Climate Action
Creating Clean, Healthy Communities and Jobs
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released its latest comprehensive climate assessment (2025), and its message is clear: climate change is accelerating, and action is urgently needed. This IPCC assessment – the culmination of several years of scientific reports – highlights alarming trends in global warming and extreme weather, but also outlines feasible solutions to mitigate the crisis. In this blog, we summarize the key findings of the report in accessible terms, focusing on climate change trends, recommended mitigation strategies, and policy implications. By understanding the findings of recent IPCC reporting, governments, businesses, and communities can better navigate the path toward a sustainable and resilient future.
The report emphasizes that the harms from climate change are no longer abstract future risks – they are already occurring worldwide. We are seeing “widespread loss and damage” to both nature and people from the existing ~1.1°C of warming. For example, extreme floods, wildfires, and storms have become more destructive, impacting food security, infrastructure, and lives.
Key Themes from Recent IPCC Work & Related Reports (2024-2025):
Critical Emissions Peak: To stay below 1.5°C warming, global emissions must peak by 2025 and fall sharply (around 43% by 2030 from 2019 levels), transitioning rapidly from fossil fuels.
AR7 Progress: In early 2025, the IPCC agreed on the outlines for its three Working Group contributions (Physical Science Basis, Impacts/Adaptation, Mitigation) for the Seventh Assessment Report (AR7).
Continued Warming: Data from 2024-2025 indicates continued record-high greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat, and glacier retreat, with the 2023-2025 period likely exceeding 1.5°C warming for the first time in a three-year average.
Solutions Exist: The science confirms that many solutions (like solar and wind power, now cheaper than fossil fuels in many areas) are available for deep decarbonization, requiring transformational change across sectors.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) pages HERE.
More from the United Nations on the Paris Climate Agreement HERE.
Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation tool HERE.
Grist Mapping of IRA, BIL and Infrastructure Funding for Climate Adaptation and Resiliency Projects.
Southeast Regional Climate Center website HERE.
We here in Kentucky must do our part. The future of our planet is at a critical point: We must reach 80% reduction in greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions by 2050 to keep global temperature increases under 2°C (3.6°F). While most efforts toward this goal have been focused on reducing fossil fuel use, new science shows natural climate solutions—based on the conservation, restoration and management of forests, grasslands and wetlands—can deliver up to 37% of the needed emission reductions by 2030. Combined with wider adoption of renewable energy and other technologies, natural climate solutions are essential to keeping our climate safe.
Weather events have already increasingly demonstrated more flooding events in Louisville and other river cities. The unpredictability of these events create challenges for disaster preparedness, agriculture, and human health.
The Kentucky Conservation Committee has been working on issues relating to climate change, including support for reforesting and reclaiming abandoned mine lands, support for greater use of native plants which are more resilient, and diversifying our energy sources with clean energy, efficiency and renewables.
This page provides links to additional resources to support the recommendations in our guide, “Key Steps for Climate Action in Kentucky”. You may download the guide, and we also can provide printed copies for your organization. Contact us to request.
Key Principles Around Climate Action
The last comprehensive climate action plan for Kentucky to come from the state’s Energy and Environment Cabinet dates back to 2011. Since that time the state has produced more limited reports on climate and environmental impacts relating to items such as the Clean Power Plan, a federal climate initiative dating back to 2015.
Local agencies, local nonprofits and national organizations with local ties have produced aspirational climate plans as late as 2016. Many of these plans focus primarily in the energy sector.
The Kentucky Conservation Committee, working with strategic partners, has outlined key steps for climate action in Kentucky, broadly including these areas:
Our Principles in Working With Communities:
Research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication shows that a majority of voters in Kentucky understand that climate change is not only real, but that something must be done about the problem. And, almost as importantly, they now understand that those coal jobs that politicians promised to bring back will not be returning. Link here.
The Kentucky Conservation Committee was founded in the mid-70s as a collaborative where organizations and citizens could come together from their different interests to find common ground and discuss and act on what is important to them in the conservation spectrum.
Starting with four core conservation organizations, we now partner with over two dozen groups and coalitions to address the needs of frontline communities. Today, it is understood that what is common to most conservation issues is a fundamental recognition that citizens have a right to clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment. And we believe that much of what will drive our progress is through citizens of each community having direct engagement on these issues. KCC believes in lifting up the voices of those who are directly affected by the impacts of pollution and the impacts of having less-than-representative democracy.
There are several excellent writings that capture some of these fundamental principles. KCC subscribes to the Jemez Principles of Democratic Organizing as a philosophy for ensuring that local communities have a voice in their own communities. The basic principles are:
Be Inclusive
Emphasize Bottom-Up Organizing
Let People Speak for Themselves
Work Together in Solidarity and Mutuality
Build Just Relationships Among Ourselves
Commit to Self-Transformation
Collaborative initiatives such as the Climate Justice Alliance have also worked collectively to outline guidance for frontline communities on core conservation areas. These include:
Building Local Living Economies
Zero Waste
Regional Food Systems
Public Transportation
Clean Community Energy
Efficient, Affordable, Durable Housing
Ecosystem Restoration and Stewardship
Building Community Resilience
Grassroots Economies
Rights to Land, Water, Food Sovereignty
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