I’ve been digging into climate action recently. Doing my research and putting our work on tackling poverty into context. I discovered this formula: Climate action + tackling the financial needs of people in hardship = climate justice.
Why don’t more people see that?
Seeing the full picture
A year or two ago, a friend bought me glasses that kind of corrected my colour blindness. They waited until we were stood at the flower bed in London’s Victoria Park before they surprised me with them. It took some adjustment and I stood open-mouthed: “Is this what you all see?”
When you find the right lens, you see the things you’ve been missing for years, or forever. Some days I feel like only a few of us wear the lens to see the hardship all around us but, less judgementally, the opportunities to do something about it. Like with # MeToo and Black Lives Matter, once we ‘adjust our set’ and start to see it, we can’t unsee it.
Earlier this year, Clean Slate became part of ClimateKind, an initiative led by Thrive LDN through the London Mental Health and Climate Coalition and funded by The National Lottery Community Fund. It was a chance to build on the money guidance work we were already doing and create our Rainy Day Money programme.
When the opportunity first came up, our team had some questions.
If people in hardship are among those who have contributed least to the climate crisis, why should we be talking to them about it? Don’t they have more immediate things to worry about? And how on earth do you start a conversation about climate change with someone focused on feeding their kids or keeping a roof over their head?
Those questions turned out to be part of the answer.
Joining the dots
Last week, along with two of my amazing colleagues, I presented on Clean Slate Training and Employment CIC‘s work on climate action. People in hardship are hit hardest by the costs of severe weather. They’re more likely to live in areas with poor air quality, at risk of overheating or flooding, and with less access to green spaces. Add financial anxiety into that mix and the effect on people’s wellbeing becomes even greater.
So this isn’t really about asking people on low incomes to solve climate change. It’s about recognising that climate change is already part of the inequality they experience.
And that’s where our money-first approach comes in.
There are no other conversations worth having when money worries are taking up all the headspace. So when we engage low-income households, we start there.
Our Quids in! information service and our one-to-one money coaching service both set out to first alleviate participants’ day-to-day money worries, but then edge into budgets for wet-weather gear, home insurance, and anxieties about kin in global areas facing catastrophe.
And, actually, climate has been in those conversations for longer than we realised.
We already talk about saving energy. Preparing for heatwaves. Shopping and selling second-hand. Budgeting for wet-weather gear. Finding affordable home contents insurance. Even anxieties about family living in parts of the world facing climate catastrophe.
Getting out of our silos
Finding the right lens means policy makers, campaigners and other stakeholders stopping their work taking place in siloes. We know poverty leads to inequalities in health, education, climate… and so on, and yet money guidance remains a blindspot. Clean Slate’s money-first approach is an opportunity to think health AND financial wellbeing, education AND financial wellbeing, climate AND… you get the picture.
No, really, can you see the picture?
We want to work with climate activists and other stakeholders to build a service that improves the financial, mental and climate resilience of people in hardship across London.
And we need help reaching more people.
That might mean sharing our new 16-page Rainy Day Money Guide, encouraging people you work with to sign up for our money and climate emails, referring someone for one-to-one money coaching, sharing our surveys and polls, or helping us make connections with other organisations and services.
If you can see where your work fits into the picture, fill in our Rainy Day Money form and tell us how you’d like to get involved.
I loved the colour blindness – climate change analogy in this article. We are forever talking about the greatest impacts of climate change falling on the poor in the UK and the poor elsewhere in the world, especially in Africa. The reality is quite different, as we’ve seen this summer, with wildfires spreading across Europe and England and with the inevitable flooding that will follow.
The negative impacts of climate change have been discussed at international meetings since the 70’s. When John Prescott was responsible for regeneration under the Blair government, construction professionals like me were trained to address the likelihood of climate change impacts, mitigation, and adaptation. However, we couldn’t apply that training because we had to consult extensively with residents and businesses affected by regeneration, who had different needs and weren’t receiving the same training as professionals. For example, on the Buildings Schools for the Future Programme, I was one of two project managers writing the outline and detailed business cases for Haringey and received £190 million. However, parents, teachers, and businesses were more concerned about extended school use and digital education, and about responding to the 47 languages in which we consulted. As consultants, we could not influence climate-change needs through building eco-schools.e adding green roofs and walls, water harvesting, renewable energy and green building technology and materials. What a lost opportunity, as this could have increased awareness of climate change among parents, teachers, pupils and the local business community. It became a defining moment and influenced my decision to leave the regeneration sector, as we couldn’t apply sustainability learning from the early 2000s onwards.
Since then, I’ve attended COPs and witnessed an obsession with projecting future temperatures and exceeding them, rather than developing and implementing policies to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of global warming. There is something perverse in seeing danger, having the knowledge to protect yourself, and still continuing with business as usual. As you’ve shown, the poorest will experience the greatest impacts of global warming and have the least resilience to respond. The glacial flood events have risen significantly, and it was heartbreaking to see the recent events in Nepal as locals ran to get away from the flooding.
The UK is not immune from flooding events, as shown by the increase in uninsurable homes. Aviva claimed that between 2022 and 2024, one in nine new homes in England were built in flood risk areas. Often it’s people on relatively low income buying and renting these homes. Where is the logic in planning when there are many brownfield sites in cities that aren’t at risk of flooding? Well done for tackling this issue as it’s much overdue in money management.
Thanks, @Mal Robinson. So good to know this blog resonated. I hope the lessons for planning are being implemented but it will be too late for so many – yes, especially those in the most affordable, ie, cheap, ie, poorest housing. For them, it’s about futureproofing their money and weatherproofing their lives.