Charly Cox and Zoe Greenwood, of Climate Change Coaches, hope to put coaching in the hands of as many climate leaders as possible. They shared their ideas at COP27 in Egypt, the biggest climate change conference in the world
There are so many ways that we could use this! A participant in one of our workshops bounded up to us excited that coaching skills could be the secret sauce in helping them have more climate impact. We had just shown them how to use a climate coaching approach to shift someone from overwhelm to feeling capable of taking real climate action.
What made that especially exciting for us was that it happened not on Zoom but at COP27 in Egypt, the largest climate conference in the world, attended by up to 45,000 people. It’s certainly the place where the most complex issues are scrutinised in highly technical ways. So what on earth could coaching offer to COP?
We were invited to both speak and run a workshop, to inject some ‘heart and hands’ alongside more ‘head-led’ sessions. We didn’t know what to expect. We met committed, energised entrepreneurs of green solutions, buzzing with purpose. We met university professors and students who expressed concern about climate anxiety and despair among young people. We were confided in by technical advisors who felt thwarted by the slow pace of change and keen to hear of new approaches. We met newcomers like us looking for collaborators to drive change faster.
While the negotiations themselves are behind closed doors, the pulse of COP comes from informal conversations over coffee, or formal panel discussions, in which people are able to put together their individual pieces of the jigsaw. We were based in the Innovation Zone, on the same stage on which John Kerry, Temilade Salami, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Katharine Hayhoe and Mary Robinson shared their thoughts; all of us livestreamed to over 20,000 people. A stage that attracted people from across the climate spectrum – activists to business people – all looking for new ways to collaborate and a better sense of where the world was moving.
Over the week, we either engaged in or observed animated discussions just like this, between people as they used the opportunity to move forward joint plans and build new alliances. The value of this togetherness cannot be underestimated given that most people working in climate feel a sense of frustration or failure at least some of the time. It turned out that showing this audience new ways to build powerful relationships, by addressing emotional roadblocks head on, was exactly what they wanted.
It is easy to feel despondent about an event like COP when watching the news, and we have done so on many occasions, because we hope for so much change, yet see increments, not leaps. We want to pull the handbrake, turning the car sharply, but we are driving a juggernaut that turns painfully slowly and sometimes we don’t even notice when it shifts.
Meanwhile, outside of the political sphere, many things are speeding along, helped in part by people coming together. That’s not only because people collaborate technically at COP, but because they revive each other’s motivation. It can be isolating to be one of a handful of people in your organisation working on climate, or the only dad at the school gates with a job no one understands.
It’s for this reason that our mission is to put coaching in the hands of as many climate leaders as possible. The COP, as we experienced it, re-energised and spurred a diverse sector to keep the climate action ball rolling. Next year the Climate Change Coaches hope to be at COP28 to play our part in moving that ball along.
- Charly Cox is an award-winning climate change coach, author and co-founder of the Climate Change Coaches.
- Zoe Greenwood is co-founder of the Climate Change Coaches with seventeen years’ experience in the environmental sector.
- Zoe and Charly’s team were early pioneers in the field of climate change coaching and recently wrote the first book on the subject, Climate Change Coaching: the power of connection to create climate action (Open University Press, 2022).