MISSION STATEMENT
We are an independent organisation supporting and coordinating agile, multidisciplinary research for action on the rapidly changing front lines of global warming.
Climate change is often described through abstract temperature averages, yet lived realities are experienced as a multitude of localised ground conditions: ecological breakdown, seasonal instability, urban heat intensification, and heightened vulnerability in regions already under pressure from extractive industries.
These impacts are experienced in specific, situated, and uneven ways by particular communities and ecosystems. While we advocate for the reduction of global emissions and the transition to renewable energy, we recognise that climate change and the infrastructural transformations needed to address it at the global level will produce uneven downstream effects in unexpected ways for local places over the coming decades.
Our mission is to address this unevenness by enabling research projects and ventures grounded in real ground conditions; projects that help communities and ecosystems navigate profound environmental, social, and economic change.
The challenge is not only environmental, but structural. Many research methodologies and governance systems were designed for a world that no longer exists. Our current predicament of Climate Change does not adhere to political borders or traditional research silos.
The tradition of western knowledge systems have organised an understanding of the planet into the neat categories of the Natural, the Technological, and the Human. These categories have historically organised academic research disciplines and silos; humanities deals with the socio-economic conditions of society, science deals with nature, and engineering deals with technology.
While cross overs between them increasingly become sites of innovation, those categories on their own are no longer sufficient for understanding the way the planet is today, as climate change reveals the entanglements between humans and nature, the urban and wild, the humanities and sciences.
How can modern institutions attend to the planetary condition of climate change and its myriad manifestations that break down these distinctions into obscurity?
We advocate for a recognition of our entangledness, and we work to develop alternative models of research, coordination, and collective response with a high tolerance for experimental, interdisciplinary approaches that defy the status quo.
We support forms of climate action that move beyond individualised responsibility, strengthening community agency, shared knowledge production, and relationships between urban networks and remote or overlooked communities and ecosystems on the front lines.
As an organisation our mission, in more practical terms, is to address three core barriers to effective climate response:
1. Fragmentation of research and action
We aim to bridge the persistent gap between siloed knowledge production and the complexities of situated action.
2. Imbalances in knowledge legitimacy
We prioritise situated research and projects which are structured through co-authorship with on-the-ground voices often left out of mainstream discourse.
3. Economic precarity
We respond to the material conditions that constrain independent research by providing workspaces, programmatic infrastructure, and access to funding that support deep, sustained inquiry, supporting both the projects and people undertaking them.
