Climate Lab Pendle is underpinned by climate psychology and listening practices; we are engaging people in order to explore, rather than to tell. The work challenges ‘business as usual’ thinking and de-centres the emphasis on individual behaviour change to look at ways we can build diversity of leadership and collective agency.

We are addressing urgent questions with people all around our community, from young people to councillors, business leaders and community workers, Council staff and local residents, amplifying voices and holding space for intergenerational and intercultural dialogue. 
 
So far on our journey we have used a tool called the Climate Fresk *, facilitated by our climate collaborator Tom Deacon. We are combining this with Talkaoke and other listening methods, including Thinking Out Loud to enable us to test the temperature and design our work in response to the full complexity of the situation, and understanding how a climate crisis response also necessarily incorporates anti-racism, resisting the far right agenda and addressing mis and dis-information. In order to do this, we are working in collaboration with our friends and neighbours, Building Bridges Pendle. 
 
We have held Climate Fresks with young people, the community and creative sector, Councillors and business leaders and groups of local residents in Nelson. We have trained up 10 community Climate Fresk facilitators, who helped us facilitate a mass climate event called ‘Inside Out Pendle’ in collaboration with The People Speak.

We have hosted community conversations, made films and produced artist responses including Aliyah Hussain’s How do we Listen PRINT! commission for This is Nelson.  And created a deck of conversational cards for Thinking Out Loud.  that brings together responses, ideas, thoughts and feelings from all the conversations we’ve had so far. 


Barriers to climate engagement

Part of the work of climate engagement is to listen, in order to better understand what holds people (ourselves included) back, or what causes people to shut down, or feel numb about what they are hearing. As well as holding numerous conversations that create space for an exploration as community of how we feel about the crises, we are also commissioning writing that goes deeper into some of the reasons why we find ourselves unable to engage or take up our agency. Our aim through all of these activities is to enable collective agency to bring about change. 


How we got here

In-Situ has always developed projects and conversations that challenge ‘business as usual’ thinking about people place and culture, including work by artists, our code of ethics and our advocacy work with local authorities, the education sector and developers. 
 
In 2024, Pendle Borough Council approached us for a new piece of work, to engage communiteis about climate change. We really ran with this invitation to develop a way of working that we tested over 9 months in 2024-25.

You can read about this in our case study and watch films that were commissioned by the Council to train their workforce around the climate crisis, where we centre inequality and active hope in our message.