2022 Annual Report

From the start, we've designed our signature in-person training events to be catalysts, building and mobilizing a network of well-trained advocates to tip the balance in a key climate battleground.

That's why, as COVID restrictions began to lift, we headed to Las Vegas, Nevada for our first in-person training since 2020. The West has become ground zero in the US climate fight in recent years, witnessing both a historic drought and an explosion in clean energy development, with many Native Tribes leading the way.

Perhaps nowhere have these forces been more apparent than in Nevada, and our goal with the training was to educate and mobilize a critical mass of advocates to seize this moment and drive a truly just transition to clean energy in the region.

From the moment we opened the doors, the energy was palpable, with an amazing lineup of speakers joining Vice President Gore and the youngest and most diverse group of trainees we've seen to date, full of ideas and eager to get to work.

That's exactly what happened. Shortly after the first phase of our Nevada work concluded with the training, the second phase began with the launch of a voter registration campaign to give young and marginalized voters a say in their future through the 2022 election.

With newly trained Leaders joining us, our advocates not only collected 30,581 registration cards in Clark and Washoe counties, but also sent over 101,000 peer-to-peer text messages to Nevada voters to get out the vote leading up to Election Day.

The results speak for themselves. Turnout was critical in a race for the US Senate decided by less than 8,000 votes and three House races decided by fewer than 13,000 votes, and we're incredibly proud of the role our advocates played.

Training Highlights:

• Highly diverse audience, with 49% of trainees identifying as Black, Latino, Indigenous, or a person of color.
• Bilingual content opened the door to many Spanish speakers.
• Training workshops explored opportunities for clean energy growth in the West, Indigenous-led solutions on Tribal lands and beyond, youth leadership in the climate movement, and more.
• Energized the movement for democracy in critical region.

In Brazil, the climate crisis has become a fact of daily life for millions. Longer droughts threaten farms and basic food security for many. Torrential rains unleash life-threatening floods more and more often. The list goes on.

As South America's largest economy, how Brazil responds – especially how it fights the deforestation threatening the world's biggest carbon sink, the Amazon rainforest, and the Indigenous peoples who call it home – will have truly global consequences.

We believed regular people – and not just vested interests like the country's fossil fuel and logging industries – should have a say. But bringing new voices into the movement and driving a national conversation would mean reaching beyond big cities alone, presenting real challenges where remote and Indigenous communities often lacked reliable internet access.

The response from Climate Reality Brazil was to develop a new hybrid model of training with both online and in-person components to enable Indigenous communities to participate with a group. The training focused on the deforestation threatening both the Amazon and our climate, clean energy opportunities for Brazil, and major climate justice challenges across the country.

While national mood can be difficult to measure precisely, we were heartened to see – several months after the training – President-Elect Lula tell the world that Brazil was back in the climate fight and committed to ending deforestation in the Amazon in a huge development for both millions of Brazilians and billions of people worldwide.

• Training held in Portuguese with a "semipresencial" model with online workshops and in-person gatherings across Brazil.
• Major focus on climate justice from a Brazilian perspective in all content.
• Key training themes included just transition, land use and deforestation, and creating economic opportunities through clean energy and climate-smart infrastructure.

For decades, poor neighborhoods and communities of color from Florida to Texas have been forced to live with an ever-growing network of pipelines and petrochemical plants in their backyards, leaving residents with poisoned water and in places like Louisiana's "Cancer Alley", breathing some of the most dangerous air in the US. Environmental racism doesn't come any plainer.

With the industry now planning to spend billions on expanding its polluting network even more, we headed to Houston for a training that brought together previously trained Climate Reality Leaders and other activists across the Southeast. What made the training so powerful was the opportunity to work with grassroots environmental justice groups to help their members and our Leaders build the skills and network to take on the powerful petrochemical industry’s foothold in the region .

Training Highlights

• Diverse training group, with more than half of attendees identifying as Black, Latino, Indigenous, or a person of color.
• Co-designed and led with partners including the Bullard Center for Environmental Justice, Rio Grande International Study Center, Rise St. James, GASP, West Street Recovery, Fenceline Watch, Southeast Climate and Environmental Network, Center for Social Justice and Education, and Greater New Orleans Interfaith Climate Coalition, the Descendants Project, and Port Arthur Community Action Network.
• Featured an environmental justice tour through polluted communities in Houston for advocates to visit communities living with petrochemical pollution and see firsthand the devastating effects of the fossil fuel economy on working families.
• Included a roundtable discussion with Vice President Gore and environmental justice leaders sharing insights, discussing lessons learned, and coordinating efforts to fight fossil fuel expansion in the months ahead.