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You have five minutes left in your break. You’ve read the latest news article about climate change or it’s a particularly hot day and that’s got you unnerved. Time is running out before heading back to work. You want to make a difference. What do you do?
Climate Club NZ is an Aotearoa newsletter built for busy people. It was started in 2021 and is run every week by collaborators Dhanya, Jenny, Cathy and Emily. Since then, it has grown to a community of over 5000 New Zealanders across their newsletter and social platforms.
Emily, one of the co-founders, was kind enough to sit down with me last week to talk about Climate Club – and what surprises her about the Kiwi who are rallying for a better world.
Meet Emily, the co-founder of Climate Club
Emily is a powerhouse. She runs workshops for councils, community organisations, and companies. She’s a Board member at Consumer NZ and a trustee for a refrigerants waste stewardship company. Her full time job, though, is Climate Club.
The newsletter came out of their want to embody the urgency that climate change demands. She’s definitely a busy person herself, and from that comes a desire to help other busy people direct their fears and motivation into tangible actions.
The community that’s grown around the newsletter is full of very busy people – and they don’t feel motivated by doom and gloom news. The constant headlines of biblical wrath from climate change with no outlet for action isn’t pushing them to act. They’re disheartened and lost.
Climate Club is written to change that narrative. It’s all about providing action every single week to improve Aotearoa now and into the future. Their actions can be focused on transport, waste, government decisions and more. In my summary of the Government’s plan to solve climate change, Climate Club were the people I turned to for a quick submission guide.
The genius of the Climate Club newsletter is that it is built to keep us taking action. You’re given options that could take five, 15 or 30 minutes depending on how much you have in the tank. Best of all, the Climate Club crew share the most popular action from the previous week. Whenever I read the newsletter, I know that there’s a community I’m connected to doing the same.
The biggest surprise that came from our chat was the sheer diversity of people who follow the newsletter. So often, the rhetoric from media about climate change is that it’s yet another culture war problem: pretentious city dwellers versus stuck up rural types. It’s a complete farce.
Emily spoke passionately about the range of ages and professions of their readers. In Climate Club, you’ll find every New Zealander from every background using their hope for the future to take action.
The people in this community are taking action in entirely different ways. Some are going off grid. Some, like me, are petitioning for better buses, bikes, and trains. Whether you want to live in the depths of the bush or the city, there’s a way to do it that’s climate friendly.
Climate Club is a relief in a world that struggles to explain climate change
The reason I love Climate Club is their skill in turning the intangible into the real. Emily astutely pointed out that carbon dioxide and methane are invisible gases. It’s nigh on impossible for someone to consider that what they do now will last invisibly in the air for a thousand years.
The challenge Three Sixty Six, Climate Club and countless other activists in the world are trying to solve is how to take action on something we can’t immediately see or feel.
It’s especially difficult when politicians and fossil fuel companies have convinced the vast majority of New Zealanders that recycling is the best thing you can do for the climate. It does very little to solve climate change. I’m a noted recycling critic in my office – but Emily has a slightly different take.
For her, it’s a good gateway action. Start with recycling. Walk to work next. Try having beef days. Spread the message to others. Climate change is scary, really fucking scary. But it doesn’t mean we’re helpless to the rising tide. We are all critical in playing a part, and Climate Club is built to help people easily understand that we must all take action repeatedly.
That is a far better message than doom and gloom. Emily is right: “it doesn’t motivate anyone.” What motivates people is an excitement for the future. To be motivated by love rather than fear. Their weekly newsletters make that repeated action, driven by love and care, easy.
Emily loves the energy that comes from a shared problem, and that shines through. In the 25 minutes we chatted, Emily told me about countless community initiatives making positive change. She shared a recently penned letter on LinkedIn by Helen Milner outlining what Aotearoa would be like if we got our response to climate change right. We’d have closely knit communities that care, beautiful infrastructure, the ability to have fun biking to work, more opportunities to talk to our neighbours and more time to spend improving our little patch of the world.
As we finished up, she was clearly racing off to another activity in her day. Right after the interview, she immediately shared a story about a South Auckland school creating a community garden. She invited me to a workshop in Wellington to connect with other people who care about the climate.
While there is a lot of doom and gloom, the energy that comes from Emily and her
