Matthew Phillips

When you see the ideal climate movement, what do you imagine?

When I imagine the ideal climate movement, I see a house of many rooms.

Each one of us can have a room inside that house, and while each of the rooms can be a different shape and size, all the rooms are essential to making up the overall edifice of the house of the movement.

This is how I've been thinking about the climate movement ever since I joined the United Nations in the lead-up to the Paris Agreement.

My boss, Christiana Figueres, used to describe the Paris Agreement as like a house of many rooms.

The governments, the businesses, civil society, they all had a room in the Paris house.

That's what made Paris succeed in the moment.

But recently, it's like our movement has started to live in separate houses.

And this is leading to a fragmentation when we can afford it least.

Remember 2019, when four million people took to the streets across 4,000 cities to march on climate in a single day?

Last year, the figure was 70,000.

We are forgetting our own potential for mass collective action on climate.

I think we need to rebuild the house of many rooms.

But what kind of a house do we actually need to truly take on the climate crisis?

Well, we're going to need a much bigger house.

We're going to need a house that builds trust.

And we're going to need a house that actually brings inside the artist to inspire us, to spice things up a little bit.

So when I imagine this house, I like to imagine a vast 100-room structure like the Alhambra Palace in Spain, where different beliefs clashed and cooperated throughout the ages.

because actually the primary challenge our movement faces is in allowing different beliefs, different mindsets to coexist under the same roof.

We've got the realists, and the realists say we are rapidly hurtling towards negative planetary tipping points, with every year hotter than the last, with rising sea surface temperatures making the hurricanes we're experiencing right now twice as likely, and with a crazy surge in oil and gas exploration that is leading to another 12 billion tons of emissions.