SUN, SH¡TSTORM & SOAPBOX. That was CCC closing LCAW 2026.

London # 5 – This Revolution Will Not Be Televised. 26 June 2026, City Hall, London

This was not a talking shop. This was not a drinks reception dressed in sustainability language. This was the moment the old guard needed to be in the same room as the revolutionaries - not to be convinced. To be confronted. With the ideas, the models, the leaders and the art that are already building what comes next. And that's exactly what happened at County Hall on 26 June. Well that, plus the arrival of a lot of sweaty people holding anxiety of melting public transport infrastructure and the risk of not getting home!

"CCC has been the most creative and buzzy event I've spoken at in LCAW for last 2 years" Lisa Merrick-Lawless - Co-founder, Purpose Disruptors

THE CASE FOR CONFRONTATION

Here's the thing about London Climate Action Week: it's designed to make incremental look inevitable. Net Zero targets, carbon reduction roadmaps, transition frameworks - all important. All insufficient. A decade of this has captured the low-hanging fruit. Cost savings. Easy wins. Incremental gains dressed up as transformation.

But the Middle East is cracking. The fossil fuel era is cracking with it. 2030 deadlines are no longer targets. They are verdicts.

This event wasn't about defending the last system or convincing anyone it needs saving. It was about showing up in three zones - DISRUPT, PROVOKE, LIBERATE - with people who've stopped asking permission and started building the next one. The room came expecting a party. They got a confrontation. Standing room only, and nobody was checking their phone.

Tom Popple - founder-CEO of Climate Cocktail Club and BE IMPACTFUL - arrived as both MC and provocateur. He opened the room, kept the energy moving between the zones, asked the sharp questions that pushed the speakers deeper and deployed a series of terrible one-liner jokes that somehow landed harder because nobody was expecting them (or listening!). But underneath the theatre was the architecture: a climate strategist who knows where the leverage points actually are, who understands the transition finance landscape, who's read the carbon markets and the compliance mechanisms and the policy gaps, and who designed this entire evening specifically to put the right people in the same room at the same moment and let the friction do the work. He stirred up trouble not for noise but for movement - the kind of MC who's genuinely trying to make something real happen, not just fill time between speakers. By the closing, the room knew exactly who had engineered what had just happened.

“WOW. It got lively... really lived up to the provocation hype - in a true sweat box of intensity that was LCAW 2026"  Tom Popple - CEO-Founder, Climate Cocktail Club

THE THREE ZONES: HOW A ROOM BECOMES A MOVEMENT

LIBERATE started first. Damoi (via Brave Poets artist collective) performing live. Cocktails flowing. The room arriving in waves, filling from the back wall forward. Trini Doubles circulating - Ella Phillips and Darryl Gadzekpo from Electric Future Foods bringing Caribbean food culture and plant-powered futures into the same breath. This is where culture takes centre stage - the soundtrack to what's coming. Live music that belongs to the movement, not a brand. Ambient at the start, ready to go loud by the end.

DISRUPT was where the decade got interrogated. The firesides - candid, unscripted, forensic - with leaders who have actually broken something and built something better in its place. Osprey Orielle Lake (Women's Earth and Climate Action Network) and Lisa Merrick-Lawless (Purpose Disruptors) arrived with years of hard-won insight. The conversation went deeper than anywhere else in London that week because there were no slides, no corporate framing, no safe distance between the question and the answer. (well that and an urgent stage swap!... joys of live event management... children, animals, climate professionals... ha ha).

PROVOKE was raw. A soapbox. No moderator. No slides. Just ten minutes per speaker to say the thing that needs to be said. Prof. Mark Maslin shooting from the hip about the state of the climate science. David Shukman - former BBC Science Editor - laying out the story that should be told but isn't. Osprey Lake again with the women-led revolution line that landed hardest. Nicola Steen from Pop-up COP asking who's actually afraid of the big, bad COP. Bonnie Chiu calling out the systems and mechanisms that work/fail. Dominika Leitane and Thais Morais Mello (Opportunity Green) on the power of law as a climate lever -chronically under-deployed. The old guard heard things here that kept them up at night. The new guard got a injection of energy and insight. That was precisely the point.

