Climate Action Tai Tokerau has pencilled in Friday 21 and Saturday 22 March for the 2025 Climate Action Conference. The main theme (tentatively) is climate and economy. We want to articulate that healing the climate and building prosperity are synergystic. So we will be exploring what that economy looks like, and identifying where the green shoots are.
business as usual is failing
Most political and business leaders project the economy of the 20th Century into the future and seem to assume that will work. But the changing climate, the continuing rise in income inequality,and an increasingly hostile global environment are just three trends that will continue to undermine our economy. But rather than focus of these failings we have to develop a vision of a functional and just economy.
The future econony
We can think of our economy on a continuum between providing necessities for a good life, and generating high value exports.
The current economy is failing to deliver the necessities for a good life. Among these necessities are good water, kai, energy, and community. And while the global economy is able to function, high value ethical exports can help sustain our economy. Examples might include food produced with regenerative practices, useful software, and circular economy innovations.
Conference preparation
We have 10 months preparation time – much more than we have ever had. This gives us oppotunities to generate an impactful conference. Here are some thoughts on how this can happen. It is all tentative at this stage so there are plenty of opportunities for co-design.
- Share your feedback about our previous conferences, what worked for you and what initiatives did it help to launch?
- Tell us about local examples of green shoots of the economy that support prosperity and help to heal the climate.
- It will be peak Autumn harvest time – so any donations of local food will help us to provide nutritious local kai. We hope to have Amber Wallace do the catering again.
- Our workshops will be facilitated, rather than being presented, so we will need a cohort of facilitators with facilitation skills rather than specific expertise. These will be outcome orientated.
- Building our climate action community leading up to the conference will create better opportunities to emerge with a compelling vision for the future.
- Donate to Climate Action Tai Tokerau to help ensure the continuity of this work or let us know if you are interested in being a conference sponsor.
Building the climate action community
There are lots of options for building our climate action community. Here is an article by Otto Scharmer about how people are getting together to navigate ways through the meta-crisis. I will be contacting his organisation to see how we might include elements of these events into our conference.
You can help further buid our climate action community by joining U-Lab in September 2024. This four month programme run online creates opportunities for local in-person collaboration. Otto Scharmer outlines the thinking behind it here.
Climate Action Tai Tokerau 
Yuss! When discussing economics it will be useful to remind Ourselves of the Ancient Greek origin meaning “oikonomia,” which literally translates to “household management”, referencing the skill of running a household efficiently (frugal and wise use of resources to meet basic needs of the family unit). The “economics” of today is suicidal madness: so unscientific, so unprincipled, so dominated by those ‘out of control’, and so contradictory as to be unrecognisable from its original meaning. There’s lots of publicly-available material on “how” or “why” We got to this point (much of it boils down to “follow the money/ power”; there are levels of individual, local, national, Pacific regional and international causes; and symptomatic/ superficial and systemic causes). I like the idea of (a) the conference creating a recommended materials list so participants can ‘refresh’ and come to the conference well-informed (putting Us more/less on the same page) so We can (b) quickly acknowledge key causes of Our situation (and their characteristics/ nature), so We can (c) rapidly move to co-creating meaningful responses (which I’d like to see as the bulk of Our time/ energy).
Also, great to build on the outcomes of past Climate Action Tai Tokerau conferences! The mahi of reviewing where We’ve come from, and ensuring transfer of memory and knowledge is critical – it literally compresses time (like swallowing a time capsule that releases data into Your mind so You’re all caught up, and ready to hit the ground running having access to all that information)! Moreover, there may have been valuable ideas expressed prior, but the timing to implement them wasn’t right (they were ahead of their time, maybe?), but the time may be NOW to action them? In any event, it is important to fully integrate all data into solution-building, so everything of value is utilized. 🙂
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Speaking of building on what went before, any chance this could be a hybrid event so folks can join virtually to some (if not all) of the activities?
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