Climate change has vanished from the headlines since the financial crisis elevated other economic concerns to the top of the agenda. But across Europe there is no shortage of activists trying to make a difference before this month’s UN climate summit.

‘I’ve cut our household emissions by 89%’

Anne Bragg, 59, is a corporate consultant who lives with her husband, Tom, in Cambridge, UK, and charts their household greenhouse gas emissions



Anne and Tom Bragg at home in Cambridge. Photograph: Kate Lyons for the Guardian

We bought this house in 2001. Since then we’ve had an 89% reduction in our emissions. One of the interesting things to me is the sheer scale of the change you can make without really noticing it, if you just keep at it. But you have to be thoughtful about what works for you.

I used to fly a lot: I was a technical consultant flying all over the world, and used to go on at least two flying holidays a year. We now try really hard not to fly. We put quite a bit of effort into thinking of what to do that would be really, really fun that doesn’t involve flying. This year, we went to a chalet in Switzerland for cross-country skiing, but we went by train.

We’ve reduced our gas bill by 83% [since 2002]: it is now £11 per month. We’ve insulated the house well. When we moved in it was dreadful: there was zero insulation, the carpet in my study used to billow on strong wind days. We’ve got a wood-fired stove in the front room and that halved our gas bill because it meant we often didn’t bother to turn on our central heating.

I would say that by switching everything off when we’re not using it we’ve reduced our electricity bill by 25%, and then by changing lightbulbs and some appliances, that’s another 25%.

We do have a car, but we try to cycle wherever we can. We don’t eat much meat and I don’t eat dairy, and we go to the market in Cambridge where the produce is grown on farms nearby. We deliberately chose to live here so we could shop in the market. We were thinking we could live out in one of the villages, have a bigger house and, more importantly, a bigger garden, but we thought, well actually then you get condemned to driving to the supermarket. So some of the lifestyle choices were about accepting a slightly smaller house and garden in order to have access to these things that make it easy to be low-carbon.

To those who think they can’t make a difference I would say, by doing low-carbon things, almost no matter what, it makes you feel less despondent. Instead of feeling helpless, you feel positive and think ‘Well, I made a difference last weekend, sealing up that draughty room.’ There is a wave of change building and people doing things slowly influences governments and companies too. Kate Lyons

Doing low-carbon things, almost no matter what, makes you feel less despondent Kate Lyons

‘We got our sea back’

Marjo Nurminen, 47, is a historian and non-fiction author from Helsinki. Both her husband Juha, 69, and she are passionate about cleaning up the Baltic Sea

Juha and Marjo Nurminen by the Baltic. Photograph: Timo Villanen/A-lehdet

Finland doesn’t have resources like Norway, but we’re very into nature. The country is vast, with few people - thousands of lakes, islands, a beautiful coastal area, plenty of forests. Everyone in Finland has a summer cottage, and we accept climate change as a true fact.

Juha’s great-grandfather was a shipowner and a shipping entrepreneur. Over the decades, a sizeable collection of maritime art, maps and maritime antiquities was collected by the family company. To safeguard this cultural heritage, we started our foundation in 1992 to celebrate our maritime culture. But we realised that there’s no point doing history books about the sea if the sea dies! The main issue of the Baltic Sea is eutrophication, caused by its excessive nutrient (nitrogen and phosphorus) load. So in 2004 we started our environmental work, since climate change will only worsen this load.

Nine European countries surround the sea, which is shallow at 55 metres. We are focused on cleaning the wastewater. Phosphorus from polluting sources such as agriculture and municipal wastewater cause the blue-green algae to grow in the summer. Cities have been trying to fix this but they have no pressure – they need a third party like a foundation.

We’re the first and only ones doing this that we know of. It’s a shitty business! Most people don’t understand the effect of having an excessive phosphorus load – cutting it is by far the best way of cleaning the sea. The Helsinki Commission (Helcom) of all 11 countries use us as their fire corps [volunteers who help with non-emergencies]. We manage and lead the projects. We are volunteers with philanthropic financing.

The EU has norms restricting the amount of phosphorus in the water, but they’re not strict enough. We’ve spent four years trying to get a special status for the sea, but the French or Spaniards or Italians don’t care about the Baltic, it’s too far north. There’s so much talk of what we should do, but when we ask people what are you doing, they say, well, we are talking! We get tired of it!

We spent seven years dealing with the pollution in the Gulf of Finland from St Petersburg, home to five million - as many as in Finland. It wasn’t easy with Russia - but we are neighbours. It took us two years to convince the water company in St Petersburg that we did not want to make money, but make clean water. The former Finnish president, Tarja Halonen, knew the [then] female governor of St Petersburg, who helped.

