate change speech at the united nations climate summit in warsaw, greta thunberg’s speech at houses of parliament.

In September 2019 climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed the U.N.’s Climate Action Summit in New York City with this inspiring climate change speech:

Here’s the full transcript of Greta Thunberg’s climate change speech. It begins with Greta’s response to a question about the message she has for world leaders.

My message is that we’ll be watching you.

This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.

The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5°C, and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

Fifty per cent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO 2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.

To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5°C global temperature rise – the best odds given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the world had 420 gigatons of CO 2 left to emit back on January 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.

How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just ‘business as usual’ and some technical solutions? With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO 2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 and a half years.

There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.

We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

Leonardo DiCaprio gave an impassioned climate change speech at the 2014 UN Climate Summit. Watch it now:

Here’s a transcript of Leonardo DiCaprio’s climate change speech in case you’re looking to quote any part of it.

Thank you, Mr Secretary General, your excellencies, ladies and gentleman, and distinguished guests. I’m honoured to be here today, I stand before you not as an expert but as a concerned citizen. One of the 400,000 people who marched in the streets of New York on Sunday, and the billions of others around the world who want to solve our climate crisis.

As an actor, I pretend for a living. I play fictitious characters often solving fictitious problems.

I believe humankind has looked at climate change in that same way. As if it were fiction, happening to someone else’s planet, as if pretending that climate change wasn’t real would somehow make it go away.

But I think we know better than that. Every week, we’re seeing new and undeniable climate events, evidence that accelerated climate change is here now .  We know that droughts are intensifying.  Our oceans are warming and acidifying, with methane plumes rising up from beneath the ocean floor. We are seeing extreme weather events, increased temperatures, and the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets melting at unprecedented rates, decades ahead of scientific projections.

None of this is rhetoric, and none of it is hysteria. It is fact. The scientific community knows it. Industry and governments know it. Even the United States military knows it. The chief of the US Navy’s Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Locklear, recently said that climate change is our single greatest security threat.

My friends, this body – perhaps more than any other gathering in human history – now faces that difficult task. You can make history or be vilified by it.

To be clear, this is not about just telling people to change their light bulbs or to buy a hybrid car. This disaster has grown BEYOND the choices that individuals make. This is now about our industries, and governments around the world taking decisive, large-scale action.

I am not a scientist, but I don’t need to be. Because the world’s scientific community has spoken, and they have given us our prognosis. If we do not act together, we will surely perish.

Now is our moment for action.

We need to put a price tag on carbon emissions and eliminate government subsidies for coal, gas, and oil companies. We need to end the free ride that industrial polluters have been given in the name of a free-market economy. They don’t deserve our tax dollars, they deserve our scrutiny. For the economy itself will die if our ecosystems collapse.

The good news is that renewable energy is not only achievable but good economic policy. New research shows that by 2050 clean, renewable energy could supply 100% of the world’s energy needs using existing technologies, and it would create millions of jobs.

This is not a partisan debate; it is a human one. Clean air and water, and a livable climate are inalienable human rights. And solving this crisis is not a question of politics. It is our moral obligation – if, admittedly, a daunting one.

We only get one planet. Humankind must become accountable on a massive scale for the wanton destruction of our collective home. Protecting our future on this planet depends on the conscious evolution of our species.

This is the most urgent of times, and the most urgent of messages.

Honoured delegates, leaders of the world, I pretend for a living. But you do not. The people made their voices heard on Sunday around the world and the momentum will not stop. And now it’s YOUR turn, the time to answer the greatest challenge of our existence on this planet is now.

I beg you to face it with courage. And honesty. Thank you.

The Philippines’ lead negotiator  Yeb Sano  addressed the opening session of the UN climate summit in Warsaw in November 2013. In this emotional and powerful climate change speech he called for urgent action to prevent a repeat of the devastating storm that hit parts of the Philippines:

Transcript of Yeb’s Climate Change Speech

Here’s a transcript of Yeb’s climate change speech:

Mr President, I have the honour to speak on behalf of the resilient people of the Republic of the Philippines.

At the onset, allow me to fully associate my delegation with the statement made by the distinguished Ambassador of the Republic of Fiji, on behalf of G77 and China as well as the statement made by Nicaragua on behalf of the Like-Minded Developing Countries.

First and foremost, the people of the Philippines, and our delegation here for the United Nations Climate Change Convention’s 19 th  Conference of the Parties here in Warsaw, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you for your expression of sympathy to my country in the face of this national difficulty.

In the midst of this tragedy, the delegation of the Philippines is comforted by the warm hospitality of Poland, with your people offering us warm smiles everywhere we go. Hotel staff and people on the streets, volunteers and personnel within the National Stadium have warmly offered us kind words of sympathy. So, thank you Poland.

The arrangements you have made for this COP is also most excellent and we highly appreciate the tremendous effort you have put into the preparations for this important gathering.

We also thank all of you, friends and colleagues in this hall and from all corners of the world as you stand beside us in this difficult time.

I thank all countries and governments who have extended your solidarity and for offering assistance to the Philippines.

I thank the youth present here and the billions of young people around the world who stand steadfastly behind my delegation and who are watching us shape their future.

I thank civil society, both who are working on the ground as we race against time in the hardest-hit areas, and those who are here in Warsaw prodding us to have a sense of urgency and ambition.

We are deeply moved by this manifestation of human solidarity. This outpouring of support proves to us that as a human race, we can unite; that as a species, we care.

It was barely 11 months ago in Doha when my delegation appealed to the world… to open our eyes to the stark reality that we face… as then we confronted a catastrophic storm that resulted in the costliest disaster in Philippine history.

Less than a year hence, we cannot imagine that a disaster much bigger would come. With an apparent cruel twist of fate, my country is being tested by this hellstorm called Super Typhoon Haiyan, which has been described by experts as the strongest typhoon that has ever made landfall in the course of recorded human history.

It was so strong that if there was a Category 6, it would have fallen squarely in that box. Up to this hour, we remain uncertain as to the full extent of the devastation, as information trickles in an agonisingly slow manner because electricity lines and communication lines have been cut off and may take a while before these are restored.

The initial assessment shows that Haiyan left a wake of massive devastation that is unprecedented, unthinkable, and horrific, affecting 2/3 of the Philippines, with about half a million people now rendered homeless, and with scenes reminiscent of the aftermath of a tsunami, with a vast wasteland of mud and debris and dead bodies.

According to satellite estimates, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also estimated that Haiyan achieved a minimum pressure between around 860 mbar (hPa; 25.34 inHg) and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center estimated Haiyan to have attained one-minute sustained winds of 315 km/h (195 mph) and gusts up to 378 km/h (235 mph) making it the strongest typhoon in modern recorded history.

Despite the massive efforts that my country had exerted in preparing for the onslaught of this monster of a storm, it was just a force too powerful, and even as a nation familiar with storms, Super Typhoon Haiyan was nothing we have ever experienced before, or perhaps nothing that any country has every experienced before.

The picture in the aftermath is ever so slowly coming into clearer focus. The devastation is colossal. And as if this is not enough, another storm is brewing again in the warm waters of the western Pacific. I shudder at the thought of another typhoon hitting the same places where people have not yet even managed to begin standing up.

To anyone who continues to deny the reality that is climate change, I dare you to get off your ivory tower and away from the comfort of your armchair.

I dare you to go to the islands of the Pacific, the islands of the Caribbean and the islands of the Indian Ocean and see the impacts of rising sea levels; to the mountainous regions of the Himalayas and the Andes to see communities confronting glacial floods, to the Arctic where communities grapple with the fast dwindling polar ice caps, to the large deltas of the Mekong, the Ganges, the Amazon, and the Nile where lives and livelihoods are drowned, to the hills of Central America that confront similar monstrous hurricanes, to the vast savannahs of Africa where climate change has likewise become a matter of life and death as food and water becomes scarce.

Not to forget the massive hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and the eastern seaboard of North America. And if that is not enough, you may want to pay a visit to the Philippines right now.

The science has given us a picture that has become much more in focus. The IPCC report on climate change and extreme events underscored the risks associated with changes in the patterns as well as the frequency of extreme weather events.

Science tells us that simply, climate change will mean more intense tropical storms. As the Earth warms up, that would include the oceans. The energy that is stored in the waters off the Philippines will increase the intensity of typhoons and the trend we now see is that more destructive storms will be the new norm.

This will have profound implications on many of our communities, especially who struggle against the twin challenges of the development crisis and the climate change crisis. Typhoons such as Yolanda (Haiyan) and its impacts represent a sobering reminder to the international community that we cannot afford to procrastinate on climate action. Warsaw must deliver on enhancing ambition and should muster the political will to address climate change.

In Doha, we asked, “If not us then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?” (borrowed from Philippine student leader Ditto Sarmiento during Martial Law). It may have fell on deaf ears. But here in Warsaw, we may very well ask these same forthright questions. “If not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here in Warsaw, where?”

What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness. The climate crisis is madness.

We can stop this madness. Right here in Warsaw.

It is the 19 th  COP, but we might as well stop counting because my country refuses to accept that a COP30 or a COP40 will be needed to solve climate change.

And because it seems that despite the significant gains we have had since the UNFCCC was born, 20 years hence we continue to fail in fulfilling the ultimate objective of the Convention. 

Now, we find ourselves in a situation where we have to ask ourselves – can we ever attain the objective set out in Article 2 – which is to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system? By failing to meet the objective of the Convention, we may have ratified the doom of vulnerable countries.

And if we have failed to meet the objective of the Convention, we have to confront the issue of loss and damage.

Loss and damage from climate change is a reality today across the world. Developed country emissions reduction targets are dangerously low and must be raised immediately. But even if they were in line with the demand of reducing 40-50% below 1990 levels, we would still have locked-in climate change and would still need to address the issue of loss and damage.

We find ourselves at a critical juncture and the situation is such that even the most ambitious emissions reductions by developed countries, who should have been taking the lead in combatting climate change in the past two decades, will not be enough to avert the crisis.

It is now too late, too late to talk about the world being able to rely on Annex I countries to solve the climate crisis. We have entered a new era that demands global solidarity in order to fight climate change and ensure that the pursuit of sustainable human development remains at the fore of the global community’s efforts. This is why means of implementation for developing countries is ever more crucial.

It was the Secretary-general of the UN Conference on Environment and Development, Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1992, Maurice Strong who said that “History reminds us that what is not possible today, may be inevitable tomorrow.”

We cannot sit and stay helpless staring at this international climate stalemate. It is now time to take action. We need an emergency climate pathway.

I speak for my delegation. But more than that, I speak for the countless people who will no longer be able to speak for themselves after perishing from the storm. I also speak for those who have been orphaned by this tragedy. I also speak for the people now racing against time to save survivors and alleviate the suffering of the people affected by the disaster.

We can take drastic action now to ensure that we prevent a future where super typhoons are a way of life. Because we refuse, as a nation, to accept a future where super typhoons like Haiyan become a fact of life. We refuse to accept that running away from storms, evacuating our families, suffering the devastation and misery, having to count our dead, become a way of life. We simply refuse to.

We must stop calling events like these as natural disasters. It is not natural when people continue to struggle to eradicate poverty and pursue development and get battered by the onslaught of a monster storm now considered as the strongest storm ever to hit land. It is not natural when science already tells us that global warming will induce more intense storms. It is not natural when the human species has already profoundly changed the climate.

Disasters are never natural. They are the intersection of factors other than physical. They are the accumulation of the constant breach of economic, social, and environmental thresholds.

