Our vision is that Western Australia is a global leader on climate action. WA Climate Leaders is an alliance of WA leaders committed to accelerating climate action in Western Australia to meet and exceed the targets of the Paris Climate Agreement 2015.
WA Climate Leaders accelerate ambitious climate action in Western Australia through visionary leadership and collaboration. We are a vibrant non-partisan, cross-sectoral network driving efforts to phase out greenhouse gas emissions while creating economic opportunity and a clean energy future for WA. We welcome decision makers from business, industry, government, academia and civil society who are committed to setting ambitious goals and accelerating climate action in this state. Together, we will harness and mobilise WA’s ingenuity and abundant resources to be world leaders in the race to keep global warming to under 1.5 degrees. WA Climate Leaders runs public conversations, forges important connections and provides science-backed information to support and accelerate this vision for WA.
WA Climate Leaders was founded in 2021 with the goal of connecting and mobilising climate action in business and industry in Western Australia. The need for WA Climate Leaders became clear when Meri Fatin brought Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, known as the chief architect of the Paris Agreement, to Western Australia in 2020 – but found that not a single government or business representative was willing to speak alongside her at a public climate event. Meri realised there was a lack of visible climate leadership in WA, and that many prominent Western Australians were concerned about the social stigma of being publicly vocal on climate change.
Our network was born when Meri was asked to curate the speakers and audience for the TEDxPerth Countdown: WA Climate Leadership Summit in 2020. For this event, both the speakers and the audience were curated, and this sold out event showed the appetite for events and networking opportunities for climate leaders to meet and connect across sectors. Our network was established to transform their energy into action.