Where should our leaders lead us?
As stated in our charter, the Askehave Climate Foundation will fund “impactful research that helps us live within the Earth’s planetary boundaries affected by climate change”. According to the latest reports from the Stockholm Resilience Institute, humankind is breaching six of the nine defined planetary boundaries. Climate change, or more precisely, global warming, is one of these, and most are interrelated. What connects them all are the choices made by more than eight billion entities: countries, politicians, corporations and individuals. Choices that individually improve short-term security, standards of living, profits, comfort, even health but collectively are a slow-moving long-term disaster. There is no technological quick fix to this. Yes, improved technologies for energy generation, storage and efficiency, for transportation and so on are needed, and they are on the way, backed by billions of dollars, yuan, euros and pounds. But they cannot stand alone.
In 1865, no less than 160 years ago, William Jevons published a book called ’The Coal Question’. He described in the book how increased efficiency in the deployment of a resource, in his case coal, increases the use of the resource. To put it simply, if it is cheaper to use, we use more. Jevons was sadly correct, much more than he could have imagined. In his day, the global annual coal consumption was 200 million tons. In 2024 it was 9 billion tons. 45 times higher. Despite solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, oil and gas, coal consumption has never been higher than today.
Technology alone cannot fix this. We need to mobilize the social sciences and the humanities to guide us all towards wiser choices.
As a consequence, the theme for the 2025 donation from the Askehave Climate Foundation was specified as follows:
“The Askehave Climate Foundation seeks proposals for interdisciplinary social science or humanities-based research with the goal of actively identifying and contributing to broad behavioural changes reducing per capita CO² emissions.”
We invited a few university research groups to describe their most impactful proposal within this – admittedly, very broad – theme. The projects were evaluated by an independent group of distinguished researchers, and the final selection was done by the board of directors of the Foundation.
The project selected was the project “Step Forward” led by Dr Tina Fawcett, Dr Sam Hampton and Dr Emilie Vrain at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, UK. The academic team will also include Dr Steve Westlake at the University of Bath, who has pioneered research on the importance of politicians leading by example on climate.
This action-oriented project focuses on the role of leadership in societal change. By inspiring and empowering a new set of climate leaders, it aims to result in widespread behavioural change and carbon emissions reductions. Through acting and advocating on climate change, leaders can help normalise low-carbon behaviours, influence their followers’ actions and foster greater public support for transformative systems-change.
First, research will explore why more leaders do not speak out on climate change. What motivations and barriers are experienced by potential climate leaders? Prior research shows many leaders feel they need to remain silent on climate – also known as ‘green hushing’. The project will investigate the capabilities of different types of leaders and how they might be supported in overcoming obstacles to action and advocacy.
Following this, influential leaders from the business, political and sports worlds will be recruited to take part in the project. Partners experienced in delivering change programmes, including Climate Outreach and Climate Change Coaches will develop tailored interventions for different groups of leaders. Using a variety of techniques, leaders will be trained to use their voices and platforms for climate. The effectiveness of different training approaches and leaders’ subsequent actions and advocacy will be evaluated.
The research will also look at public perspectives on climate leadership by undertaking a global opinion survey. This evidence will help influence and shape the public conversation around climate leaders and leading by example.
By evaluating different interventions with leaders, the project will determine the most effective behaviours and communication strategies that climate leaders can employ to influence their followers. These findings will be widely communicated, ensuring the project has influence far beyond the impacts of the individual leaders who engage during its four-year life.
The vision is that this project will provide the evidence-based foundations for all leaders to become climate leaders.