Most of the time disasters are a result of inequity and the poorest people of the world are at greatest risk because of their vulnerability and decades of maldevelopment, which I must assert is connected to the kind of pursuit of economic growth that dominates the world. The same kind of pursuit of so-called economic growth and unsustainable consumption that has altered the climate system.

Now, if you will allow me, to speak on a more personal note.

Super Typhoon Haiyan made landfall in my family’s hometown and the devastation is staggering. I struggle to find words even for the images that we see from the news coverage. I struggle to find words to describe how I feel about the losses and damages we have suffered from this cataclysm.

Up to this hour, I agonize while waiting for word as to the fate of my very own relatives. What gives me renewed strength and great relief was when my brother succeeded in communicating with us that he has survived the onslaught. In the last two days, he has been gathering bodies of the dead with his own two hands. He is hungry and weary as food supplies find it difficult to arrive in the hardest-hit areas.

We call on this COP to pursue work until the most meaningful outcome is in sight. Until concrete pledges have been made to ensure mobilisation of resources for the Green Climate Fund. Until the promise of the establishment of a loss and damage mechanism has been fulfilled. Until there is assurance on finance for adaptation. Until concrete pathways for reaching the committed 100 billion dollars have been made. Until we see real ambition on stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations. We must put the money where our mouths are.

This process under the UNFCCC has been called many names. It has been called a farce. It has been called an annual carbon-intensive gathering of useless frequent flyers. It has been called many names. But it has also been called “The Project To Save The Planet”. It has been called “Saving Tomorrow Today”. We can fix this. We can stop this madness. Right now. Right here, in the middle of this football field.

I call on you to lead us. And let Poland be forever known as the place we truly cared to stop this madness. Can humanity rise to the occasion? I still believe we can.

Finally, in April 2019, Greta spoke at the Houses of Parliament in the UK. Here she gave this powerful climate change speech to the UK’s political leaders:

Transcript of Greta’s Climate Change Speech

Here is the full transcript of Greta’s climate change speech:

My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 16 years old. I come from Sweden. And I speak on behalf of future generations.

I know many of you don’t want to listen to us – you say we are just children. But we’re only repeating the message of the united climate science.

Many of you appear concerned that we are wasting valuable lesson time, but I assure you we will go back to school the moment you start listening to science and give us a future. Is that really too much to ask?

In the year 2030, I will be 26 years old. My little sister Beata will be 23. Just like many of your own children or grandchildren. That is a great age, we have been told. When you have all of your life ahead of you. But I am not so sure it will be that great for us.

I was fortunate to be born in a time and place where everyone told us to dream big. I could become whatever I wanted to. I could live wherever I wanted to. People like me had everything we needed and more. Things our grandparents could not even dream of. We had everything we could ever wish for and yet now we may have nothing.

Now we probably don’t even have a future anymore.

Because that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money. It was stolen from us every time you said that the sky was the limit and that you only live once.

You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. And the saddest thing is that most children are not even aware of the fate that awaits us. We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences. But their voices are not heard.

Is my microphone on? Can you hear me?

Around the year 2030, 10 years 252 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it. That is unless, in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place, including a reduction of CO 2 emissions by at least 50%.

And please note that these calculations are depending on inventions that have not yet been invented at scale, inventions that are supposed to clear the atmosphere of astronomical amounts of carbon dioxide.

Furthermore, these calculations do not include unforeseen tipping points and feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas escaping from rapidly thawing arctic permafrost.

Nor do these scientific calculations include already locked-in warming hidden by toxic air pollution. Nor the aspect of equity – or climate justice – clearly stated throughout the Paris Agreement, which is absolutely necessary to make it work on a global scale.

We must also bear in mind that these are just calculations. Estimations. That means that these “points of no return” may occur a bit sooner or later than 2030. No one can know for sure. We can, however, be certain that they will occur approximately in these timeframes because these calculations are not opinions or wild guesses.

These projections are backed up by scientific facts, concluded by all nations through the IPCC. Nearly every single major national scientific body around the world unreservedly supports the work and findings of the IPCC.

Did you hear what I just said? Is my English OK? Is the microphone on? Because I’m beginning to wonder.

During the last six months, I have travelled around Europe for hundreds of hours in trains, electric cars, and buses, repeating these life-changing words over and over again. But no one seems to be talking about it, and nothing has changed. In fact, the emissions are still rising.

When I have been travelling around to speak in different countries, I am always offered help to write about the specific climate policies in specific countries. But that is not really necessary. Because the basic problem is the same everywhere. And the basic problem is that basically nothing is being done to halt – or even slow – climate and ecological breakdown, despite all the beautiful words and promises.

The UK is, however, very special. Not only for its mind-blowing historical carbon debt but also for its current, very creative, carbon accounting.

Since 1990 the UK has achieved a 37% reduction of its territorial CO 2 emissions, according to the Global Carbon Project. And that does sound very impressive. But these numbers do not include emissions from aviation, shipping, and those associated with imports and exports. If these numbers are included the reduction is around 10% since 1990 – or an average of 0.4% a year, according to Tyndall Manchester. And the main reason for this reduction is not a consequence of climate policies, but rather a 2001 EU directive on air quality that essentially forced the UK to close down its very old and extremely dirty coal power plants and replace them with less dirty gas power stations. And switching from one disastrous energy source to a slightly less disastrous one will of course result in a lowering of emissions.

But perhaps the most dangerous misconception about the climate crisis is that we have to “lower” our emissions. Because that is far from enough.

Our emissions have to stop if we are to stay below 1.5-2 ° C of warming. The “lowering of emissions” is of course necessary but it is only the beginning of a fast process that must lead to a stop within a couple of decades or less. And by “stop” I mean net-zero – and then quickly on to negative figures. That rules out most of today’s politics.

The fact that we are speaking of “lowering” instead of “stopping” emissions is perhaps the greatest force behind the continuing business as usual. The UK’s active current support of new exploitation of fossil fuels – for example, the UK shale gas fracking industry, the expansion of its North Sea oil and gas fields, the expansion of airports as well as the planning permission for a brand new coal mine – is beyond absurd.

This ongoing irresponsible behaviour will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of humankind.

People always tell me and the other millions of school strikers that we should be proud of ourselves for what we have accomplished. But the only thing that we need to look at is the emission curve. And I’m sorry, but it’s still rising. That curve is the only thing we should look at.

Every time we make a decision we should ask ourselves; how will this decision affect that curve? We should no longer measure our wealth and success in the graph that shows economic growth, but in the curve that shows the emissions of greenhouse gases. We should no longer only ask: “Have we got enough money to go through with this?” but also: “Have we got enough of the carbon budget to spare to go through with this?” That should and must become the centre of our new currency.

Many people say that we don’t have any solutions to the climate crisis. And they are right. Because how could we? How do you “solve” the greatest crisis that humanity has ever faced? How do you “solve” a war? How do you “solve” going to the moon for the first time? How do you “solve” inventing new inventions?

The climate crisis is both the easiest and the hardest issue we have ever faced. The easiest because we know what we must do. We must stop the emissions of greenhouse gases. The hardest because our current economics are still totally dependent on burning fossil fuels, and thereby destroying ecosystems in order to create everlasting economic growth.

“So, exactly how do we solve that?” you ask us – the schoolchildren striking for the climate.

And we say: “No one knows for sure. But we have to stop burning fossil fuels and restore nature and many other things that we may not have quite figured out yet.”

Then you say: “That’s not an answer!”

So we say: “We have to start treating the crisis like a crisis – and act even if we don’t have all the solutions.”

“That’s still not an answer,” you say.

Then we start talking about circular economy and rewilding nature and the need for a just transition. Then you don’t understand what we are talking about.

We say that all those solutions needed are not known to anyone and therefore we must unite behind the science and find them together along the way. But you do not listen to that. Because those answers are for solving a crisis that most of you don’t even fully understand. Or don’t want to understand.

You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before. Like now. And those answers don’t exist anymore. Because you did not act in time.

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

Sometimes we just simply have to find a way. The moment we decide to fulfil something, we can do anything. And I’m sure that the moment we start behaving as if we were in an emergency, we can avoid climate and ecological catastrophe. Humans are very adaptable: we can still fix this. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We must start today. We have no more excuses.

We children are not sacrificing our education and our childhood for you to tell us what you consider is politically possible in the society that you have created. We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us, and tell us that you really admire what we do.

We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.

I hope my microphone was on. I hope you could all hear me.

Hopefully, these climate change speeches will encourage you to take action in your local community. If you need more inspiration then head to my post on the best TED Talks on climate change , my guide to the best YouTube videos on climate change , and the sustainability poems to inspire you.

Found this post useful? Please consider buying me a virtual coffee to help support the site’s running costs.

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Wendy Graham is a sustainability expert and the founder of Moral Fibres, where's she's written hundreds of articles on since starting the site in 2013. She's dedicated to bringing you sustainability advice you can trust.

Wendy holds a BSc (Hons) in Environmental Geography and an MSc (with Distinction) in Environmental Sustainability - specialising in environmental education.

As well as this, Wendy brings 17 years of professional experience working in the sustainability sector to the blog.

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• Environment
• Climate change and energy
• Climate change adaptation

Speech - Climate change: too true to be good

Speech by Sir James Bevan, Chief Executive of the Environment Agency Royal Society of Arts, 24 September 2018

Introduction

This speech takes twenty minutes, provided I don’t get heckled. But for those of you who are in a rush, here’s the short version of what I’m going to say:

• Climate change is the biggest threat we face.
• If we don’t tackle it the consequences are grim.
• We can tackle it and we are. The three most important things we can do are to stop the activities that cause it; enhance our resilience to its effects; and talk about it.

Climate change is real

Say “climate change” and see how most people react. I find it’s a bit like “sustainable development”: a phrase at which many people quietly glaze over and switch off. So here’s the first point: Don’t switch off. Climate change isn’t just words. It is a real Thing. And man-made climate change is a very scary real thing.

The rise in global temperature over the last several decades is a matter of public record. There is an overwhelming scientific consensus that it can only be explained by one thing: the rise in greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activities.

Some people say that climate change is natural and we shouldn’t worry. The answer to that is that we have indeed had naturally-occurring climate change since the Earth was formed. But none of the natural causes of climate variation, from the Sun’s output, the tilt of the Earth, volcanic activity or emissions from rotting vegetation, can account for the warming we observe today. There is only one thing that can: the emissions from fossil fuels caused by human activities over the last two hundred years. The concentrations of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere have increased by nearly 30% since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

It’s not as bad as you think – it’s worse

Here’s another inconvenient truth. Not only is global warming happening, it may be speeding up. The 20 warmest years on record have all come since 1995. The five warmest years have all been in this decade, the 2010s. 2016 was the hottest year since records began.

And this year the UK had the joint hottest summer on record. It was extremely dry too – the driest across England since 1921. The Environment Agency’s hydrologists recorded exceptionally low river flows for five weeks in a row, reservoir stocks were at historic lows and soils in the North West were the driest on record.

The environment suffered badly: numerous species, habitats, birds, trees and aquatic life were affected by the hot conditions and high demand for water. The Environment Agency responded to a 330% increase in drought-related incidents as our teams acted to protect wildlife and rescue fish struggling due to low river flows and low oxygen. This kind of thing won’t happen every year. But it will happen more frequently, and it will happen worse. Most of us enjoyed this summer’s exceptional weather. But by 2040 it is likely there won’t be anything exceptional about summers like the one we have just had. The records will keep tumbling. Exceptional may be the new normal.

And just as the rate of temperature rise looks to be accelerating, so too does one of its main consequences: the rise in sea level. Over the last 20 years sea levels have risen at roughly twice the speed of the preceding 80 years.