St Petersburg, home to 5m people. Photograph: EPA

With Greenpeace, St Petersburg would never have got involved. We’re pessimistic about Kaliningrad, 400,000 people whose toilet water runs directly into the sea … even Putin doesn’t know what’s going on there.

Plus, the catchment area of the Baltic is three times bigger than the sea itself, and is home to 90 million people. We’ve managed to work with Belarus, which is a political outcast in the EU. Belarus doesn’t have the sea, but its big rivers affect the Baltic. It helped to have Russian-speaking project managers.

We cut phosphorus emissions, the biggest environmental problem in northern Europe, by 60%. Fifteen years ago it was awful: the algae smelled, it was poisoning dogs who drank it. We have school-aged kids. On the eastern side of the Gulf of Finland we have our summer cottage and for five years now they have been allowed to swim without restrictions. We got our sea back.

For now, the Gulf of Finland is clean - but most of the nutrient load comes from Poland, with its big population and rivers running straight into the Baltic. In Sweden and Finland we are orientated to our sea, but in Poland they sail less, don’t have boats. One private company who we had approached wrote to the second largest newspaper and said there was an environmental terrorist organisation in Finland trying to contact them! They might be even worse than the Russians back in the Soviet times. Nabeelah Shabbir





‘I’ve gone to every UN climate summit for the past two decades’

Christoph Bals, 55, executive director, Germanwatch

I started to pay attention to climate change as a journalist in 1987, when there were reports of the first authoritative temperature scenarios. An expert commission in the German parliament warned that the 21st century could see [a rise of] five degrees if carbon emissions weren’t reduced.



I realised that that would be a huge, uncontrolled experiment with humanity, which would fundamentally change how we lived on this planet. Five years later I became a founding member of Germanwatch. Ever since, I’ve been working on changing things in Germany. For the past two decades I’ve gone to every UN climate summit.



It’s always been clear how difficult it is to get the world economy to stop running on fossil fuels in one go. But it was breathtaking to see the gigantic scale on which the lobbies work in the background in their efforts to discredit climate policies. Looking back, I have to say that they have also shamelessly exploited the naivety of environmental groups and well-meaning mediators.

A 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen. Photograph: Miguel Villagran/Getty Images

But that’s how we have learned. The task ahead is comparable to the abolition of slavery, which took a century. It’s not going to happen in one fell swoop since there are huge interests and jobs at stake, with livelihoods depending on this industry. We need political and emotional intelligence, strategic moves and long, deep breaths.

The task ahead is comparable to the abolition of slavery

I’m driven by the knowledge of what threatens us. People from everywhere – be it the Philippines, Peru or India – have taught me that. It’s fascinating to see how these friends make their case for change with vision, creativity and courage. It gives me a lot of strength. And recently the signs are leading to a global turnaround in climate policy.



Last year worldwide emissions from the energy industry hardly rose, for the first time, although the global economy is growing fast. Renewable energy is booming everywhere, in Germany but also in countries such as Morocco. Both China and the US have agreed to reduce their emissions. No one should think that the climate will be saved in Paris alone, but it can break down barriers. The summit must send a message to investors and the public worldwide about the gradual phasing out of oil, coal and gas. That will map the way for the debate about getting out of coal and putting a sufficiently higher price on carbon. I look forward to it.

Michael Bauchmüller @MBauchmueller

‘I’m educating society’

Disgusted with Polish ignorance about climate change, scientist Marcin Popkiewicz set out to educate his compatriots

Marcin Popkiewicz Photograph: Supplied

I launched a website called The World at a Crossroads, then set up another with Polish scientists dealing with climate research, giving information about climate myths. I started up a number of internet-based tools making this subject accessible, became a specialist in giving public addresses, and wrote books.



I do this because it’s important. It’s probably the biggest choice we’ve faced in our history. We’re standing at a crossroads, and what we do (or perhaps don’t do) will decide the fate of humanity, and that of the millions of other species with which we share our beautiful planet.

I first began to explore this subject in the early 1990s when, as a doctoral student in the department of nuclear physics at the University of Warsaw, I had to give a lecture on the safety of nuclear energy. One of the advantages was the lack of greenhouse gases and their consequences.

After my PhD, I went into business, but I didn’t lose my passion for science and teaching, and gave lectures for friends at home. One day, after a presentation on how the moon was formed, somebody asked me for the story of global warming. My presentation was based on the official scientific position that the climate is getting warmer.

