Who’s actually in the grassroots climate movement?

The grassroots climate movement is not a sector or a list of registered organisations. It is a working reality made up of individuals, informal groups and small companies who take responsibility for the conditions around them. Some of their work is explicitly environmental. Much of it is not labelled at all. It simply gets done because someone cares enough to do it.

At the level of individuals, this includes people who install their own rainwater systems, test soil amendments, build composting rigs, repair bikes for neighbours or insulate their homes. Some teach themselves solar installation. Others monitor local air quality from a bedroom window or turn unused land into productive space.

There are informal groups that operate without titles or structure. Neighbours coordinate small retrofits street by street. Community members organise flood responses with simple tools. Shared gardens, seed swaps and cooling spaces appear when needed. Small circular economy projects keep materials circulating even when margins are thin and institutional support is absent.

There are small companies that contribute to mitigation or adaptation without describing themselves as climate actors. A workshop that restores windows. A one-person insulation business improving homes. A farm running low-emissions machinery maintained from spare parts. A maker using recovered materials to build tools or equipment. These groups rarely appear in official accounts of climate work, but their influence is visible in the built environment and in local practices.

Most of these actors have never applied for a grant and have no contact with the language or structures of climate finance. They do not appear in ESG reporting. They were not designed to fit into due diligence frameworks. Their value comes from the fact that their work is rooted directly in the conditions they are trying to improve. They see problems before policy frameworks catch up. They test solutions before guidance exists. They work with real constraints, which forces clarity and speed.

Estimating the scale of this ecosystem is difficult because it is not formally counted. The formal NGO world contains hundreds of thousands of small environmental organisations worldwide, but this is only one part of the picture. When you include informal groups, mutual-aid networks, citizen science efforts, off-grid experimenters, neighbourhood initiatives and people who act simply because something needs doing, participation expands significantly. Tens of millions of people are part of this landscape in an active way. Over time, the number reaches into the hundreds of millions.

Our early interviews with people drawn to DIY Earth show clear patterns across builders, growers, engineers, teachers, carpenters, technicians and tradespeople. They care about responsibility, craft and local knowledge. They want to improve their homes, land, waste streams and neighbourhoods. They want to reduce reliance on brittle systems and produce work that lasts.

They also describe the same needs with striking consistency.

• Practical clarity. They want to know what works, what fails and what is worth their time.

• Access to others who have done similar projects so they can learn from real precedent instead of starting from scratch every time.

• Evidence their work matters. Not certification. Just a sense of how it fits into a larger effort so the impact is visible rather than lost in noise.

• Tools fit for their scale. Not institutional frameworks repackaged for smaller projects.

This is the landscape we support. Not the institutional end of climate finance. Not the market for carbon credits. The distributed and inventive world where meaningful action already happens without permission or formal recognition.

It does not need to be reorganised. It needs infrastructure. It needs ways to make scattered actions legible. It needs measurement that preserves context rather than stripping it away. It needs a way to aggregate into something that can stand alongside larger systems without losing its character.

The individuals, informal communities and independent experimenters working in this space are responsible for some of the most overlooked climate work in the world. They are also one of the most likely sources of the next wave of climate innovation.

Our role is to make their work visible, measurable and impossible to dismiss.