It gets worse. While the international community has pledged to avoid a rise of more than 2°C in the average global temperature by 2100 compared with pre-industrial levels, many scientists think that the figure will be higher. The central scientific estimate now is that by 2100 global temperature will have risen by nearly twice the 2 degree figure - by around 3.5 °C.

Climate change has bad consequences

Second big point, and one that bears constant repetition: if we don’t tackle climate change, very bad things will happen.

“Global warming” is another of those deceptive phrases. It doesn’t sound that threatening. Indeed to cold Brits shivering on our chilly northern island it sounds rather appealing. Who wouldn’t want a bit more sun and the weather a few degrees warmer? But the phrase is misleading because it doesn’t identify what will actually happen as the globe warms. The answer is that:

The tropics will be hotter and drier.

The higher latitudes, where the UK sits, will be hotter and wetter.

In Britain we will have hotter summers. By 2040, we expect more than half of our summers to exceed 2003 temperatures.

We will have wetter winters, and extreme rainfall events will become even more extreme. This is already happening. In 2015’s Storm Desmond, a gauge at Honister Pass in Cumbria recorded 341mm of rain in 24 hours, a new record: that rain caused some of the worst flooding in living memory. Last year’s flash floods at the Cornish coastal village of Coverack were caused by an extreme rainfall event which set a new UK record for 3-hour rainfall intensity. Half a mile offshore the rainfall intensity was 25% higher. It was only a fortuitous accident of nature that it didn’t make landfall.

Sea levels will rise significantly, perhaps by up to a metre in places by 2100, as waters warm and take up more space and our glaciers and land-based ice sheets melt. Sea level rise is particularly scary, because while other climate change-driven effects like extreme flooding or drought can do terrible harm, recovery from them is possible. But there is no recovery from a rising sea: it takes land, communities, infrastructure and everything else away forever.

All of these changes in climate will have consequences. They will mean:

More frequent and more extreme flooding and coastal erosion, caused by those wetter winters, heavier rain, stronger storms and rising sea levels. That threatens all of us, because floods destroy: lives, livelihoods, communities.

More water shortages and higher drought risk, caused by the hotter drier summers and less predictable rainfall. That could do deep damage to our economy and our environment.

More frequent and more extreme fires and wildfires, such as we saw in the UK and around the world this summer, often with terrible human cost.

More air and water pollution, due to those longer, hotter summers. That will threaten the living world of plants and animals, our wider environment and our own health.

More damage to wildlife and the habitat on which it depends. In many cases that damage may be existential. If we continue to emit greenhouse gases at the same rate as today, then by 2050 one million species across the globe are likely to vanish.

We in this country are particularly exposed to these effects. The UK sits at a weather crossroads, with a big water mass to the west, a large land mass to the south and the jet stream running over the top. Our location means we will experience more of this extreme weather than some others.

So don’t get comfortable. If we allow climate change to continue unchecked, England’s green and pleasant land will be neither green nor pleasant. And if sea levels rise significantly, there won’t be much of our land left either . Example: Lincolnshire. Much of that beautiful county is flat and low-lying. Quite a lot of it is a tidal floodplain. It is already at significant flood risk. 43 people lost their lives there in the great 1953 flood when a huge storm surge brought the sea crashing through the coastal defences. That’s why the Environment Agency has spent hundreds of millions of pounds improving and maintaining Lincolnshire’s sea walls and other coastal defences. And it’s worked: in 2013 there was a bigger East Coast storm surge than the one sixty years previously – and nobody died.

But as sea levels rise and the storms get fiercer, how much higher can we build the walls around our coasts? There’s a limit to what’s practical and affordable. And even if we build ever higher and stronger defences along the coastline, there’s another problem: our rivers.

Climate change means more rain is likely to fall more quickly into our rivers. So they will fill up quicker, and will flood the surrounding land unless they can rapidly discharge all that rainwater into the sea. But the higher tides and sea levels which climate change will also bring mean that precisely when we need our rivers to be better at discharging water to the sea, they will be less and less able to do so, because they will be increasingly tide-locked.

So we could have three nightmare future scenarios: one where high seas overwhelm our sea defences, a second where the rivers flood the land behind the defences, and a third – the worst of all – where both of these things happen together.

The result, if we fail to address these future risks, will be that many low lying parts of the country will be either permanently waterlogged, or flooded with such frequency as to be no longer habitable. In my Lincolnshire example, Skegness would be lost, Lincoln would be at the edge of a new wet fenland landscape, and much of the rest of the county would revert to marsh.

Am I exaggerating? No. I might even be underplaying the risk. A report from an international team of climate researchers which hit the headlines this summer warned of a “hothouse Earth” – the risk that without intervention we could cross a threshold leading to runaway climate change, with sea level rise up to 60m. That wouldn’t just make Lincolnshire and Britain history: it would make most of the Earth uninhabitable. That is why climate change is simply the biggest issue there is. It is the biggest threat out there to our economy, environment, health, way of life, our country, our world, and our future.

But disaster is not inevitable: we can tackle this problem

That’s enough bad news. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be like this. We can tackle this problem, if we act now. Because while some of the effects of climate change - temperatures increasing, sea levels rising, wetter winters, more violent weather – will continue for the next 30-40 years no matter what we do now, we can affect what happens after that.

We know what we need to do. It’s summed up by another two words that tend to make people switch off but which also really matter: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation means addressing the causes of climate change, by reducing or stopping the human activities which are affecting the climate system, for example by cutting our emissions of greenhouse gases. Most of the UK’s emissions come from the way we produce and consume energy – from heating our buildings, driving our cars, manufacturing goods, watching our TVs or boiling our kettles. We can lower our emissions by becoming more energy efficient and switching to renewable or low-carbon fuels.

As a country we’ve made a good start on that. UK emissions are down 43% compared to 1990, while over the same period the economy has grown significantly. That’s really important: it shows that we can both tackle climate change and grow our economy. But most of these emission reductions have come from closing coal power stations and cleaning up heavy industry. That was the easy bit. It’s a lot harder to reduce emissions from transport, agriculture and buildings. That will require much greater use of renewable energy, and infrastructure to capture and store remaining carbon emissions. The quicker we can move ahead on all that the better.

Adaptation means making changes to prepare for, reduce and negate the effects of climate change, for example by building stronger sea defences to reduce the vulnerability of coastal communities. Other things we can and should be doing now include reducing water usage by cutting leakage and extending domestic metering; avoiding any unnecessary development in flood plains or on fast-eroding coastlines; and designing infrastructure that will be resilient to the more extreme weather we know is coming. There’s more good news. There is now a pretty broad consensus – at least in this country - on the need to do these things. The government gets it.

You can see that in the 25 Year Environment Plan launched this year by the Prime Minister and Michael Gove, which commits the government to take all possible action to mitigate climate change, including by continuing to cut greenhouse gas emissions; to adapt to reduce the impact of climate change; and to ensure that all government policies and investment decisions take it into account.

You can see that in the National Adaptation Programme issued by Defra in July, which sets out the actions the government will take over the next five years to help the country adapt to climate change; and which recognises that while we should continue to aim to keep global temperature rise well below 2° C, our resilience will only be robust if we prepare for worse scenarios.

And you can see it in the government’s new National Planning Policy Framework, which is explicit that all new development plans should “take a proactive approach to mitigating and adapting to climate change, taking into account the long-term implications for flood risk, coastal change, water supply, biodiversity and landscapes, and the risk of overheating from rising temperatures”.

The independent experts get it. The National Infrastructure Commission has recommended a national standard of flood protection for all communities to be achieved by 2050, a concept which the Environment Agency supports; and major investment to enhance water supply and reduce demand in order to tackle the long term drought risk which climate change threatens. We support that too.

The Green Finance Taskforce, composed of leading experts in academia, finance and civil society, has identified ways to encourage capital to move towards greener and cleaner sectors in the UK; and rightly framed this not as a cost but as a huge opportunity for investment, in particular in those sectors which are the backbone of the economy such as housing, transport, retail, utilities and industry.

Business increasingly gets it. The insurance companies are pricing climate change into their policies and looking to help their customers become more resilient to its effects, not least because that can cut insurance payouts when things like flooding happen. The water companies, energy companies, retail sector and others see the hard-nosed business sense in investing now for resilience later. All businesses need to be able to sustain their operations in a climate changed world, and to have confidence that when extreme weather hits, they will be the first back up and running.

The NGOs get it. Many of them, not just the environmental NGOs, are recognising that climate change poses the biggest threat to the things they and their members want to achieve, and are rightly challenging the rest of us to go further and faster in tackling it.

And - I hope you will agree - the Environment Agency itself gets it.

As regulators, we work every day with industry and the energy sector to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. We are working with local authorities, planners and developers to create better places, designed for the climate we now anticipate. We are working with the water companies to manage the short term consequences of drought, as we have been doing this summer, and to ensure that the country will have better water security in the long term: last week I launched a new collaborative initiative with the leaders of the water industry to do precisely that.

We are building new flood defences up and down the country, explicitly designed for climate resilience. We are thinking long term about those defences. We design them with the latest climate change predictions in mind. And we build extra strong foundations beneath many of them so we can raise them as sea level and river flows rise. And despite their long design lives, we are already working on a replacement for many of them.

The Thames Barrier, which protects 125 square kilometres of central London, millions of people, and £200 billion worth of assets, is designed to sustain that protection against a changing climate till around 2070. But we are already planning its successor. I like to think of projects like the next Thames Barrier as the modern version of the great age of cathedral building. We will develop the plans and lay the foundations, and future generations will lift the spire.

The Environment Agency’s philosophy is that we should aim to do better than just surviving a changing climate: our aspiration is to help the country thrive in it. We can do that by working with the grain of the natural environment.

Example: the Medmerry flood defence scheme on the Sussex Coast. Instead of building an unsightly wall to protect the local community from rising seas we knocked a large hole in the shoreline to let the sea in so as to create a large new area of coastal wetland. That wetland is the flood defence: it absorbs the high tides safely. But it is also a new and beautiful wildlife habitat, now run by the RSBP as a bird sanctuary. It’s a great example of how you can turn the threat of climate change into an opportunity to create a better place.

We in the Environment Agency are also trying to walk the walk ourselves. We are reducing the carbon footprint from our own day to day operations year on year. Our £3bn Pension Fund is a leader in green finance. We have embedded climate risk into our pension investment strategy for well over a decade and have delivered outperformance.

Together with the Church of England’s investing bodies we founded the Transition Pathway Initiative, with the Paris climate goals at its heart. The TPI assesses how companies are preparing for the transition to a low-carbon economy and is supported by asset managers and owners with over £7 trillion of assets under management. And at Governor Brown’s Global Climate Action Summit earlier this month, it was announced that TPI’s insight will inform Climate Action 100+, a global investor initiative to engage with companies to drive climate action, supported by $31 trillion assets under management.

Perhaps more important still, the British public increasingly get it. More and more of the people I meet up and down the country tell me that they are seeing evidence of climate change happening in front of their eyes. Many of them then go on to say that all of us as individuals have a duty to what we can to tackle it.

Don’t underestimate the power of the people. We’ve seen an almost overnight change in behaviour in relation to plastics. We’re seeing something similar, if slower, in people’s attitude to water, with more and more of us taking care to use it wisely. It has become socially unacceptable to litter or to use throwaway plastic bags. It is increasingly socially unacceptable to waste water. The same thing can happen – and maybe is happening – with regard to behaviour which stokes climate change.

One last bit of good news: while it will cost a lot of money to respond successfully to climate change, we can afford it. Indeed, it’s the best investment we could possibly make. It would be much more expensive not to respond. And the economic benefits of mitigating and adapting to climate change – in terms of damage foregone, extra growth achieved through new investment and infrastructure, prosperity boosted through innovative technology - far outweigh the costs.

