Climate action must be seen to be done

Newsroom

5 hours ago

Opinion: What use is climate protest to society? A version of this question was posed to the jury during the trial of four Restore Passenger Rail activists this year.
It's worth asking because the impact of climate activism is not always clear or linear. However, new research reviews the evidence on the effectiveness of climate activism in shaping voting, political communication, public opinion, and media coverage. The research authors looked at 50 of the most robust and recent evaluations of protest.
Among other things, they found that climate activism tends to increase public concern about climate change. There is already a very high level of consensus in this country that climate change is real and the vast majority of the population are worried about it. But there is a gap between people wanting action and what is happening on the ground.
For example, the policies of our current Government could be described as a masterclass in climate delay. It pushes non-transformative, even non-existent, solutions such as carbon capture, while financing further fossil gas extraction. Members of the Government emphasise the downsides of changing our economy and society, without acknowledging the vastly more enormous costs both now and into the future of not acting. And they redirect responsibility – we are too small and our actions are supposedly meaningless. Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour has also questioned whether we should remain part of the Paris Agreement.
Climate protest acts as a bridge between the population and the decision makers who serve us. Protests communicate the depth of feeling and provide one way of seeking accountability from politicians for community wellbeing.
Protests and direct action are often reported by mainstream media as provoking a negative response among the wider public. However, research has found very little evidence of 'backfire'. Furthermore, researchers have observed a 'radical flank' effect – even very disruptive protest pulled public opinion towards the climate cause, although towards the more moderate groups and positions.
Climate activism was also found to shape political communication from politicians, and when looked at at a regional or state scale, was related to lower emissions (although the causal relationship was not clear).
Other work by Lincoln University's Sylvia Nissen and colleagues describes the 'legacies' of political action – the emergence of political leaders who go on to shape policy and politics, the ways new narratives flow through culture, and the way political action seeds ideas, skills, and relationships that grow in unexpected ways.
By thinking about legacies, we can appreciate some of the ways protest contributes to our political make-up. Take for instance the nuclear-free movement – as well as affecting broader geopolitics, protest fed into political discourse. This led to iconic political moments ('I can smell the uranium on your breath') that helped evolve our national identity.
Much of the current Government's work promotes individualism – there is little sense of a public that it serves (as opposed to a group of consumers, or workers with an airline CEO). For instance, note its efforts to undermine Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the treaty that holds us together. Or the promotion of liberty, free choice, and property rights in the Regulatory Standards Bill over shared responsibilities to each other, and to the environment.
In contrast, climate action is about being together, in communities (whether communities of place or communities of interest), to nurture the things that Aotearoa New Zealanders value – nature and fairness.
The jury in the trial of the Restore Passenger Rail activists had to weigh up the risk of the actions taken (hanging signs and people from gantries and tunnel entries around Wellington) and whether those were the actions of a reasonable person. The court heard from two climate scientists. Their message was clear – the scale of transformation needed requires enormous collective effort now. Their evidence was included by the defence to build the argument that the actions of the protesters were entirely reasonable; after decades of trying every other lever, in the face of intransigent business-as-usual, disruption was all these activists felt they had left.
Ultimately, the jury found one person not guilty and they couldn't reach a verdict for the other three. The trial was supposed to be the first in a series arising from Restore Passenger Rail (now Climate Liberation Aotearoa) protests in 2022 and 2023. However, in May the Crown abandoned the prosecutions of more than 20 people.
Did the protests have social utility? As I've highlighted, there are many ways of answering this question – from the shared good of helping build public opinion in favour of climate action, to translating public sentiment into a call for accountability and meaningful action from decision makers, to the (very difficult to measure) legacies of political leadership and cultural impacts.
Despite all the rhetoric of individualism, ultimately this Government, like the ones before it, is an expression of a collective. It is accountable to the public and not just once every three years. In the enormous gaps between public opinion and the coalition's discourses of climate delay, between its rhetoric of democracy and its actions undermining it, protest is a democratic bridge that delivers the weight of collective feeling to those who are supposed to be representing us.