Bringing it home

Book

In December this year, politicians, campaigners and diplomats will come together in Paris to attempt to tackle the world’s greatest collective challenge: how to catalyse action on climate change.

There are reasons to be hopeful that a global deal might be done. But whether or not the latest in a series of UN negotiations can keep global temperature rises to 2ºC will ultimately be up to us. Public pressure is crucial to securing a stretching deal. Yet there is currently no sense that climate change is high on the political or public ‘to-do’ list.

If 2015 is going to be remembered as the year the world finally got serious about our climate threat, we will need bold and imaginative political leadership. We must not see Paris as an end point: it is a critical staging post on a longer journey, not a single event. What we need in this crucial year for the climate is to find a hopeful story about why Paris matters, for our values, for our national interest and for our daily lives; that engages us all in the task of our time.