The scandal is not that climate change is made up. The scandal is that it’s not, and that while a lot is already being done to tackle it, we are still not doing all we could. Why is tackling changing climate not at the top of everyone’s agenda? Partly, no doubt, because most people have busy lives and other things to worry about. Partly because the effects of a changing climate tend to be invisible and incremental until they are suddenly catastrophic. And maybe too because of the words we use. Language matters. So here’s a final thought: if words like “climate change” and “global warming” have become a turn-off for most ordinary people, maybe we should change the words. Perhaps we should talk instead about what those things actually mean: killer weather, a world under water, and a mortgaged future.

Many people might not get out of bed to fight something that sounds vaguely technical and non-threatening called climate change. But pretty much all of us would do so to protect our loved ones, our homes and our livelihoods, and to build a better world. Conclusion: climate change is too true to be good. So let’s tell it like it is, let’s tackle it together, and let’s redouble our efforts. Over the last two hundred years humans have comprehensively demonstrated that they can change the climate – and we have changed it for the worse by doing the wrong things. Now let’s show we can change it for the better by doing the right things.

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• Speech Writing /

Speech on Climate Change For Students

• Updated on  
• Dec 18, 2023

How do you feel when covered completely overhead? It must be suffocating, and in the meanwhile, due to the scale down of oxygen, your brain, after some time, will stop responding due to a deep state of unconsciousness. 

The above situation was just an example to describe the trapping of carbon dioxide. Imagine what will happen if our environment gets trapped with harmful gasses and inhaling oxygen comes with no options. All such adverse effects of climate change can be hazardous for all living beings.

As a burning topic of the current scenario, we will discuss this burning climate change speech for students.

Also Read: Essay on Climate Change

Long Speech On Climate Change

Greetings to all the teachers and students gathered here. Today, I stand before you to address a matter of urgency and global significance—Climate Change. In my climate change speech, I have tried to cover relevant facts, figures, adverse effects and, importantly, how to save our environment from climate change. 

Also Read: Essay on Global Warming 

As per data studies by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), there is a continuous increase in global temperature with a comprehensive rise. Hazardous situations of this increase in temperature will follow up in the coming years, too, which is again an unfortunate signal.

Earth signals, which are constant by nature and cannot be reverted, are increasing. 

The rise in drought, floods, wildfires, and utmost rainfall continuously reflects the signals that are not sound indicators. Again, if we talk about numbers and statistics, the sixth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warned humans about heat-trapping figures of nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) from 1850 to 1900. 

Moreover, the body has warned about the expected reach or exceed 1.5 degrees C (about 3 degrees F) within the next few decades.

Now here comes a question, what has led to such an adverse situation? 

Natural reasons such as pollen remains, glacier lengths, ocean sediments and more are some of the naturally occurring processes that contribute a little portion to climate change. But the major contributor to this worst condition, after an industrial revolution, is only created by human activities. 

Regular cutting of forests or deforestation, burning of fossil fuels for releasing energy, regular use of fertilizers in agriculture, and livestock farming are some of the major reasons for climate change in the environment. 

Despite all the adverse effects of global climatic change, many organizations, both private and government, are working for the welfare of climate change. 

However, since humans are responsible for this disaster, we should try our best to curb it in the safest and most secure possible ways; likewise, using less private transportation, switching to e-bikes or zero-emissions vehicles following the practice of reducing, reusing, repair and recycle and practicing more use of plastic free products. 

All such efforts will help curb the ill effects of the climate of the earth and environment. 

Also Read: Environmental Conservation

Also Read: How to Prepare for UPSC in 6 Months?

Deforestation, changes in naturally occurring carbon dioxide concentrations, livestock farming, and burning fossil fuels are major causes of climate change.

Less tree cutting, less dependency on fossil fuels, use of different forms of natural energy, and use of electric vehicles can solve the problem of global climatic change.

Paris Agreement is an agreement between 196 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) to reduce and mitigate Greenhouse Gas emissions.

Rise in temperature, drought, soil erosion, landslides, and floods are some of the adverse effects of climatic changes in the environment. 

The Montreal Protocol, Kyoto Protocol, and Paris Agreement are important international agreements on climate change.

Related Articles

For more information on such interesting speech topics for your school, visit our speech writing page and follow Leverage Edu.

Deepika Joshi

Deepika Joshi is an experienced content writer with expertise in creating educational and informative content. She has a year of experience writing content for speeches, essays, NCERT, study abroad and EdTech SaaS. Her strengths lie in conducting thorough research and ananlysis to provide accurate and up-to-date information to readers. She enjoys staying updated on new skills and knowledge, particulary in education domain. In her free time, she loves to read articles, and blogs with related to her field to further expand her expertise. In personal life, she loves creative writing and aspire to connect with innovative people who have fresh ideas to offer.

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/read-climate-activist-greta-thunbergs-speech-to-the-un

Read climate activist Greta Thunberg’s speech to the UN

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg chastised world leaders Monday for failing younger generations by not taking sufficient steps to stop climate change.

“You have stolen my childhood and my dreams with your empty words,” Thunberg said at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York.

Thunberg traveled to the U.S. by sailboat last month so she could appear at the summit. She and other youth activists led international climate strikes on Friday in an attempt to garner awareness ahead of the UN’s meeting of political and business leaders.

Read Greta Thunberg’s speech below:

This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you?

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering, people are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?

For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight? You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency, but no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil and that I refuse to believe.

The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in ten years only gives us a 50 percent chance of staying below 1.5 degrees and the risk of setting up irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. Fifty percent may be acceptable to you, but those numbers do not include tipping points most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution, or the aspects of equity and climate justice.

They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So a 50 percent risk is simply not acceptable to us. We who have to live with the consequences. To have a 67 percent chance of staying below the 1.5 degree of temperature rise, the best odds given by the IPCC, the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on January 1, 2018.

Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons. How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just business as usual and some technical solutions? With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 that entire budget will be gone is less than 8 and a half years. There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today because these numbers are too uncomfortable and you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

You are failing us, but young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this, right here, right now, is where we draw the line. The world is waking up, and change is coming whether you like it or not.

Gretchen Frazee is a Senior Coordinating Broadcast Producer for the PBS NewsHour.

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COP26: 'Not fear, but hope' - Attenborough speech in full

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Sir David Attenborough has told delegates at COP26 that they are powerful enough to save the planet, if they work together.

In an impassioned speech to leaders, the naturalist and COP26 people's advocate brought together video of the natural world and voices of young people to warn that, because of rising carbon dioxide levels, "the stability we all depend on is breaking".

More on climate summit:

The COP26 global climate summit in Glasgow in November is seen as crucial if climate change is to be brought under control. Almost 200 countries are being asked for their plans to cut emissions, and it could lead to major changes to our everyday lives.

Why the COP26 climate summit is important

Simple guide to climate change

What will climate change look like for you?

Will the UK meet its climate targets?

How extreme weather is linked to climate change

• Subsection Science & Environment
• Published 1 November 2021

News from the Columbia Climate School

You Asked: What’s the Best Way To Talk About Climate Change?

This story was published as part of our Climate Week NYC coverage. Learn more about Climate Week, read our other stories , and check out our upcoming events .

More Americans today are worried about climate change than ever before. From 2014 to 2020, the proportion of people who said they felt “alarmed” by global warming nearly tripled, according to research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. But while public awareness for climate change is at an all-time high, dinner tables and debate stages can still feel boobytrapped with uncomfortable conversations. As part of State of the Planet’s “You Asked” series, Columbia scientists, journalists, and content creators spoke to why that is and how, through thoughtful climate communication, it doesn’t have to be.

The Evolution of Climate Communication

Climate scientist and Columbia Climate School professor Kate Marvel remembers when the main story about climate change had to do with whether or not it existed. Experts not unlike herself were pitted against skeptics on live television with little time for well-meaning discussion. The relatively few stories that did uplift climate science focused on what was happening in the natural world; for mainstream publications—and the majority of their readers—that meant climate change was synonymous with polar bears trapped on melting icebergs or rainforests burning in the Amazon.

Andrew Revkin was an environmental reporter with The New York Times for over 15 years before joining the Earth Institute as the director of the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability. He said the “newsroom norm” of  prioritizing what had happened that day made it difficult for issues with incremental developments and long-term time horizons to get top billing. It is only in the last handful of years, he noted, that climate change has begun to “infuse itself into other coverage,” with reporters writing about its impact on other pressing social issues such as public health and racial justice.

At the same time, climate solutions have become more visible and scalable, resulting in coverage that considershow the crisis can be mitigated, rather than just its consequences. Sabine Marx, former managing director of Columbia’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, said this shift has offered a psychological advantage in how the threat of climate change is communicated. “If I know there are steps that I can take towards actionable solutions, then I am much more likely to accept that there’s a problem,” she explained.

Climate communication has also been supported by the proliferation of new forms of media.  Sustainable Development student Lauren Ritchie , for example, founded the online platform The EcoJustice Project to make climate education and action more accessible to her generation.

“Gen Z is eager to learn and trying to get involved,” said Ritchie. “Most of the time, I’m making content based on what I would want to consume.”

Through social media features like Instagram Live, Ritchie provides her tens of thousands of followers with the opportunity to hear firsthand from people experiencing and responding to climate change in their communities.

How To Talk About Climate Change

Whether it is in person, in print, or online, climate communication often begins where it ends—with the audience. Marx explained that the experiences and values of a person inherently shape the way that they choose to engage with climate change, if at all. As a result, what resonates with a financial investor in New England might not be what resonates with a farmer in the Southeast.

“Knowing your audience will allow you to get beyond the information deficit so that you can look at filling a motivation deficit,” said Marx.

With no shortage of prospective audiences, climate communicators are constantly adapting the way that they frame the issue, a process that Marvel has found to be really empowering. “I don’t like feeling like a robot,” she said. “I think if you decide that there’s only one way to communicate about this, and you have to say the same thing over and over, then you’re going to burn out really quickly.”

Journalist Brian Kahn will use any combination of analogies, examples, and recent climate events in his work to connect with his readers—including the ones who send him hate mail. “As long as they’re not threatening my life, I’ll usually respond,” he said. “There’s a surprising amount of common ground between folks where you might not expect it.”

While finding common ground does not always equate to changing someone’s mind, Marvel noted that it is often the “human conversations without ulterior motives” that are the most productive. “When I talk about climate change, I want other people to understand this thing that’s really important to me,” she said, “and I want to learn from other people.”

It is a strategy that Marx refers to as “leading to ” climate change, rather than “leading with ” climate change. By starting with what is relatable—raising kids, owning a home, enjoying long walks on the beach—the impacts of climate change can be tethered to the shared reality of what is at stake. “We want to open the door with something that is meaningful to people, something that they care about,” she said.

The Future of Climate Communication

Given that climate communication has changed so much in the last two decades, it can be difficult to predict what will come next for the field as a whole. For Revkin, the future of climate communication will involve convening more stakeholders for in-depth conversations rather than writing for traditional media outlets.

“Climate and sustainability communication is different from telling another good story,” he said. “It’s getting brains into a place and having them think about something they might not otherwise, to collaborate on something that they can do more effectively together than alone.”

Through his “Sustain What?” webcast series, Revkin has already hosted a wide variety of experts to discuss issues ranging from global ecological restoration to the future of nuclear energy . In the last year and a half, he has recorded over 220 episodes that have engaged an estimated one million listeners.

The creation of new shared spaces like the “Sustain What?” webcast series can also function to champion greater diversity in climate discourse—something that Ritchie, Marvel, and Kahn stressed is desperately needed moving forward. “There is so much nuance to climate change,” said Ritchie, “and yet we tend to look at it through this privileged, white lens.”

