16th April 2026
Last month I chaired a panel at the Climate and Nature Education Festival, a one-day event bringing together educators, activists, politicians, business leaders, governors, parents, and charities from across the education spectrum. The panel’s question was a simple one: is climate change a working class issue?
The question itself, as panellist Tahir Latif (Greener Jobs Alliance) pointed out, is revealing. That it still needs asking points to a persistent cultural and political failure to recognise that working class communities are not only acutely affected by climate change, but already engaged with it. Tahir challenged the assumption – common even within progressive circles, that working class people are indifferent to the climate crisis.
The real problem, he argued, lies in how that crisis is communicated. Green messaging has long been framed around individual lifestyle choices – whether switching to electric vehicles, changing consumption habits, or buying organic food, all of which require disposable income most working class people simply do not have. Holding these up as markers of climate concern is, as he put it, infantilising. Working class people are not failing to care about the planet; they are operating under material constraints that mainstream environmentalism too often ignores. It is a dynamic that I have regularly encountered over the years – barriers to working class engagement with the climate movement are rarely about values. They are almost always about material constraints and feeling as if their presence would be an unwelcome one.
Catherine Porritt (Greener Jobs Alliance) reminded us of the classic trade union organising principle of educating, agitating, and organising. She made the stakes viscerally concrete.Education workers are already living the climate crisis as a health and safety emergency, with staff reporting classroom temperatures reaching 42 degrees, nosebleeds and fainting.
The challenge, she argued, is not necessarily about awareness but about agency. People know that something is wrong. What they need is knowledge of what they can do about it, and trade unions and health and safety representatives are uniquely well placed to provide that. Crucially, this means engaging workers in climate action on their own terms, rather than reproducing the top-down green messaging that has so often left working class communities and workers cold. The role of trade unions is not to hand down policy from above but to build the conditions for workers to understand, act, and organise together.
Suzanne Jeffrey (Campaign Against Climate Change) widened the lens further, placing climate vulnerability within global structures of inequality. She was clear that working class communities need to hear, and believe, that it is neoliberalism driving the erosion of their living standards, not net zero or immigration. Until that reframing takes hold, the climate movement will keep losing ground to narratives that pit workers against climate action. She was equally clear that there are no individual solutions to climate change, only collective ones, and that the just transition framing within trade unions has too often been reduced to a narrow question about carbon-heavy jobs, losing sight of the scale of the emergency we are actually facing.
There was a shared critique of the way climate action has been individualised, commodified, and stripped of its political content, and a shared conviction that the only credible response is collective action, rooted in working class experience and power. The speakers also drew focus to real tensions that cannot be brushed aside – between the urgency of ecological breakdown and the legitimate exhaustion of communities that have been failed by institutions, governments, and employers for decades. Holding both of those things together, without dismissing the emergency or abandoning the people bearing the sharpest edge of economic precarity, is one of the defining challenges for climate organisers and educators right now.
The answer to the panel’s opening question is not only yes, but obviously yes. Climate change is a working class issue because it is a question of who bears the costs, who gets to adapt, and who is left behind. Not least because working class people have always cared, and have a long history of organising for environmental justice that many in the mainstream climate movement have been too quick to overlook.
Written by Emma River-Roberts