WHAT THE ROOM ACTUALLY HEARD

Shooka Bidarian - Journalist and Northern Europe Regional Organiser for The Climate Reality Project - held the firesides with a skill that made them feel like conversations rather than interviews. She arrived in a dramatic dress rendered in Ed Hawkins' climate stripes - that unmistakable visual language of warming, translated into fabric, worn as both statement and signal. The dress was impossible to miss: colour as data, heat made wearable, a reminder that this isn't abstract. But the real work happened in her questions. She interviewed Osprey Orielle Lake and Lisa Merrick-Lawless not by leading them toward conclusions but by clearing space for them to think out loud, to land on insights they didn't know they had. Candid. Unscripted. Forensic. The kind of interviewer who listens harder than she speaks, which meant the speakers had to go deeper. By the end of the second fireside, the room understood: this is what it looks like when climate communication stops performing and starts connecting.

Osprey Orielle Lake carried the thread from the firesides into the soapbox and it was the thread of the whole night: women-led, network-powered, uncompromising. She brought an authority earned through years of organising climate action at scale. The room felt the difference between someone who's read about the movement and someone who's built it.

Prof. Mark Maslin arrived as the bold scientist - slinging truths without the academic hedging. His take: we know what's coming. The question isn't whether the climate is changing. The question is what we do about it now, when we still have agency.

Dominika Leitane and Thais Morais Mello landed the renegade insider line: the legal architecture already exists. We have the tools. We're just chronically failing to use them. If your climate strategy doesn't include a legal dimension, it's incomplete. And the room - full of leaders - had to sit with that.

Nicola Steen (Encompass, Pop-up COP) opened the conversation nobody wants to have: who's actually afraid of the big, bad COP? The narrative around climate conferences is that they're toothless, corrupt, performative - all of which has truth. But that's also a convenient excuse for not showing up, not pushing, not forcing accountability. Her line was sharper: if you're not at the table, you're not changing the conversation. If you're not changing the conversation, you're not changing the outcome. The portal opener doesn't mean COP is perfect. It means the game is real enough to be worth playing inside.

Bonnie Chiu (The Social Investment Consultancy) named the system builder thesis: you don't beat a system by standing outside it. You get in, learn the levers and pull them differently. She was speaking directly to a room full of people with access power, saying - use it. Not to prop up the old model. To break it open. The difference between impact theatre and actual systems work is that systems work requires people inside the machine who've decided to reprogram it. Bonnie was naming exactly who needs to be in that position.

Lisa Merrick-Lawless spoke to the advertising world's reckoning: 'The better I am at my job, the worse I'm making the climate crisis. What do I do about that?' That's not rhetorical. That's a professional crisis reframed as a professional opportunity. Purpose Disruptors was born from that tension and it showed.

David Shukman (the press insurgent) arrived with the story that should be told but isn't. His new book, The Response, cuts through the future-tense abstractions of climate communication and lands hard on the present: we are not remotely ready to deal with the worsening conditions confronting us now. Wildfires burning London suburbs. Downpours that drown people in basements (Tony was the story of the night - sh*tstorm). Heatwaves paralysing hospitals. This isn't fiction. This is the ground-level reality already happening. His core argument: we could have been prepared. We could have responded to early warnings. Lives could have been saved. But weren't and weren't and can't be, unless something shifts. The room - full of decision-makers who could have been part of that preparation - had to sit with that accountability. Shukman wasn't raging. He was reporting. Which is somehow worse.

By the time Aisling McCaffrey (London Collective Lead for CCC, Just Transition Programme Lead at Impact Investing Institute) closed the night, the room knew exactly what this event was: a recruiting moment. Not for converts. For people ready to stop defending the old system and start building the next one.

WHY THIS MATTERS

CCC LCAW 2026 had a specific thesis: the revolution doesn't need your approval. But it does need your presence. Come if you are building the next system. Come if you are ready to stop defending the last one. Come if you believe regenerative models, radical leadership and bold ideas are not a threat to prosperity - they are the only path to it.

That's what showed up on 26 June. The futurists already building. The pioneers who have run out of patience. And the institutional decision-makers who know - whether they admit it or not - that the model they built their careers on is burning itself down. The room will remember who showed up.

WHAT'S NEXT

Save the date for the Climate Carnival on 15-16th September in Ireland... see events HERE.

PARTNERS

Huge thanks to our partners: Sustainable Ventures, THINKHOUSE, Purpose Disruptors, BE IMPACTFUL and DIAGEO. Without your support these events don't happen.

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