Marvel agreed. “It’s an existential problem if climate communication is a monolith,” she said. “No one person or group of people is going to be able to talk to all communities, so we need to uplift diverse voices.”

Perhaps then the most important part of climate communication is that it keeps happening in more places with more people, especially in the face of what Kahn referred to as an “epidemic of climate silence” in the United States and around the world.

“People should not be afraid to talk about this stuff,” he said. “Having these conversations—even if they feel hard—is the first step to actually acting, passing climate policy, and getting this work done.”

Watch Elise Gout chat with Andy Revkin, Director of Columbia Climate School’s Initiative on Communication and Sustainability and host of the “Sustain What?” webcast series, on how to talk about climate change. 

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Speaking of Climate Change

Climate change is the greatest public health crisis we face, with global implications for tackling disease, food, safety, and security. When it comes to cultivating consensus and adoption of the best solutions, communication is key—and the messenger matters most. Have you ever heard the phrase “Your vibe attracts your tribe”? We often surround ourselves with people of similar beliefs, whether intentionally or not. Wilbur Schramm, one of the original academics in communication theory, suggested that individuals are more likely to receive information if they share the same field of experience, beliefs, values, and learned meanings as the sender of information. The implication is that fruitful conversations on climate change are more likely to result from conversations between members of the same “tribe”—individuals with similar beliefs, shared experiences, or kindred values.

C-Change Conversations, which was launched by an all-volunteer group in 2014 (and is unrelated to the Harvard Chan School’s center with a similar acronym), embodies these principles. Their mission is to discuss climate change with moderate and conservative audiences by meeting them where they are. It’s an approach that is yielding results across the country, and I hope you can learn from their experiences and adapt them to your personal and professional work.

—Gina McCarthy Professor of the Practice of Public Health; Director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE); Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

By Kathleen Biggins and Katy Kinsolving

The tall gray-haired man spoke politely but firmly, his frustration obvious. “I don’t buy into the fact that man is causing climate change , and I certainly reject big-government policies that pick winners and losers in the energy markets.” Next to him, a younger man chimed in, “Even if it’s real, we can’t hurt our economy with more regulations when China and India are getting a free ride.” The young man’s wife added, “I’m in finance, and I know you can’t trust models, especially ones that project far in the future. Why should I trust climate models?”

The tension in the audience was palpable. How would the speaker, who was there to outline the risks of climate change, respond to these challenges?

This scenario plays out often as our group, C-Change Conversations, travels the country speaking to moderates and conservatives about the risks of climate change. On this night, we were addressing a group at a private club, but it could just as easily have been in a church basement, a theater, the community room of a public library, or even in a private home. Often, the audience is guarded; people may feel personally attacked when someone says climate change is real. Our objective is to neutralize that emotional response and help audience members evaluate climate change risk in a different way.

Tribal Communication

Social psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt have documented that much of our decision making takes place based on instinct, influenced by those we consider to be members of our “tribe,” and that our intellect is used to confirm that choice. This means that on an issue such as climate change, facts alone are not persuasive. The top predictor of one’s opinion on climate change is political party affiliation: Individual positions on the issue are often a litmus test of whether someone is a “good conservative” or a “good liberal.”

Our organization, C-Change Conversations, has been able to work with the seemingly inflexible target of political moderates and conservatives to discuss how they evaluate climate-change-related risk. We reach people with climate change information through their nonpolitical “tribes”—associations like garden clubs, business clubs, investment clubs, and country clubs. By meeting with those who are skeptical, in a place where they are comfortable and surrounded by people they consider to be peers and friends, we find they are more willing to listen. We often speak at regularly scheduled meetings, so that audience members do not have to consciously decide to come hear our message. This means they don’t feel disloyal to their tribe, uncomfortable, or that they are wasting their time.

We try to establish a personal connection with each group’s leadership. Our team members are usually similar to our audiences—perhaps they have lived or attended schools in their area, had similar career paths, or have been members of a similar association. We are introduced by someone within the audience’s group who has heard us before. This gives us an endorsement from a member of the “tribe,” someone whom our audiences know and trust. When people learn that we do not have a political agenda and that we are volunteers traveling the country solely because we are concerned and want to share this message, they are even more receptive to listening.

Leveraging Conservative Values

Our presentation begins with three facts everyone can agree on: that the climate has always been changing due to natural causes, that fossil fuels have helped us create vibrant economies and have improved our quality of life, and that climate change is a difficult question to discuss. We do not frame climate change as an environmental issue. Instead, we talk about how it will negatively impact our economy and jobs, our personal security and health, and our exposure to geopolitical instability. We use humor and a friendly, nonlecturing tone, and we provide scientific information from credible sources such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

While our presentation is grounded in science, we translate it into layman’s terms. For example, we explain that fossil fuels are made from carbon that fell to the surface of the earth millions of years ago, got sequestered over the ensuing period, and that humankind’s actions are reintroducing that carbon into the atmosphere at a rate that does not happen in nature.

We also note that many politically and culturally conservative institutions, such as the military, national intelligence agencies, and large corporations, are identifying the risks associated with climate change. We add that a moderate and conservative stance is not necessarily at odds with government action on climate change. Indeed, several lions of the Republican Party—including former Secretary of State George Shultz, and former Secretaries of the Treasury James Baker III and Henry M. Paulson—have been outspoken proponents of policies such as placing a fee on carbon, arguing that such policies follow conservative free-market principles. Recently, Lamar Alexander, the Republican senior senator from Tennessee, proposed a new “Manhattan Project” that focuses on investing in research to create advanced computing and breakthroughs in nuclear, natural gas, carbon capture, better batteries, greener buildings, electric vehicles, and solar power.

Most important, we are scrupulously nonpartisan. We highlight the fact that economic and political realities have historically precluded both major parties from taking steps to mitigate climate change risks, and that many different effective policy approaches, including those that fit within a conservative agenda, could be implemented today.

Inspired by Personal Change

Our approach is grounded in our own personal experience. We are moderates and conservatives ourselves, and our minds were opened when we attended a national affairs and legislation conference on conservation in 2013 organized by the Garden Club of America. We heard business leaders, scientists, and a rear admiral of the United States Navy describe how climate change was a significant and urgent threat to all Americans because of its impact on our economy, health, and national security. We listened in part because they were such credible experts and were presented by an organization that we trusted and respected.

Our founder, Kathleen Biggins, spent the next year educating herself on the issue. She recognized that many of her conservative and moderate peers did not believe the risk was real or significant. She wondered if it was possible to mirror the experience that had changed her own mind at the conference and decided to create a salon-style lecture series of experts that would be credible to those two groups. She felt that hosting the events in private homes would help attendees feel welcome and comfortable.

Kathleen asked three others who had attended the national gardening conference to join her. Those three were Pam Mount, the former mayor of Lawrence, New Jersey, who has deep experience in public-private partnerships; Katy Kinsolving, a former nonprofit management consultant with public relations experience; and Carrie Dyckman, a former producer of educational and electronic media. Together, we launched C-Change Conversations in 2014 in our home community of Princeton, New Jersey.

Since then, C-Change Conversations has hosted 17 lectures, featuring scientists such as Arctic specialist Max Holmes of the Woods Hole Research Center; financiers such as Bob Litterman, former manager of risk at Goldman Sachs; public policy experts including Christine Todd Whitman, former Republican governor of New Jersey and former Environmental Protection Agency administrator; David Crane, former chief executive officer of NRG Energy; and Peter Hoeppe, former head of Geo Risk Research at the Global Climate Forum and a climate expert for the world’s leading reinsurance company, Munich Re.

A Primer on Climate Change

The speaker series raised climate change awareness among business and community leaders in Princeton. It also positioned C-Change Conversations as a credible voice in climate change communication. However, we realized that many in the audience lacked an understanding of the science underpinning climate change and therefore did not recognize the urgency of the issue. We could tell from their questions and comments that they viewed the issue as an intellectual one, rather than one that would directly impact their own well-being. Without an accessible overview of the science and economics, it was difficult for them to appreciate the scope, complexity, and short-term implications of the problem.

For instance, many did not understand that greenhouse gases make up a tiny portion—less than 1 percent—of our atmosphere, yet play an outsized role in stabilizing the temperature that has enabled humans to thrive over the last 10,000 years. It was hard for them to appreciate how human activities that release additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere could have such a profound effect on temperature, precipitation, and agriculture. In addition, we provided historical perspectives to help our listeners understand why the current speed of change in weather trends, which is unprecedented in past cycles of nature, exacerbates the dangers of a warmer planet.

Our team held focus groups with their peers to understand what information they would find helpful. Kathleen, who has a background in journalism and advertising, worked with climate scientists and energy policy experts to develop the C-Change Conversations “Primer,” a 50-minute presentation designed to answer questions that moderates and conservatives—who are often concerned that the risks are hyped and that any action to combat climate change will harm our economy—might have on the issue.

After presenting the Primer locally, C-Change Conversations was asked to open the Garden Club of America’s same national conservation conference that had started them on their journey. From there, delegates who heard the presentation invited them to their communities around the country. Two years after the group’s formation, C-Change Conversations has been asked to present to a wide range of organizations in 26 states, including Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.

Fighting the “Spiral of Silence”

Our goal is to reach as many people as we can with the overarching message that climate change is a critical issue in species survival, environmental conservation, global migration, and human well-being in general—and one that we need to join together to address. Social scientists say there is a “spiral of silence” around this issue, that most Americans do not discuss it on a regular basis. This silence enables policymakers—who are elected to fix issues of immediate concern, not become embroiled in complex and difficult long-term problems—to leave climate change action for others.

The public health arena is an important forum for us. We have learned from past presentations to health care professionals that many do not understand how climate change will impact them personally, nor how it could affect their patients. Many have not focused on how the trend undermines health in general—for example, how climate change leads to heavier precipitation, which compromises water supply and can isolate or close hospitals and medical facilities. Climate change also raises the risk and severity of natural disasters. Dangerous heat waves increase mortality and put pressure on agriculture, diminishing the quantity and quality of our food supply.

Opening Ears, Hearts, and Minds

We continue this effort because we see and hear that we are making a difference. At almost every presentation we deliver, we are asked to go to another community to deliver the Primer. This strong word-of-mouth reception suggests to us that our approach is working. Again and again, audience members have thanked us for our apolitical, calm, moderate tone. This type of reception underscores that people are willing to change their minds if approached in a respectful, nonpartisan way.

Recently, we received a standing ovation from a conservative crowd in Columbia, South Carolina. In Nantucket, Massachusetts, we were approached by an attendee who said, “You’ve opened my ears, my heart, and my mind.”

Survey results and testimonials from attendees show that many of them now feel more comfortable talking about climate change because it seems “less taboo.” They say they feel “empowered” because they understand the basic science of why climate change is unfolding. We believe there are many ways for an individual to help address climate change, and we offer a few suggestions to audiences at the end of the presentation—from managing their personal carbon footprint to supporting organizations that are working in this arena. Because we are a 501(c)(3) organization, we do not engage in lobbying efforts. We do encourage everyone who comes to our presentations to vote—no matter on which side of the aisle they sit—and we encourage them to contact their legislators at the local, state, and federal level to let them know that addressing climate change is important.

The scale of the response necessary to blunt the worst of climate change mandates that we as a society come together, just as we did in the race to the moon and our victory in World War II. But we cannot join forces without consensus that the problem is real and urgent. In our focused efforts with moderates and conservatives, we are trying to do our part in laying the groundwork for action.

