Highlights from London Climate Action Week (LCAW) 2020

Great progress was made at the first-ever digital London Climate Action Week (LCAW) – an event harnessing the capital’s world-leading expertise to develop climate policy solutions for the post-Covid world. This year’s LCAW digital was a resounding success, more than 10,000 people attended over 70 events online with over 150 climate experts, including highly influential speakers such as Alok Sharma and Kwasi Kwarteng.

The Covid-19 crisis has demonstrated that global crises need global responses with strong international governance and cooperation. It has also shown how societies need to build in the resilience to cope with sudden economic shocks, underlining warnings that even 2°C of warming could see the global economy contract by 13%.

London Climate Action Week provided a platform for London’s cutting-edge climate organisations to re-energize the climate debate by working with experts worldwide to find innovative solutions.

Event summary video – created by Greenhouse and partners 

LCAW 2020: the power of digital   

The decision to make LCAW a digital event did not hinder its success – in fact, it enhanced it. London is a global city, and holding events digitally-enabled greater capacity, allowing individuals to participate from all around the world. Most notably, one event by Climate Action had more than 3,000 attendees.

Likewise, it encouraged event organisers to respond to the challenge in creative ways. An example of this was the Risk-Informed Early Action Partnership event who made their audience ‘Jurors’ in their event, asking them to offer recommendations in a climate Jury, with expert speakers from a number of sectors acting as ‘witnesses’. 

The online medium also opened up new opportunities for international and interdisciplinary collaboration. The IIED and ICCCAD event brought together experts from England and Bangladesh to discuss the mutual benefits of strengthening ties; Bangladesh gains assistance in building climate resilience and academics in the UK access and learn from Bangladesh experience.

Other highlights included: 

• Chatham House and HSBC hosted a joint event on the effect of COVID-19 on various sectors – including transport, energy, aviation, insurance – and how investors can build green growth into the economic recovery.
• The Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC), whose members hold more than €30 trillion in assets under management, hosted an event on investing in a sustainable recovery post Covid-19.
• Wilton Park, the Foreign Office agency, brought together policymakers, investors and financiers for an event on how to use development finance for a sustainable recovery.
• Climate charity Ashden held their annual awards, globally recognised as a mark of excellence in the field of climate solutions.
• UK financial think-tank Carbon Tracker will discuss its most recent report on the energy transition, and the size and vulnerability of the fossil fuel system.

See a full list of the events that took place here. 

Greenhouse PR’s role

The Greenhouse team was delighted to be involved in running the digital communications campaign for LCAW 2020, as well as supporting organisers across the 70 events. We built social media channels for Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, compiled a series of social media assets for event speakers, and created compelling promotion and wrap-up films, showing the momentum and energy behind the event.

We managed to navigate the challenges of social distancing to film thought leadership Interviews with high profile climate experts including Nigel Topping (High Level Champion for Climate Action, COP26) and Emma Howard Boyd (Chair, Environment Agency). 

Social media:

LCAW’s Twitter was built to over 2K followers in just three weeks and garnered over 1.1K retweets and 2.2K likes during this time. LCAW’s videos were shared more than 104K times and watched collectively for over 42.7K minutes.

COP26 President @AlokSharma_RDG reflects on a hugely successful #LDNClimateAction Week.

👇 👇 👇

What was your favourite #LCAW2020 event? 🌍 💪#COP26 | @london_climate | #ClimateAction #COP26 | @topnigel pic.twitter.com/vCILwO618v

— COP26 (@COP26) July 4, 2020

Tweets were shared by influential accounts such as COP26, Sadiq Khan, Alok Sharma, Christiana Figueres, Nigel Topping, Inger Anderson as well as the British Embassies in the USA, Paraguay, Portugal, Chile, Bahrain, Argentina, Bangladesh, Angola, Dominican Republic, South Africa, Uzbekistan, and Morocco. 

Media

LCAW proved that there is widespread interest in a conversation around a green recovery. Engagement in LCAW was high from both attendees and the media. With over 75 media pieces written around the event, including in publications like The Guardian, Telegraph, Mail and Reuters. These articles themselves created engagement and garnered 7.7K article shares on social media in less than a week, leading to an estimated 2.65M coverage views.

There were also a number of blogs written around the event. By stakeholders Ashden and Blue Patch and 3 op-eds in BusinessGreen – for Tom Burke, Co-founding Director of E3G, Shirley Rodrigues, Deputy Mayor for Environment and Energy, and Sandrine Dixson-Declève, CEO of Club of Rome.

Greenhouse blogs surrounded the 3 key themes of the event: green investment, international collaboration and solutions for adaptation and climate resilience.

Event teaser video – created by Greenhouse and partners 

Building back better

We need to build on the LCAW 2020 event and continue to drive momentum to build a green recovery. But its real significance was as a snapshot of the expertise on policy, finance and resilience in the UK, and the resounding call to build back better and to fight the climate crisis with innovative and meaningful policies and campaigns.

We are proud to be part of global movement that is demanding climate action, urgency and collaboration, especially during this poignant time. It is clear we don’t want a return to normal – we need our government to put a cleaner future at the heart of plans to rebuild our economy to create a cleaner, greener, fairer world for future generations.

If you are addressing social and climate issues and want to scale your impact, please do get in touch with the Greenhouse team on 0117 214 1250 or email  info@greenhousepr.co.uk.