🌍 Could you be the climate messenger your workplace and community need?
Welcome to the ClimateAction.tech (CAT) Newsletter, a curated briefing for people in climate tech. This week, we’re exploring how the conversations we have at work can help move climate action forward.
Hey CATs,
Welcome to the ClimateAction.tech (CAT) Newsletter, a curated briefing for people in climate tech. This is the second in our revamped newsletter. Do let us know in Slack if you have any comments or things you’d like to see more or less of.
This week, we’re exploring how the conversations we have at work can help move climate action forward. Who do colleagues listen to? How do we make climate relevant to people’s everyday decisions? And what helps someone speak up when a company’s priorities seem at odds with its climate commitments?
We’ve also included a roundup of events, CAT community news, and jobs and career advice.
Stay curious 😌💚🐱
🐯️ The big story: Building a workplace culture where climate conversations can thrive
How can we build a workplace culture where more people feel able to talk about climate without worrying about their jobs, and colleagues also take those conversations seriously?
Research published in Human Relations, based on 58 interviews with professionals involved in internal climate activist groups, explores how employees navigate climate advocacy alongside their careers.
The study, A Bourdieusian Perspective on Internal Activism and Professional Careers, looks at how professional standing, workplace relationships, and career expectations shape people’s ability to push for change.
It can be so easy for climate responsibility to become the remit of a sustainability team or a small group of already-convinced colleagues, but making climate action part of everyday working life means reaching beyond those circles. It means finding ways for engineers, designers, product managers and other colleagues to connect climate to the decisions they influence, the problems they solve, and the priorities their teams already care about.
It also means recognising that speaking up isn’t always easy or straightforward, especially when you’re just starting out in your career and feel like you don’t have the influence or visibility to make a difference. Employees have to navigate workplace hierarchies, professional expectations, shifting job markets, and the risk of being seen as out of step with business priorities.
How, then, can we all work together to make it easier for more people to talk about climate, build support among colleagues, and influence the decisions that shape the tech industry?
CATs can get involved by:
Reading the research on internal climate activism and professional careers and sharing it with your workplace climate group or a colleague who is trying to influence change.
Raising an environmental question at your next team meeting, such as how a proposed project might affect your organisation’s carbon footprint.
Starting a conversation with a colleague outside your usual climate circle about how environmental concerns fit into their work.
Posting a workplace climate win or challenge in the CAT community, so other tech workers can learn from your experience.
📰️ Other news - Who knows about your company’s climate plans?
A survey by energy business D-ENERGI found that senior leaders are far more confident about their company’s net-zero plans than junior staff. While 78% of C-suite employees believe their company will reach net zero by 2050, just 34% of entry-level employees agree. Half of employees surveyed didn’t even know whether their company had a sustainability plan.
This doesn’t mean that junior staff don’t care about their company’s net zero promises – 70% of them say they care about their energy use at work, but they’re just not informed.
And the person communicating this does matter. A study from the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations looks at how trusted people influence climate-related behaviour. Its framework considers who delivers a message, who hears it, what behaviour it aims to change, and how much we take our cues from the people around us.
Inside tech companies, getting the message across and changing behaviour requires trusted peer networks, cross-functional allies, and colleagues who break the internal climate silence and make speaking up feel more normal.
🐯️ Three other things worth sharing
This blog shares insights from a CAT workshop where members collaboratively mapped the systemic forces shaping the industry, from extractive business models to data centres and inadequate governance. Explore the systems map to understand how these issues connect and why tackling the root causes matters for meaningful change.
A study of more than 9,000 scientists across 115 countries found that those who believe technology will largely solve the climate crisis are less likely to engage in climate advocacy or make high-impact lifestyle changes. So, can optimism about technological solutions actually distract us from the changes our industry needs to make now and in the future?
Have you ever thought about setting up a focus group on ChatGPT (or your AI of choice) to test your sustainability messaging across audience segments? That is one of the new tools, messengers, messages, and strategies that are needed to make sure climate comms responds to the challenges and trends of the world we’re living in right now.
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📅 Events (see all CAT events)
Wed Nov 04 2026 - Designing for Impact || AI, User Behavior, and the Climate Cost of Design Choices
Every AI design choice shapes resource consumption. Join this interactive workshop to explore how product design influences AI's environmental footprint — and how to deliver better outcomes with fewer resources.
Mon Nov 09 2026 - Climate Scaling Summit: The True Entry Points for Startups Working with Government
Join LACI at BATWorks and The Trust for Governors Island for a Climate Scaling Summit focused on one critical inflection point: how climate startups break into government as a customer, regulator, and partner.
🐯️Thurs Nov 12 2026 - Thinking in systems: Applying systems thinking tools to map the current reality of unsustainable tech
In the third workshop in a series of collaborative systems thinking sessions, we'll continue mapping out the complex challenges hindering the development of sustainable technology.
We will use the Bee and the Hive metaphor as a framework to explore the intrinsic complexities and interconnected dependencies inherent in technological unsustainability. Even if you missed the first session or the second session, your unique perspective is welcome and valuable as we build a complete systems map together.
Tue Nov 17 2026 - Code Green London Meetup
Do you want to be a part of the green software movement? Then come to this Green Software Practitioner training to make your software more sustainable!
The course is from the Green Software Foundation, and it teaches green application development across all domains.
Want an event listed here? Use this event listing form to submit the details so we can add it to the newsletter.
#️⃣ CAT Community News
Have you joined the channel #proj-cat-actions yet?
In line with our newsletter theme, the channel is centred around getting CATs to take action. One idea that the channel is exploring is a campaign calling for mandatory environmental transparency from AI companies, asking them to publicly disclose the energy consumption, carbon emissions, and water use associated with their models and services.
Join the channel if you’d like to get involved into 2027!
💼 Jobs and career advice
Seqana Permanent - Permanent employment (Unbefristeter Arbeitsvertrag - Hybrid - Berlin, German
Senior Software Engineer (Data & Platform)
In this role, you'll own the platform that takes our data, models, and estimation methods from R&D to auditable client deliverables, and you'll be a trusted reviewer and guide across software and data engineering. As a small team, you'll also shape how we build our geospatial pipelines and internal analytics.
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