As an audience member in Louisiana wrote to us: “Thank you for presenting the facts that get to the core of the matter. I for one will not sit around waiting for the ice caps to melt … you have inspired me to take action and sound the alarm in the name of all mankind.”

Kathleen Biggins and Katy Kinsolving are the co-founders of C-Change Conversations.

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Read Greta Thunberg's full speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit

Teen environmental activist Greta Thunberg spoke at the United Nations on Monday about climate change, accusing world leaders of inaction and half-measures.

Here are her full remarks:

My message is that we'll be watching you.

This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet, you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words and yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency, but no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act then you would be evil and that I refuse to believe.

The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50 percent chance of staying below 1.5 degrees and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

Fifty percent may be acceptable to you, but those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice.

They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

So a 50 percent risk is simply not acceptable to us, we who have to live with the consequences.

How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just business as usual and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than eight and a half years.

There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable and you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

You are failing us, but the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you and if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.

We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up and change is coming, whether you like it or not.

Climate Change Persuasive Essay

Climate Change Persuasive

Climate Change: Persuasive Essay Climate change has been discussed a plethora of times in the science community. Only a small number of scientists believe that climate change is not happening. Most scientists today agree that climate change is indeed happening and its causing extreme damage to the planet. What is majorly causing climate change is the burning of fossil fuels. The gasses released are affecting the atmosphere creating a greenhouse like effect on the earth which makes the temperature

Persuasive Essay On Climate Change

Mohamed Idris Larry Huff ENGL 1301 15 October 17 Climate Change: How To Stop It In Its Tracks As Earths average temperature increases every year, the discussion of climate change has become a significant topic in the scientific community. Human activities such as powering factories, running automobiles or something as simple as burning wood for heat, emit dangerous greenhouse gases. What makes these greenhouse gases so detrimental is that they absorb the heat radiating off

Persuasive Speech On Climate Change

Persuasive Speech Outline Don’t Ignore Climate Change Purpose : To persuade my audience to change their perception on climate change. Thesis : Climate change is a controversial topic that some believe to be fake. Studies show that climate change is a real danger going on around us. These studies uncover what the future holds for humanity. As humans it is our moral duty to do what is right by earth, that has been our home for millions of years. 1. Attention A. Read quote by the 8th Secretary General

Climate Change “There’s one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent threat of a changing climate.” - Barack Obama. Climate change has been a popular topic of discussion for years now, because of the threat to our environment. The world will forever be changed if climate change isn’t taken into serious consideration and not in a good way. Climate change has had many negative effects, for example, damage to coral reefs, the increase

Due to climate change, millions of people all over the world are suffering from issues with their health. In the United States, waves of relentless heat, mostly in the southern states, have a drastic effect upon more and more people each year. Many people believe that this is because each generation gets weaker than the one before; for example, about a year or so ago, there was a discussion about whether or not they should put air conditioning on school buses because children were passing out from

years climate change has been a controversial issue affecting individuals worldwide; climate change has been debated by scientists including the rest of the world. Many factors can affect climate change such as biological factors and human actions. The intricate details are what go unnoticed and unmanaged, people may be greatly against this claim. However, it is underlying factors, like landfills and driving cars, that help maintain the increasing temperature of the earth thus, climate change has become

Overall, internationally and nationally there is an inadequate and underdeveloped system of addressing climate change. Global climate change means it is a global problem, so one nation or a couple of nations will not be enough to combat the severe impacts headed our way. The world will need to address the effects of the changing climate on society and the ecosystems and pursue actions together to see any improvement. There has been several promising plans proposed for all heavy greenhouse gas emitters

The topic of climate change has been one of much controversy in recent times. In fact, down in the District of Columbia you can find Republicans and Democrats bickering about the issue often. Headings such as “California Drought is Made Worse by Global Warming” and images such as polar bears stranded on floating ice simply add fuel to the fire. Although maybe not an only factor, humans have definitely contributed majorly to global warming. With all of the air pollution that humans have added (and

Debate around the global climate change has reached a fever pitch in recent years. Though the storm has been swirling around for the past two decades, little more than talk and sweet nothings have pervaded discourse. Though certain political segments have taken the downside seriously, they have had difficulty mobilizing all fronts. The looming question: how to secure our energy future? Ideally, the gradual weaning off non-renewables and transitioning into clean, sustainable fuels would occur naturally

Climate change is about the changes in global temperature over time, the climate patterns, and the causes and effects of climate change. As we all know, climate change has been one of the most important global issues in our world, and I believe the only way we could help with the temperature changing situation is if we all work together, by using our knowledge, our technologies, and our resources. This essay is about understanding climate change, and what we can do to stop it. In this paper, I will

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• Climate Change Speech/Global Warming Speech

Download Long and Short Climate Change Speech Essay in English Free PDF from Vedantu

Earth is the only planet which has variety in weather and climate crucial for survival.  But we humans are killing nature to fulfil our need and greed that causes global warming, eventually leading to climate change. Here, we have provided both long and short Climate Change speech or Global Warming speech along with 10 lines for a brief speech on Global Warming. Students can refer to this article whenever they are supposed to write a speech on Global Warming. 

Long Global Warming Speech

Global Warming refers to the Earth's warming, i.e. rise in the Earth's surface temperature. A variety of human activities, such as industrial pollution and the burning of fossil fuels, are responsible for this temperature rise. These operations emit gases that cause the greenhouse effect and, subsequently, global warming. Climate change, starvation, droughts, depletion of biodiversity, etc. are some of the most important consequences of global warming.

The average surface temperature of the planet has risen by around 0.8 ° Celsius since 1880. The rate of warming per decade has been around 0.15 °-0.2 ° Celsius. This is a worldwide shift in the temperature of the planet and should not be confused with the local changes we witness every day, day and night, summer and winter, etc.

There can be several causes for Global Warming, the GreenHouse Effect is believed to be the primary and major cause. This impact is caused primarily by gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbon, nitrous oxides, etc. In the atmosphere around the Earth, these gases form a cover from which the Sun's hot rays can penetrate the Earth but can not leave. So, in the lower circle of the Earth, the heat of the Sun persists, allowing the temperature to increase.

This is not something new, it is not something we weren’t aware of before. Since childhood, each one of us present here has been made to write a speech on Global Warming in their school/college, at least once. We have been made aware of the disastrous effects through movies, articles, competitions, posters, etc. But what have we done? Recently, the Greta Thunberg's Climate Change speech was making headlines. Greta Thunberg is a 16-year-old teenager who got the chance to speak at the United Nations Climate Action Summit. Although, most of us were quick to term Greta Thunberg Climate Change speech as ‘Scathing’ but very few could point out the need for such a brutal reminder. Remember? “We have been made to write a speech on Global Warming since our school days and nothing changed”. Maybe a searing reminder would bring a change and yes, it sure did.

Now, we have the titanic fame, Leonardo DiCaprio, speaking up about climate change in his Oscar speech as well as at the UN. However, Leonardo Dicaprio's Climate Change speech makes us aware of the fact that this has grown beyond individual choices. If we have to fight climate change, industries and corporations have to take decisive large-scale action.

I would like to end my speech by saying that only spreading awareness isn't the answer. It's time to act, as actions yield results.

Short Speech on Global Warming

Today, I am here to deliver a short speech on Global Warming. We all are well aware of Global Warming and how it results in Climate Change. Owing to global warming, there have been cases of severe drought. Regions, where there used to be a lot of rainfall, are seeing less rainfall. The monsoon trend has shifted around the globe. Global warming also causes ice to melt and the level of the ocean to rise, resulting in floods.

Various species are also widely impacted by global warming. Some land organisms are very vulnerable to changes in temperature and environment and can not tolerate extreme conditions. Koalas, for example, are at risk of famine because of climate change. Several fish and tortoise species are susceptible to changes in ocean temperatures and die.

One of the biggest threats to global security is climate change. Climate change knows no borders and poses us all with an existential threat. A significant security consequence of climate change is a rise in the frequency of severe weather events, especially floods and storms. This has an effect on city and town facilities, access to drinking water, and other services to sustain everyday life. It also displaces the population and since 2008, disasters caused by natural hazards have displaced an average of 26.4 million people annually from their homes. 85% of these are weather-related. This is equal to every second of approximately one person displaced.

It is important that we finally stop debating about it. Schools need to stop making students write a speech on Global Warming or Climate Change and focus on making them capable of living a sustainable life. Face it with courage and honesty. 

10 Lines for Brief Speech on Global Warming

Here, we have provided 10 key pointers for Climate Change Speech for Students.

Global warming refers to the above-average temperature increase on Earth.

The primary cause of global warming is the Greenhouse effect.

Climate change is blamed for global warming, as it badly affects the environment.

The most critical and very important issue that no one can overlook is climate change; it is also spreading its leg in India.

India's average temperature has risen to 1.1 degrees Celsius in recent years.

Living creatures come out of their natural environment due to global warming, and eventually become extinct.

Climate change has contributed to weather pattern disruptions across the globe and has led to unusual shifts in the monsoon.

Human actions, apart from natural forces, have also led to this transition. Global warming leads to drastic climate change, leading to flooding, droughts and other climate catastrophes.

The pattern of monsoon winds is influenced by changes in global temperature and alters the time and intensity of rain. Unpredictable climate change impacts the nation's farming and production.

Planting more trees can be a positive step in eliminating the global warming problem.

What is Climate Change?

Climate change refers to alterations in Earth's climate, it has been happening since the planet was formed. The Climate is always changing. There are different factors that could contribute to Climate Change, including natural events and human activities.

Factors that cause Climate Change

The sun’s energy output

Volcanic eruptions

Earth’s orbit around the sun

Ocean currents

Land-use changes

Greenhouse gasses emissions from human activity

The most significant factor that contributes to Climate Change is greenhouse gasses emissions from human activity. These gasses form a “blanket” around Earth that traps energy from the sun. This trapped energy makes Earth warm and disturbs the Earth’s climate.

The Impact of Climate Change

Climate change is already happening. It is causing more extreme weather conditions, such as floods and droughts.

Climate change could lead to a loss of biodiversity, as plants and animals are unable to adapt to the changing climate.

Climate change could also cause humanitarian crises, as people are forced to migrate because of extreme weather conditions.

Climate change could damage economies, as businesses and industries have to cope with increased energy costs and disrupted supply chains.

Here are some Tips on How to write a Speech on Climate Change:

Start by doing your research. Climate change is a complex topic, and there's a lot of information out there on it. Make sure you understand the basics of climate change before you start writing your speech.

Write down what you want to say. It can be helpful to draft an outline of your speech before you start writing it in full. This will help ensure that your points are clear and organized.

Be passionate about the topic. Climate change is a serious issue, but that doesn't mean you can't talk about it with passion and enthusiasm. Let your audience know how important you think this issue is.

Make it personal. Climate change isn't just a political or scientific issue - it's something that affects each and every one of us. Talk about how climate change has affected you or your loved ones, and let your audience know why this issue matters to you.

Use visuals to help explain your points. A good speech on climate change can be filled with charts, graphs, and statistics. But don't forget to also use powerful images and stories to help illustrate your points.

Stay positive. Climate change can be a depressing topic, but try not to end your speech on a negative note. Instead, talk about the steps we can take to address climate change and the positive outcomes that could come from it.

Start by defining what climate change is. Climate change is a problem that refers to a broad array of environmental degradation caused by human activities, including the emission of greenhouse gasses.

Talk about the effects of climate change. Climate change has been linked to increased wildfires, more extreme weather events, coastal flooding, and reduced crop yields, among other things.

Offer solutions to climate change. Some solutions include reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, investing in renewable energy sources, and planting trees to help absorb carbon dioxide.

