The end of 2025 must be the end of the inane rule of climate ‘optimism’ | The world missed its opportunity to prevent climate change. We need to focus our resources on adapting to it.

We were supposed to have gone net zero by now: that was XR’s central demand, when we formed it, seven years ago. Can we all please at last acknowledge and take seriously the utter failure to do so? Only such acknowledgement will prevent us from continuing collectively to basically ignore the increasingly pressing need to actually focus resources on a strategy beginning with climate adaptation. We should admit that widely-mandated climate optimism has been actively harmful to the needful acknowledgement of reality – and to the active collective self-protection that we now desperately need to get serious about making happen.

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Here at the end of 2025, we are already living with the consequences of delay. Flooding, heatwaves, droughts and wildfires are no longer rare events; they are becoming features of normal life. And in some cases – look at California, or Sri Lanka, or (closer to home) at the many floodplains that have been and will be built on – the consequences of their not being taken seriously enough as our new never-normal have been deeply disastrous, or indeed very deadly. The idea that we can still prevent at source very serious damage is an illusion. What we can do is reduce harm, protect the most vulnerable and adapt in ways that for starters do not worsen the problem.

This is the moment to prioritise resilience at every level — from reinforcing critical infrastructure to strengthening the social fabric of communities on the frontline of climate impacts, from learning from how global South frontline communities have already been practising transformative adaptation to shared inner work turning climate despair into climate courage.

I'm not sure how much I agree with this, but I certainly found it thought-provoking.