Innovative climate workshops seek new solutions to the crisis

“Does melting sea ice cause sea-level rise?” Emily Mabin Sutton asks.
“Imagine you have a glass of water and you’ve got an ice cube in it. If the ice cube melts, the level of the water still stays the same.”
The nine of us standing around the long table all nod in sudden understanding.
We’re about half an hour into a three-hour workshop. By the end, we’ll have developed a deeper understanding of climate science, of what needs to be done to avert the worst of the crisis and of what levers we can pull in our lives.
Sutton is the general manager of the non-profit Climate Club Aotearoa and frequently runs these workshops. They’re called Climate Fresks because the first hour sees the participants handed 42 cards labelled things like “Agriculture” or “Ocean Acidification” and making a fresco of how they link together to describe the causes, mechanisms and impacts of the climate crisis.
“In 2015, a French professor called Cédric Ringenbach wanted to communicate the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports to his students, but they’re 6000 pages long or more,” Sutton explains.
“So he ended up unpacking it into a game, which is just 42 cards, and he iterated the game over time and showed it to his students and realised that they found it a lot more fun and engaging and a really useful way to learn climate science.”
Since then, more than 1.8 million participants in 162 countries have taken part in a Fresk. Sutton has brought it to New Zealand, after her own experience with one changed her life.
“I’d been working in software for a decade, but when I did this Fresk, it changed everything for me. Seeing the whole big picture and realising that there was something every one of us could to do contribute made me really want to share this workshop format with others,” she says.
She quit her job, founded Climate Club and began travelling the country to run Fresks for a wide range of New Zealanders.
At the workshop I’m attending in Wellington, I’m not alone in working daily on climate change. Most of the participants have a background in climate or environmental work. That isn’t the standard, though.
“Usually when I run these, it’s much more with decision-makers in business or community groups or local government councillors. Someone who doesn’t regularly think about climate change is definitely the target for this workshop and will get a lot more from it.”
On Thursday, Sutton hosted her largest ever Fresk, not with climate professionals but with nearly 100 kindergarten teachers.
“We see sustainability as a core strategy to ensure our tamariki can enjoy a secure future on a liveable planet, as our generation has experienced. The Climate Fresk is a wonderful tool around which this conversation can take place,” Tara Solomon, the general manager for Kaitiaki Kindergartens, says.
Even in our knowledgeable group in Wellington, however, there is still something for everyone to learn. The cards go into the finer details of issues like the carbon cycle and water cycle – as well as why melting sea ice doesn’t raise sea levels.
After we piece together the Fresk and name it (“We Did Start The Fire”), we pair off to name and briefly discuss the emotions that we feel when talking about climate change. After that, a quiz on climate change and climate policy in New Zealand, which again shows most of us still have plenty to learn.
(I do feel a bit guilty when I get all of the questions correct, since at least a couple of them had emerged from my articles.)
Then we split into groups to each tackle a different sector of greenhouse gas emissions. We write down ideas on Post-It notes before rotating around the room, until we’ve offered ideas on each sector and are back where we started.
At my table, on agriculture, we find proposals ranging from meat-free Mondays to agricultural emissions pricing to regenerative farming. Sutton asks us to place them along two axes – impact and difficulty. The highest-impact things tend to be more difficult, we find, though this isn’t always the case. Incremental dietary change, like skipping meat for a meal a week, isn’t hard but does offer big climate benefits.
To wrap up, we discuss in our smaller groups the areas we have influence in our lives.
When we think of how we can make a difference to climate change, we generally revert to thinking in terms of our carbon footprint. Putting aside, Sutton says, that the “carbon footprint” was part of an ad campaign by oil giant BP to deflect focus from its own responsibility for the climate, we actually have influence well beyond our own households and consumer choices.
We are employees or employers. We are investors. We are members of communities, whether their churches or social clubs or something else. We’re role models, too.
Sutton asks us to write down, within each of these spheres, things we can do to make a difference. To finish off, we each stand up and say one thing we’ll do within the next week – and sure enough, a week later, Sutton emails us to check in.
“People really come out feeling optimistic and inspired to take action. It’s such a dense and complex topic but Climate Fresk really simplifies it and makes it seem understandable. When you’re able to have conversations about it, it helps each participant feel collectively like they can take action with their group or on their own – and like they’re part of a bigger picture,” Sutton tells me afterwards.
“A CEO who took this sent me a selfie of him taking a bike to work for the first time in a long time, the day after taking this workshop. We had a hospital employee talk to their employer about aligning train timetables to the shifts at work so that people could take public transport. People find very different actions based on their own context, but the range of actions is really large, depending on what levers we each have to pull.”
Escaping the framing of the “carbon footprint” is a critical part of this. In 2020, researchers reported how the consumer mindset limited peoples’ conceptions of climate action.
“In our work, we frequently encounter people who say, ‘I am very concerned about climate change personally, but I cannot see how I can do anything about it in my work or professional context,’” they reported.
“Some – perhaps surprising – professional communities we have heard this sentiment from were creative writers, journalists, teachers, architects, business consultants, health professionals, lawyers, pension fund managers, senior managers in oil companies and even elected politicians. These individuals may have plenty of agency in their job context, but it does not extend to climate action.”
For most people, climate change communications is one-directional. They read about it online or hear about it in the news. The Fresk turns it into a conversation.
“It’s action-focused, it’s participatory and it’s fun. It makes it a very different experience to the doom and gloom you often hear with climate change,” Sutton says.
“One of the things that we have to acknowledge when we think about climate change is each person usually feels really powerless, but we have so much power if we look at the decisions we can make in our companies and in our own lives.”