Appeal to your audience’s emotions. Climate change is a problem that affects everyone, and it’s important to get people emotionally invested in the issue.

Make sure your speech is well-organized and easy to follow. Climate change can be a complex topic, so make sure your speech is clear and concise.

FAQs on Climate Change Speech/Global Warming Speech

1. What should be the main focus of my speech? Can I use statistics in my speech?

The main focus of your speech should be on the effects of climate change and the solutions we can enact to address it. However, you can also talk about your personal connection to the issue or how climate change has affected your community. Yes, you can use statistics to support your points, but don’t forget to also use images and stories to help illustrate your points.

2. How much should I talk about the potential solutions to climate change?

You should spend roughly equal time discussing both the effects of climate change and potential solutions. Climate change is a complex issue, and it’s important to provide your audience with both the facts and potential solutions.

3. Can I talk about how climate change has personally affected me in my speech?

Yes, you can talk about how climate change has personally affected you or your loved ones. Climate change is a serious issue that affects everyone, so it’s important to get people emotionally invested in the issue.

4. Are there any other things I should keep in mind while preparing my speech?

Yes, make sure your speech is well-organized and easy to follow. Climate change can be a complex topic, so make sure your speech is clear and concise. Also, remember to appeal to your audience’s emotions and stay positive. Climate change can be a depressing topic, but try not to end your speech on a negative note. Instead, talk about the steps we can take to address climate change and the positive outcomes that could come from it.

5. Where can I find more information about preparing a speech on climate change?

The best place to start is by reading some of the reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). You can also find helpful resources on the websites of Climate Reality Project or Greenpeace.

6. How long should my speech be?

Your speech should be between 5 and 7 minutes in length. Any longer than that, and your audience will start to lose interest. Climate change can be a complex issue, so it’s important to keep your points brief and concise. If you need help organizing your speech, consider using the following outline:

Define what climate change is;

Talk about the effects of climate change;

Offer solutions to climate change;

Appeal to your audience’s emotions.

7. How can I download reading material from Vedantu?

Accessing material from Vedantu is extremely easy and student-friendly. Students have to simply visit the website of  Vedantu and create an account. Once you have created the account you can simply explore the subjects and chapters that you are looking for. Click on the download button available on the website on Vedantu to download the reading material in PDF format. You can also access all the resources by downloading the Vedantu app from the play store.

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Climate change is THE challenge of our times. It is up to us all to demonstrate leadership

Mr. Huang Runqiu, CCICED Chinese Executive Vice Chairperson Minister of Ecology and Environment 

Steven Guilbeault, International Executive Vice Chairperson of CCICED, Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Canada, 

Fellow Vice Chairpersons 

Excellencies, colleagues and friends.  

It is an honour to serve as Vice Chairperson of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED) alongside so many distinguished colleagues. I am pleased to be in Beijing for this Annual General Meeting (AGM).  

By providing key policy recommendations and setting the CCICED’s research priorities for the next year, this AGM can strengthen China’s efforts to address the three environmental planetary crises: the crisis of climate change, the crisis of nature and biodiversity loss, and the crisis of pollution and waste.  

Poor and marginalized communities have been suffering for years as result of the three crises. This suffering is now spreading to every nation and community. Our planet, our health and our economies are in serious and immediate peril.  

July was the hottest month in recorded history. China hit a record temperature of 52.2 degrees C in Turpan, close to the Kumtag Desert. Four billion people in the Asia-Pacific region are exposed to air pollution. Nature and biodiversity loss continues, with fears growing over the impacts on food systems.   

And so it is clear that the entire world needs to rapidly pivot in every sector to dampen these three crises. That is why I am particularly pleased that the CCICED’s recommendations this year focus on areas that can deliver these pivots – from emissions reductions to green finance to implementing the Global Biodiversity Framework. These are areas that exactly align with UNEP’s mandate. Let’s look at just a few.  

One, carbon neutrality.   

China’s commitments to peak emissions before 2030 and become carbon neutral before 2060 are welcome. And China is, of course, making strides. As the CCICED’s 2022-2023 policy study showed, China contributed around one third of the world’s installed renewable energy capacity in 2021. These numbers are remarkable.   

Allow me to zoom in on climate for a moment and to highlight what I highlight in many of my speeches across the world. It is my contention that climate change is bigger than anything planet earth and, we, its human occupants, have ever experienced. Bigger than politics. Bigger than competition amongst and between nations. Bigger than nations and their civilisations and bigger than our collective history. It is, in the words of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, an existential crisis. I have therefore highlighted in my talks and speeches across the world that climate change cannot be lost in the squabble between nations. Cannot be lost when other crises appear on our doorstep. Lost in the squabble of domestic politics. Lost in the squabble of trade and competition. Or get pushed to the back burner to win the next election or to pacify domestic climate deniers. Or pushed to the back burner to address economic woes. Climate change is THE challenge of our times. And it is up to us all to demonstrate leadership. Here and now.  

For China, therefore, the CCICED recommendation to formulate a systematic coal power phase-out policy involving a number of considerations to maximize benefits is therefore noteworthy of attention. Similarly, the recommendation to move forward faster, science-based strategic planning and policy design are key in areas such as implementing the “1+N” policy system, promoting clean vehicles and boosting energy efficiency. And, of course, I echo the UN Secretary-General’s call for no new coal power plants, domestically or financed abroad.  

China’s renewable energy industry is second to none. This sector is expanding at exponential speed for which China is to be congratulated. With an intensification on the efforts to control and reduce energy demand and with a focus on energy efficiency and with continued focus on acceleration of decarbonization of the high-emitting industry sectors with a clear target of phasing down coal use, China holds the promise of leading the world in demonstrating ambition for climate action.  

Two, reboot consumption and production.   

Unsustainable consumption and production are fuel to the fire of the three crises, so the CCICED’s taskforce on this issue is important. Even more important is China’s full engagement in finalizing the global deal to end plastic pollution. A deal that, by 2024, must be ready to enable the complete redesign of products, packaging and systems. A deal that reduces plastic use, creates the conditions for true circularity and delivers justice for vulnerable communities. We at UNEP applaud China’s 2018 decision no longer to accept imported plastic waste. We also recognize that when it comes to plastic pollution, we cannot recycle our way out of the mess of plastic pollution. We need a complete rethink. Numbers indicate that China produces some 30% of the world’s plastic. So there are tremendous opportunities here for Chinese R&D to invest in reinventing the products that we envelope in plastic. Must the products be liquid? Can the products be delivered in dry form? What are the alternative packaging opportunities? There is a new economy ahead to replace plastic and the early bird gets the worm. So the CCICED’s recommendation for better guidelines in China on Extended Producer Responsibility, the reuse and recycling of plastic products, and the development of viable alternatives are in line with this reboot.   

Three, implementing the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).    

Let me here start out with congratulating China’s Presidency of COP15 under the able leadership of Minister Huang. Let me also stress that the goals of the GBF are consistent with China’s ideal of ecological civilization. We will delve more into this topic during tomorrow’s Open Forum. Now, let me just say this: wins under the GBF that restore nature’s infrastructure are wins across triple planetary crisis. We need to redline protected areas, fulfil the restoration agenda, and finance nature-based solutions. I ask China to demonstrate the same drive it showed in getting the GBF agreed to implementing the framework itself.  

The CCICED has much more on its AGM agenda and draft workplan. Reorienting finance and investment to align with the health of the planet. Unlocking the potential of digital transformation. Harnessing the Blue Economy for food security, jobs and carbon neutrality.  

What is clear is that the CCICED and UNEP want the same thing: a healthier planet upon which people of all nations live in harmony with nature and each other. I look forward to our discussions on how UNEP can support the CCICED and China to make this dream a reality.  

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Communicating on Climate Change

Communicating on climate change is about educating and mobilizing audiences to take action to confront the climate crisis. Everyone can play a part by raising their voice, sharing solutions, and advocating for change – shaped by different experiences, cultural contexts, and underlying values.

If you are creating a communications product – such as a video, a podcast, a written article, or a graphic on climate change – keep in mind the following tips to make it a valuable, effective, and reliable piece of content.  

1.  Use authoritative scientific information  

Misinformation and disinformation are widespread on the issue of climate change – and they are major obstacles towards progress in tackling the climate crisis. Deceptive or misleading content distorts the perception of climate science and solutions, creates confusion, and often leads to delays in action or even harmful action. “Rhetoric and misinformation on climate change and the deliberate undermining of science have contributed to misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, disregarded risk and urgency, and dissent,” according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ).

• Check your sources. When sharing facts and figures, make sure they come from a reliable source, which is science-based (consistent with the latest scientific consensus) and objective (not biased or influenced by financial or political incentives). Peer-reviewed articles (reviewed by experts in the same field prior to publication) generally provide the most reliable information. A uniquely authoritative source is the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , whose comprehensive assessments are written by hundreds of leading scientists, with contributions from thousands of experts, and endorsed by its 195 member countries.  
• Stop misinformation. Things you post online can spread very fast. Pause before you share something. Find out who made it, what sources it is based on, who paid for it, and who might be profiting from it. If you detect misinformation among your followers, rebut it by using the ‘Fact, Myth, Fallacy’ model that can help convey your message in a way that will stick.  
• Beware of greenwashing (presenting a company or product as environmentally friendly when they actually aren’t). Double-check what the company is really doing to reduce their carbon footprint and deliver on their climate promises, and only promote genuinely sustainable brands that meet certain minimum criteria . When taking on work that is financially rewarding, be careful to challenge the assignment to make sure it promotes sustainable behaviours.  
• Use trusted messengers. Breaking down the science behind climate change is complex, but the right messengers can get the audience engaged. As an established content creator, you may already be a trusted messenger for your audience. If you bring in other messengers, consider respected scientists (whose articles refer to peer-reviewed scientific journals or studies conducted by reputable research institutions or universities), weather presenters, and medical doctors, all of which are widely trusted . Often the most impactful climate communications also come from “ people like me ” who are affected and care.  

2.  Convey the problem and the solutions  

Explaining the scale of the climate crisis is important, but it can seem overwhelming, leading people to lose interest and tune out. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges humankind has faced. It is daunting, but the fight against climate change is far from lost. The worst impacts can still be averted if we act now. A good way around disillusionment and “crisis fatigue” is to convey a hopeful message focused on the solutions , helping people feel empowered and motivated to engage.

• Tell a story – make it real. Presenting data alone may numb the audience. Make it relatable, local, and personal . Individual stories can forge an emotive connection , get the audience to care, and make shared global challenges seem less daunting. You don’t even need to lead with the word ‘climate’ but start with a related issue that is important to your audience. Air pollution, for instance, which cities like Dar es Salaam are tackling by introducing soot-free buses. Or new job opportunities offered by clean energy projects, like in this story from India . Or power outages during hurricanes, which Puerto Rico is tackling by installing solar power.  
• Empower people. Let people know that they have the power to effect change. Individual action and systemic change go hand in hand . Individuals can help drive change by shifting consumption patterns and demanding action by governments and corporations. Small steps by a large number of people can help persuade leaders to make the big changes we need. And the more people act now and speak up for change, the bigger the pressure on leaders to act.  
• Link it to justice. Climate change is not just about science, it is also an issue of justice . The poor and marginalized are often hit the hardest by increasing climate hazards like floods, droughts, and storms. Those who contributed the least to greenhouse gas emissions are too often affected the most. And financial commitments of support by wealthier countries have not been met. Solving the climate crisis also means addressing injustice and inequity, which can create opportunities for all.  
• Avoid stereotypes . Poorer countries and underserved communities, including indigenous peoples who have protected the environment for generations, are often portrayed solely as victims of climate change, rather than positive agents of change. The same is often the case for women and girls. Make sure to highlight the voices, expertise, innovations, positive action, and solutions by people from all walks of life and communities from all parts of the world .  

