How to Build (and Sustain) a Movement

Join us for a discussion with Luisa Neubauer, the leading voice of the climate justice movement in Germany.

In 2018, Luisa Neubauer started building the climate youth movement "Fridays for Future" in Germany and made an effort to connect the movement internationally. For over five years, the organizers have succeeded in bringing hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets to demand more ambitious climate action. Luisa and her fellow activists participated in climate summits all over the world and reminded global leaders of the urgency of the climate crisis. However, when the pandemic hit in 2020, the world was shaken by health, social, and economic crises – and the youth movement began to struggle, its future seemed unclear.

When at the beginning of this year the news broke that Germany’s far-right party AfD was planning mass deportations of immigrants, Luisa together with numerous other democracy advocates organized protests across the country. They became one of the largest protests in German history.

Together with GW climate activists and democracy defenders, Luisa will talk about the challenges (climate) activism and justice movements are facing in times of economic crisis, persistent injustice, and the political radicalization of the Right – and we will talk about strategies, narratives and the question, what comes next for progressive movements in America and Europe.

Doors open at 5:45 PM. The presentation begins at 6 PM. The event will be followed by a reception with drinks and light snacks.

Sponsors:

• George Washington University Alliance for a Sustainable Future
• George Washington University Law School's Environmental & Energy Law Program
• Heinrich Böll Foundation, Washington, DC

Speaker

Luisa Neubauer is the leading voice on the climate crisis in Germany and the climate justice movement's most prominent representative. For over five years now, Luisa and Fridays for Future have brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets. The TIMES listed her on the 2022 list of the 100next. In "Neubauer vs. Germany" she and others won a landmark constitutional court ruling against the German government (then led by Angela Merkel) in 2021, forcing the government to improve its climate law. She and others are now suing the (new) German government again. She has published three best-selling books on the climate crisis. One of them is available in English: Beginning to End the Climate Crisis. A History of Our Future, published by Brandeis University Press in 2023. Her TED talks on climate action have been watched more than 4 Million times.

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Noah J. Gordon will moderate the discussion. He is the acting co-director of the Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. His research focuses on climate change and how it's changing international politics. He manages projects on climate geopolitics and security, global clean energy supply chains, and the interplay between climate change and migration; and he co-created a Carnegie podcast about animal agriculture and climate change, Barbecue Earth.