Donations Spotlight: Planet Reimagined is mainstreaming the climate movement with fair solutions

Note from the CREDO Mobile team: This July, Planet Reimagined is among three amazing groups that will receive a share of our monthly grant. Funding from the CREDO Mobile community will support Planet Reimagined in its work to mainstream the climate movement with fair solutions.

 Read this important blog post about Planet Reimagined’s critical work, then visit CREDODonations.com and cast your vote to help send funding to the group to assist its efforts — and the efforts of our other outstanding July grantees.

June 5, 2024, was the 51st annual World Environment Day. On the occasion, UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged world leaders to act immediately to address mounting climate risks, highlighting the dire fact that our planet just endured 12 straight months of record heat.

After attending the special address on climate action by Guterres, Adam Met—U.N.-appointed climate advocate (and the “A” in eight times platinum band AJR)—appeared on CNN Newsroom to reflect on the Secretary-General’s ambitious plan to confront the crisis.

“He laid out a really comprehensive plan,” Met told CNN. “He started by calling fossil fuel companies the godfathers of climate chaos and called on people around the world to stop investing in advertising that supports fossil fuel companies. But at the same time he called for potential, saying they could be the leaders of the renewable energy transition.”

Met then described a climate solution designed by Planet Reimagined, the social impact nonprofit he founded in 2020. The solution, Common Grounds, is a bipartisan effort to engage with fossil fuel companies and independent producers to help them transition by co-locating renewable energy projects on top of oil and gas land. “They really can be the leaders if they put their mind to it and the political will,” Met says.

In his special address, Guterres called for 33 specific actions by different groups, from financial institutions to governments. As the 1.5C threshold of global warming has been breached for a full 12 months for the first time, sustainable approaches and accelerated action must happen—and they will require sweeping policy reform at local, state and federal levels. Ultimately, the scale of the climate crisis demands unconventional cross-sector partnerships, innovations and solutions to advance changes in policy and practice through sophisticated advocacy strategies and publicly accessible communication channels to inspire public audiences on the platforms and channels where they are most engaged.

Planet Reimagined has an innovative solution

In 2020, Met recognized that the movement for climate and environmental justice overall had the problem that advocacy and research take place in silos. This sparked the founding of Planet Reimagined, which is dedicated to building a bridge between thought and action. “There can be robust research showing technically how or why a solution would work,” Met says. “But if we do that research in isolation from advocacy—without engaging with policymakers and without answering the economic, social and political questions, along with the scientific and policy ones—then just having good evidence isn’t enough.”

Planet Reimagined combines rare access to media and entertainment with global partnerships to enable interdisciplinary teams to work nimbly within academia, industry, policy and social movements. Planet Reimagined is advancing real solutions through its Action Research Center (ARC), a new kind of academy that brings together researchers from around the world on fellowships to collaborate on fair solutions to the climate crisis. This model maximizes the impact of research and advocacy through the arc of sequential topics that ladder up from the work of previous fellows, graduating projects from incubation to full-scale implementation.

As a result of this unprecedented action-research model, Planet Reimagined incubated the Common Grounds clean energy idea and graduated it to implementation, achieving rare bipartisan Congressional agreement that sparked an affirmative response from the Department of the Interior. As a result, the Department of the Interior is indicating that, for the first time in U.S. history, it will accept and encourage proposals for new solar and wind projects on top of current and former oil and gas leases on public lands. This landmark response triggered the next stage of Common Grounds: the development of pilot co-location projects in the western U.S. and a digital portal that will help small energy-business owners transition away from fossil fuels to power our economy in a way that is more sustainable.

Additional victories from Planet Reimagined’s ARC include: attracting more than 1,600 fellowship candidates from 110 countries; new research on fan engagement in climate action featured by CNN, Fox, Pollstar, Worth magazine and at the 2024 Music Sustainability Summit; and research on the values of freshwater conservation incorporated into local stakeholder appeals for river restoration in arguments before the Supreme Court of Nepal.

To learn more or get involved, please visit PlanetReimagined.com.