The CMP’s new report – and a conversation that gave me hope

Last week, the Climate Majority Project and The Glacier Trust published We Need to Talk About Adaptation – our new report comparing how five major environmental organisations communicated about climate adaptation between 2020 and 2025.

As I outlined in my recent Desmog article, the results are revealing. Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, WWF, the RSPB and the Green Party have all made huge strides in how they talk about resilience and the realities of a changing climate. Adaptation, once marginal, has moved closer to the centre of the conversation – but it still tends to take a back seat to the endless, unclear talk of “net zero”.

As part of this work, I sat down with RSPB CEO, Beccy Speight, to discuss how that’s changing and what we can learn from their work. The RSPB have been restoring habitats and managing land in ways that build resilience for over twenty years – and yet, until recently, adaptation wasn’t something they spoke that much about, publicly at least. 

Beccy spoke beautifully about the potential for adaptation to be not just defensive, but transformative – “taking climate adaptation seriously, locally, could ultimately create much better places, much better homes for people, as well as nature.” She reflected that “working with natural ecosystems… would actually deeply help us rebuild our connection with nature,” and that by “getting more people more involved in ecosystem-based adaptation,” we can remember that we are “a part of the natural world, not apart from it.”

For me, this is the spirit of adaptation at its best – practical, hopeful, and deeply human. Not just resilience in the face of crisis, but renewal of community, nature and their links.

Our conversation left me hopeful too: about how the conservation movement is evolving, and about what it means to prepare wisely for the world already here. 

To find out more, and to help all of this have the biggest impact, please read our report (and do please share it and my article if you feel inclined!).