Letters from Earthfest: What Earthfest 2025 Taught Me About Climate Communication

Hosted across London’s King’s Cross, EarthFest 2025 is London's four-day “ultimate festival of sustainability, created to inspire positive climate action.” And let me tell you, this event was spectacular. It brought climate communication to life in ways I hadn’t quite experienced before. There was a Fashion Quarter filled with sustainable runway shows and upcycling workshops, a Green Kitchen where chefs gave plant-based cooking demos, and a full schedule of panels covering everything from greentech to eco-anxiety to storytelling in film and television. There was even a quiet space beside the canal, a rare and thoughtful addition that offered room to pause, process, and reflect.

What struck me most about EarthFest wasn’t just the content but the atmosphere. Whether you were there for the talks, the workshops, the music, or simply out of curiosity, the festival welcomed you in without prerequisites. You didn’t need to be an expert. You didn’t need to know a lot about the climate crisis. It was a space where learning, exploration, and feeling were all part of the experience. It was a quiet, joyful experiment in reimagining how we talk about the climate crisis, not through fear, guilt, or jargon but through culture, experience, and community.

We talk a lot about climate communication in abstract terms like behaviour change, narrative strategies, and awareness-raising, but EarthFest made it tangible. The whole event seemed designed around a different premise: that people don’t act because they’re scared. They act because they’re inspired, included, and shown what’s possible. It felt like the festival was less about telling people what to do and more about letting them feel what it’s like to live differently.

That openness continued into the sessions, especially the panel “Using Communication to Turn Eco-Anxiety into Action.” In the talk, climate activist and founder of Force of Nature, Clover Hogan, described the dissonance many young people experience, knowing how urgent the crisis is, but watching the world continue as if nothing’s wrong. The problem isn’t just the scale of the climate emergency. It’s the loneliness of caring about it in a society that often refuses to respond. That disconnect, she argued, is a key driver of climate anxiety. And it’s worsened by the way communication tends to focus on individual guilt: recycle more, fly less, buy better—as if personal behaviour alone could undo systemic failure.

It was a theme that came up again and again. Actor and co-founder of Green Rider, Fehinti Balogun, spoke about “societal gaslighting,” or the way people are shamed for feeling alarmed, even when that alarm is rational. Nicky Hawkins, a consultant at Heard, talked about how traditional messaging treats people more like problems to solve than collaborators in change.

But the most compelling argument didn’t come from the panels alone. It came from the atmosphere of the festival itself. Throughout the day, a clear thread emerged: climate communication works best when it connects. When it centres people’s lived experiences, honours their emotions, and invites participation through culture, creativity, and care.

These weren’t just ideas in the panels; they were embedded in the structure of the festival itself. You could learn how to repair your jeans, try a drink made from carbon-negative spirits, and end the day watching a musical performance where music is used as a tool for positive change—all in one place. These were small moments, but they reminded me of something that humans often forget: we act on what we can feel. And we sustain action when we feel included and when it’s tied to identity, not obligation.

When the world we are being asked to fight for looks like one we might actually want to live in, change becomes possible. That’s what EarthFest got right. It let people imagine change through joy, not pressure. It met people where they were, not with demands, but with music, food, fashion, humour, and connection. In doing so, it pushed back against the idea that climate action has to be based in fear or guilt.

It showed that sustainability can be cultural. Even celebratory. That it can be a way of living, not just reacting.

That’s what I’m trying to explore with Letters to a Warmer World: how we can talk about climate with more clarity, creativity, and care. I left EarthFest reminded that the way we frame and communicate climate matters just as much as what we communicate. And that sometimes, creating spaces where people feel welcome, curious, and capable is one of the most powerful forms of action we have.