3.  Mobilize action  

We need all hands on deck. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, and halving them by 2030, requires nothing less than a complete transformation of how we produce, consume, and move about. Surveys indicate that a majority of people around the world want their governments to take action and most citizens in advanced economies are willing to make changes in their own lives.

• Convey urgency. Make it about now. Many misinformation narratives present climate action as something that is necessary, but only in the future. Make sure you let people know what needs to happen right now in order to solve the climate crisis, and that action can’t wait . Studies have also shown that explaining the human causes of climate change increases public support for urgent action.  
• Focus on the opportunities. Get your audience excited about the prospects of a sustainable world. Addressing climate change will bring about an abundance of opportunities – green jobs, cleaner air, renewable energy, food security, livable coastal cities, and better health. Are there climate initiatives in your community that face resistance? Showcase their benefits to rally support. Reframing the issue to focus on the prospects of a better future can galvanize action.  
• Make it relevant. Meet people where they are – and avoid technical jargon. Limiting global warming to 1.5°C, for example, can be hard for people to relate to. Frame the issue in a way that will resonate with your local audience, by linking it to shared values like family, nature, community, and religion for instance. Safety and stability – protecting what we have – were also found to be highly effective frames for creating a sense of urgency.  
• Engage youth. The global youth climate movement has played a powerful role in driving action and holding leaders accountable. Featuring voices of youth will make your content more relatable to young people and get more youth involved in demanding change. But avoid presenting climate change as a problem only for future generations. It is hitting hard right now, and action is needed right now.  

These guidelines were produced by the United Nations Department of Global Communications , in consultation with United Nations Climate Change (UNFCCC), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), as well as ACT Climate Labs , Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), the Conscious Advertising Network (CAN), TED Countdown , and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication .

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Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Global Warming — Persuasive Speech On Climate Change

Persuasive Speech on Climate Change

• Categories: Global Warming

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Published: Mar 13, 2024

Words: 523 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

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Evidence of climate change, consequences of climate change, challenges and denial.

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The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington, DC 20500

Remarks by President   Biden at the Virtual Leaders Summit on Climate Opening   Session

8:07 A.M. EDT   THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you, Madam Vice President.   Good morning to all of our colleagues around the world — the world leaders who are taking part in this summit.  I thank you.  You know, your leadership on this issue is a statement to the people of your nation and to the people of every nation, especially our young people, that we’re ready to meet this moment.  And meeting this moment is about more than preserving our planet; it’s also about providing a better future for all of us.    That’s why, when people talk about climate, I think jobs.  Within our climate response lies an extraordinary engine of job creation and economic opportunity ready to be fired up.  That’s why I’ve proposed a huge investment in American infrastructure and American innovation to tap the economic opportunity that climate change presents our workers and our communities, especially those too often that have — left out and left behind.    I’d like to buil- — I want to build a — a critical infrastructure to produce and deploy clean technology — both those we can harness today and those that we’ll invent tomorrow.   I talked to the experts, and I see the potential for a more prosperous and equitable future.  The signs are unmistakable.  The science is undeniable.  But the cost of inaction is — keeps mounting.    The United States isn’t waiting.  We are resolving to take action — not only the — our federal government, but our cities and our states all across our country; small businesses, large businesses, large corporations; American workers in every field.    I see an opportunity to create millions of good-paying, middle-class, union jobs.    I see line workers laying thousands of miles of transmission lines for a clean, modern, resilient grid.    I see workers capping hundreds of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells that need to be cleaned up, and abandoned coalmines that need to be reclaimed, putting a stop to the methane leaks and protecting the health of our communities.    I see autoworkers building the next generation of electric vehicles, and electricians installing nationwide for 500,000 charging stations along our highways.    I see engine- — the engineers and the construction workers building new carbon capture and green hydrogen plants to forge cleaner steel and cement and produce clean power.    I see farmers deploying cutting-edge tools to make soil of our — of our Heartland the next frontier in carbon innovation.    By maintaining those investments and putting these people to work, the United States sets out on the road to cut greenhouse gases in half — in half by the end of this decade.  That’s where we’re headed as a nation, and that’s what we can do if we take action to build an economy that’s not only more prosperous, but healthier, fairer, and cleaner for the entire planet.    You know, these steps will set America on a path of net-zero emissions economy by no later than 2050.  But the truth is, America represents less than 15 percent of the world’s emissions.  No nation can solve this crisis on our own, as I know you all fully understand.  All of us, all of us — and particularly those of us who represent the world’s largest economies — we have to step up.    You know, those that do take action and make bold investments in their people and clean energy future will win the good jobs of tomorrow, and make their economies more resilient and more competitive.    So let’s run that race; win more — win more sustainable future than we have now; overcome the existential crisis of our times.  We know just how critically important that is because scientists tell us that this is the decisive decade.  This is the decade we must make decisions that will avoid the worst consequences of a climate crisis.  We must try to keep the Earth’s temperature and — to an increase of — to 1.5 degrees Celsius.    You know, the world beyond 1.5 degrees means more frequent and intense fires, floods, droughts, heat waves, and hurricanes tearing through communities, ripping away lives and livelihoods, increasingly dire impacts to our public health.   It’s undeniable and undevi- — you know, the idea of accelerating and the reality that will come if we don’t move.  We can’t resign ourselves to that future.  We have to take action, all of us.    And this summit is our first step on the road we’ll travel together — God willing, all of us — to and through Glasgow this November and the U.N. Climate Conference — the Climate Change Conf- — Conference, you know, to set our world on a path to a secure, prosperous, and sustainable future.  The health of communities throughout the world depends on it.  The wellbeing of our workers depends on it.  The strength of our economies depends on it.    The countries that take decisive action now to create the industries of the future will be the ones that reap the economic benefits of the clean energy boom that’s coming.   You know, we’re here at this summit to discuss how each of us, each country, can set higher climate ambitions that will in turn create good-paying jobs, advance innovative technologies, and help vulnerable countries adapt to climate impacts.   We have to move.  We have to move quickly to meet these challenges.  The steps our countries take between now and Glasgow will set the world up for success to protect livelihoods around the world and keep global warming at a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius.  We must get on the path now in order to do that.    If we do, we’ll breathe easier, literally and figuratively; we’ll create good jobs here at home for millions of Americans; and lay a strong foundation for growth for the future.  And — and that — that can be your goal as well.  This is a moral imperative, an economic imperative, a moment of peril but also a moment of extraordinary possibilities.    Time is short, but I believe we can do this.  And I believe that we will do this.    Thank you for being part of the summit.  Thank you for the communities that you — and the commitments you have made, the communities you’re from.  God bless you all.    And I look forward to progress that we can make together today and beyond.  We really have no choice.  We have to get this done.   8:14 A.M. EDT

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The disarming case to act right now on climate change

• climate change
• environment
• sustainability
• social change
• Anthropocene

Climate Action: It’s time to make peace with nature, UN chief urges

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The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, has described the fight against the climate crisis as the top priority for the 21st Century, in a passionate, uncompromising speech delivered on Wednesday at Columbia University in New York.

The landmark address marks the beginning of a month of UN-led climate action, which includes the release of major reports on the global climate and fossil fuel production, culminating in a climate summit on 12 December, the fifth anniversary of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

Nature always strikes back

Mr. Guterres began with a litany of the many ways in which nature is reacting, with “growing force and fury”, to humanity’s mishandling of the environment, which has seen a collapse in biodiversity, spreading deserts, and oceans reaching record temperatures.

The link between COVID-19 and man-made climate change was also made plain by the UN chief, who noted that the continued encroachment of people and livestock into animal habitats, risks exposing us to more deadly diseases.

And, whilst the economic slowdown resulting from the pandemic has temporarily slowed emissions of harmful greenhouse gases, levels of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane are still rising, with the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at a record high. Despite this worrying trend, fossil fuel production – responsible for a significant proportion of greenhouse gases – is predicted to continue on an upward path.

‘Time to flick the green switch’

The appropriate global response, said the Secretary-General, is a transformation of the world economy, flicking the “green switch” and building a sustainable system driven by renewable energy, green jobs and a resilient future.

One way to achieve this vision, is by achieving net zero emissions (read our feature story on net zero for a full explanation, and why it is so important). There are encouraging signs on this front, with several developed countries, including the UK, Japan and China, committing to the goal over the next few decades.

Mr. Guterres called on all countries, cities and businesses to target 2050 as the date by which they achieve carbon neutrality – to at least halt national increases in emissions - and for all individuals to do their part.

With the cost of renewable energy continuing to fall, this transition makes economic sense, and will lead to a net creation of 18 million jobs over the next 10 years. Nevertheless, the UN chief pointed out, the G20, the world’s largest economies, are planning to spend 50 per cent more on sectors linked to fossil fuel production and consumption, than on low-carbon energy.

Put a price on carbon

For years, many climate experts and activists have called for the cost of carbon-based pollution to be factored into the price of fossil fuels, a step that Mr. Guterres said would provide certainty and confidence for the private and financial sectors.

Companies, he declared, need to adjust their business models, ensuring that finance is directed to the green economy, and pension funds, which manage some $32 trillion in assets, need to step and invest in carbon-free portfolios.

Far more money, continued the Secretary-General, needs to be invested in adapting to the changing climate, which is hindering the UN’s work on disaster risk reduction. The international community, he said, has “both a moral imperative and a clear economic case, for supporting developing countries to adapt and build resilience to current and future climate impacts”.

Everything is interlinked

The COVID-19 pandemic put paid to many plans, including the UN’s ambitious plan to make 2020 the “super year” for buttressing the natural world. That ambition has now been shifted to 2021, and will involve a number of major climate-related international commitments.

These include the development of a plan to halt the biodiversity crisis; an Oceans Conference to protect marine environments; a global sustainable transport conference; and the first Food Systems Summit, aimed at transforming global food production and consumption.

Mr. Guterres ended his speech on a note of hope, amid the prospect of a new, more sustainable world in which mindsets are shifting, to take into account the importance of reducing each individual’s carbon footprint.

Far from looking to return to “normal”, a world of inequality, injustice and “heedless dominion over the Earth”, the next step, said the Secretary-General, should be towards a safer, more sustainable and equitable path, and for mankind to rethink our relationship with the natural world – and with each other.

You can read the full speech here .

António Guterres, UN Secretary-General December 2, 2020

• climate change
• climate action

How Rachel Reeves, Britain’s probable next chancellor, wants to change the country

Her memories, including of beating private schoolboys at chess, offer clues.

A S A STUDENT at Oxford University in the late 1990s, Rachel Reeves’s friends gave her a framed photograph of Gordon Brown, then the Labour chancellor, to hang in her college room. “They knew how much I loved the Treasury,” she later recalled. Unless the polls are very wrong, Labour will sweep to power on July 4th after 14 years out of office. Credit will belong, in large part, to Ms Reeves’s work in changing perceptions of a party once seen as fiscally reckless and hostile to business. Her reward will be the fulfilment of a long-held dream: becoming Britain’s first female chancellor.

Ms Reeves was born in south-east London in 1979, the daughter of two primary-school teachers. Her younger sister Ellie is also a Labour member of parliament; she is now the party’s deputy campaigns co-ordinator. After Oxford (where she read politics, philosophy and economics) and the London School of Economics (where she got an MS c in economics) Rachel Reeves joined the Bank of England as an economist; her time there included a stint at the British embassy in Washington, DC . She became an MP in 2010 for the constituency of Leeds West in Yorkshire.

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