Edition: 8 September 2026
Theme: Scaling Hope
This week the United Nations declared that the world will miss target and exceed 1.5 degrees warming. While we now know that it will get worse before it gets better, there is still so much we can do to avoid worst-case scenario. To do so we can still work to reduce future emissions, and we have at our disposal a multitude of solutions to adapt and thrive. This is where climate hope comes in.
Climate hope as a practice isn’t naive, and new research shows it isn’t passive either. Hope can be an enabler of climate change adaptation – they reinforce each other. This week we look at five stories that trace that feedback loop, from a community’s resilience after disaster, to grassroots practices that scaled into systemic change, to local initiatives cutting emissions and already showing measurable results.
1. How one town’s hope grew from rebuilding together
In 2011, catastrophic flash flooding devastated the Queensland town of Grantham, killing twelve people and destroying much of the community. Rather than simply rebuilding, the residents chose, through a voluntary land swap led by their own mayor, to move much of the town to higher ground, staying together as neighbours. Research on hope and climate adaptation points to towns like Grantham as evidence that collective action after disaster can reinforce, rather than deplete, community wellbeing. Fifteen years on, Grantham is studied worldwide as a model of community-led hope-driven resilience.
Source: Communications Psychology, Nature — October 2025
Buen Vivir connection: Grantham’s recovery was built on solidarity and choosing to collectively prioritise the wellbeing of the whole community over any individual, a living example of Buen Vivir’s relational view of a Good Life.
Why it matters: Emerging psychological research suggests hope and adaptation reinforce each other in a loop: communities that act together to adapt build the hope that fuels further action, and that hope fuels more adaptation in turn.
2. Seven seedlings that grew into a movement
In 1977, Wangari Maathai and a handful of Kenyan women planted seven trees on World Environment Day, the start of what became the Green Belt Movement. Organised into local groups that collect seeds, grow seedlings, and plant and tend trees, participants, mostly women, are paid for their work, turning conservation into a livelihood rather than a favour. Today the movement has planted more than 51 million trees across Kenya and trained over 100,000 women, and its model has been replicated by grassroots groups across Africa and helped inspire the UN’s global tree-planting campaigns.
Source: Green Belt Movement
Buen Vivir connection: Maathai’s insistence that environmental restoration and women’s empowerment were the same project, not two competing goals, reflects Buen Vivir’s holistic vision of community and environmental wellbeing as one whole.
Why it matters: What began as seven seedlings became one of the clearest examples anywhere of a local practice scaling into systemic change, proof that grassroots climate action can grow far beyond its origins.
3. From one village in India to solar power in 96 countries
Barefoot College began in Tilonia, in India’s Rajasthan desert, training rural women with no formal education to become solar engineers, wiring and maintaining their own villages’ power. The model has since scaled to 96 countries, and between 2022 and 2024 alone trained 3,800 women who went on to electrify 212,500 homes. Communities report a 90 percent drop in fossil fuel use for lighting and cooking, and in 2024 the programme’s installations avoided an estimated 132,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions, all while cutting household energy costs and respiratory illness.
Source: Lipman Family Prize, University of Pennsylvania — March 2026
Buen Vivir connection: Barefoot College trains communities to own their own power, literally, refusing outside dependency in favour of self-determined, locally controlled technology, a model of self-sufficiency at the heart of Buen Vivir.
Why it matters: This is what scaled climate impact looks like when a community-owned model is replicated rather than centralised. Measurable emissions are avoided, with the knowledge and equipment staying in the hands of the people who need them.
4. The English village that cut its emissions by 40%
In January 2006, around 400 residents of Ashton Hayes, a village of roughly 1,000 people in rural Cheshire, gathered in the local school and voted to try to become England’s first carbon-neutral community. Two decades on, through measures as simple as clotheslines, better insulation and fewer flights, alongside a community-owned renewable energy company, the village has cut its carbon emissions by 40 percent. Residents surveyed their own footprint, tracked their own progress, and shared everything they learned for free, and the village now links with more than 1,000 other communities worldwide who are following its lead.
Source: Ashton Hayes Going Carbon Neutral — November 2025
Buen Vivir connection: Twenty years of villagers choosing collective, voluntary change, and openly sharing what they learn rather than guarding it, reflects Buen Vivir’s understanding of wellbeing as something built and shared collectively.
Why it matters: Ashton Hayes shows a local emissions-reduction initiative can deliver real, measured results while becoming a template thousands of other communities have since adapted for themselves.
5. Brazil’s cooperatives turn membership into climate action
Across Brazil, a country with more than 14 million cooperative members, member-owned cooperatives are increasingly becoming vehicles for climate action alongside their traditional work in farming and credit. In 2023, 736 Brazilian cooperatives generated their own energy, more than 3,500 of them through new solar installations, up from 582 the year before. In Bahia, the Pataxó Indigenous village of Boca da Mata runs its own forestry cooperative, Cooplanjé, which has reforested 210 hectares of Atlantic Rainforest to help form an ecological corridor connecting two protected areas.
Source: Resilience.org / Grassroots Economic Organizing — May 2026
Buen Vivir connection: Cooperatives run democratically by their own members, whether reforesting ancestral land or installing solar panels, embody Buen Vivir’s insistence that economic activity serve the community and the land together, not one at the expense of the other.
Why it matters: Brazil already has a vast, trusted network of local cooperatives; channelling climate action through institutions communities already own and run may scale faster than building new ones from scratch.
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