People’s Emergency Briefing on the Climate Crisis

Climate and Nature in Crisis

People’s Emergency Briefing is a film, presented by Chris Packham, that brings together the latest evidence on the climate and nature crisis and what it means for the UK. You cannot download it or watch it on You Tube. But you can hire it for public showings in your community in order to organise our response to the crisis.

The film is a compilation of testimonies from expert voices who spoke at the National Emergency Briefing (NEB) in Westminster Hall on 27th November 2025 attended by 1200 MPs, peers and leaders from across UK society. The key message is that the crisis is intensifying. After years of conferences and calls for action, the key message is that all our efforts to reduce global warming have not been enough to stop it. In fact we are accelerating towards disaster. Hence the NEB and its campaign for the government to take this crisis as seriously as previous threats like WW2, financial crises and COVID. To this end NEB is building support for a government backed, televised emergency briefing akin to the COVID briefings.

The People’s Emergency Briefing is part of that. Local groups are organising screenings of the film and inviting their MP to attend and support a televised emergency briefing by the government. When I sat down to watch the film in Barrow-in-Furness, it had already had a cinema showing up the road in Ulverston, attended by my MP, which had an audience of 80 people and was reported in the local paper. We were a smaller group, sat in comfy chairs in the Art Gene gallery and served with Allotment Soup, made from organic ingredients grown in our community growing space on Walney Island.

The film consisted of edited highlights from the meeting in Westminster Hall interspersed with reactions from members of the public who watched the film with Chris Packham. It was not an easy watch. Experts in various fields – nature conservation, climate science, economics, even a retired general who spoke on the threat to national security – were unequivocal. We have to stop burning fossil fuels or we face societal collapse in our lifetime. The threat from Climate Crisis requires an immediate political response. Hence the campaign for the government to act. Part of that campaign calls on MPs, Peers and members of devolved legislatures to sign a statement that:

“call(s) on the Government to stage a prime-time televised emergency briefing across all the main channels, delivered by independent experts and supported by the UK’s Chief Scientific Adviser, setting out:

• the nature and scale of the climate and nature threats facing the UK
• why these threats matter to people’s lives and livelihoods
• how government, business and society can engage constructively with the challenges ahead”

Even though at least a thousand legislators attended the briefing in Westminster, five months later only 80 have signed up for the call. My own MP, Michelle Scrogham (LAB), who responded positively in the local paper after watching the film has yet to sign up.

Politics in Crisis

Politicians of every stripe have been presented with evidence of an existential threat to human society and cannot even put their names to a call for the government to lead a national conversation! Instead they are obsessed with Putin’s threat to Western Society, or the impact of the Middle East Crisis on the world economy. That is, when they can drag themselves away from damage limitation to their own political careers from the Epstein/Mandelson fiasco.

Part of the problem is that, thanks to a successful lobbying operation from the fossil fuel industry, the received wisdom goes something like this:

• We are already doing more than other countries. What about all that dirty coal in China?
• We cannot grow our economy and follow a green agenda.
• Technology can solve the problem with carbon capture.
• Renewables may be the future but we need more oil and gas in the short term.
• Et cetera, et cetera.

The detailed presentations on the NEB website refute all these claims and so much more. How many people know that two thirds of all the petrol we put in our cars produces heat from combustion and only one third actually powers the engine? With electric vehicles no combustion means that all the energy powers the car.

Returning to China, it is a massive country and so it is no surprise that its carbon emissions are among the highest in the world. But it has cut them by half and also has the highest figure for renewable or green energy consumption. Whatever you think of the political set up in China, it is actively growing its economy with a green agenda.

It’s later than you think

Although the overall message on climate change from the NEB is depressing, I left the film feeling more optimistic because the solutions are so straightforward.

• Nature is not an optional extra. It is fundamental to our existence. Treat it as an asset and not a liability.
• Carbon capture aint gonna happen in time to save us all. Cut carbon emissions now.
• A Green Industrial Revolution can deliver sustainable growth.
• The solutions are there. All we need is the political will.

The unanswered question – in fact it is never put by NEB – is why there is no political will to deliver these solutions. This is where their deliberate eschewing of political analysis lets them down. By all means support this initiative. It is a brilliant resource and an opportunity to build in your community. But there are systemic reasons why we are heading towards the abyss. A scientific understanding of the problem is necessary but not sufficient. We also need a political understanding of how unrestricted capitalism has brought us to this pass. If the crisis is systemic, we need system change to stop climate change. And that will not come from the current crop of politicians without a mass movement applying pressure from below.