How do you build a climate event that would still happen if you cancelled it?
Adam Lake talks to our host Tom Clark about nine years of building Climate Week NYC into one of the largest climate events in the world, and why the engagement is the work rather than the thing you do around the work.
Adam identifies as a campaigner. For him that means picking a goal, picking an audience, and then getting creative about the methodology that moves one towards the other. He came to climate via A level economics and theatre studies, a short acting career, a politics magazine and the Press Association, and he now leads communications for a week that draws around 250,000 people onto the streets of New York.
With this year's Climate Week focused on the energy, the impact and the action we drive together, his story of action is a fitting one. When COVID hit, every other major climate summit was cancelled or postponed. Climate Group decided to go ahead, and Adam's worry was not the main stage, but the wider week, the hundreds of community groups, school groups and artistic collectives built up over years, and whether that bubble would burst without people meeting in person. It did not. He says that year broke every record any climate week had set anywhere in the world up to that point, with more events and more people than ever before.
Adam talks about:
- Why Climate Week NYC events platform is still only a cog in something much bigger
- Building an audience one cafe in Queens and one launderette in Brooklyn at a time
- Choosing agencies, and being honest about when shared values matter and when effectiveness matters more
- Communications as a listening rather than a talking sport
- Why engagement built up over years is what matters
A producer got in touch out of the blue with an idea to take over every late night show, and three months later, Kimmel, Fallon and Colbert had all given over airtime to climate. There was no grand plan behind it. It came from years of turning up and talking to people.