While preparing the lecture, I realised how complicated the subject is (even for a physicist). But after collecting the materials I felt like I finally knew something. However, the feeling soon passed when a colleague at the lecture accused me of presenting a one-sided picture that many scientists disagreed with. He sent me information about the film The Great Global Warming Swindle.

This film argues that the current state of knowledge on climate change is problematic, that we don’t know anything for sure, and that the picture of climate change presented by scientists and the media is manipulated and exaggerated. It was very convincing and seemed credible. I watched it, thinking “so what’s the real story?” Worse still, with my knowledge as a physicist I couldn’t even immediately identify errors – either in the film or in what I had learned when putting my talk together.

I felt stupid. How could this be? I was intrigued, and spent the next few weeks getting my teeth into the subject. I read books as well as scientific and press articles, pored over graphs and analysed various sources. I soon found two instances where the director of The Great Global Warming Swindle had omitted facts. As a physicist, this manipulation of data is something I really don’t like. These findings made me more cautious about the reliability of sceptics. I made sure I checked all the key assertions made in the film. But this wasn’t easy – and many proved to be true.

I was annoyed to see that somebody could dupe their viewers like this, and so efficiently too. So I set about educating society. Tomasz Ulanowski

‘I’ve picked up over 800kg of rubbish’

Hervé Pighiera, 28, has walked more than 600 miles across France picking up litter.

I’m 28, live in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France, and I’ve been a mason for 10 years.

I have walked 975.5km (605 miles) for the environment, from Aix-en-Provence to Paris, picking up all the rubbish left on the motorways and roads: 810kg (127st) in total. I left my home town on 12 July with my green bin in tow, wanting to raise awareness of the state of the planet and its climate change problem.

A tree covered with plastic bags, near a dump outside Istres, southern France, after heavy winds. Photograph: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images

I am not an ecologist, I’m not a member of any political party, but I have a conscience – everyone should do something to avoid the worst. We’re almost at the point of no return when it comes to the state that the planet and its resources are in.

My family is pro-environment and we recycled and used a composter, although we didn’t particularly devote ourselves to eating organic food. I have always loved nature and going on walks with my family.

Over 57 days, I managed around 17 km of walking a day. I picked up 61kg of recyclable plastic, 3,977 cigarette packets and 2,083 cigarette butts (one butt can pollute 500 litres of water, according to a UN study), 117kg of glass, 162.5 kg of metal and 325kg of non-recyclable waste. My girlfriend, Lola, made sure it got sorted, thanks to the tow truck she had attached to a car.

I got the idea to do a walk for the environment during a trip to Latin America. I had gone to Brazil for the football world cup, and then I took a bus to see Lola, who was studying in Peru at the time. The whole way, I found it staggering just how much rubbish collected up along the motorways, outside the villages. The plastic bags, cans, tyres, boxes, empty bottles ... a total shock. Lima was playing host to the COP 20 climate summit, the 20th such event which was the precursor to the climate summit in France at the end of this year.

After the UN climate summit in Paris, I’ll keep going with a cooperative called Petra Patrimonia. We’ll be able to do so much if we can keep recycling and sorting our rubbish properly. It’s a strategic sector in promoting clean energy. Lola and I will also protest against the proposed biomass plant in Gardanne, which apparently needs wood from Canada to work. It’s an aberration. Rémi Barroux, Le Monde





‘I went from being a volunteer to an activist

Luca Iacoboni runs the energy and climate campaign at Greenpeace Italy

I was at school, watching a video presented by Greenpeace volunteers, and it hit me. It was on a huge banner on the chimney of a coal factory. I had always been interested in the environment, but in that specific moment I understood that what we do in Italy has an impact elsewhere and vice versa. I started to link energy production, climate change and environmental disasters.



In 2006 there wasn’t much talk about climate change, at least not in Italy where the implications of climate change were not so evident. A few months after I turned 18 I joined Greenpeace in Rome. I loved volunteering, but my passion quickly became energy, especially the need to replace fossil fuels, coal and gas with renewables. At the beginning I thought 100% renewables was a bit too ambitious, but after a bit of research I realised it wasn’t.



I went from being a volunteer to an activist, and I continued my interest in energy and climate when I was at university. I have a degree in environmental economy, and did my thesis on energy scenarios and carbon dioxide markets.



After seven years my passion became my profession and I now run the energy and climate campaign at Greenpeace Italy. As we edge close to the climate summit in Paris, I can say confidently that we can still save the climate, but we are running out of time. We need to abandon fossil fuels and work for 100% renewables and energy efficiency.

I don’t know if a deal will be signed at COP 21 [the Paris summit], but I am sure that the climate challenge will be won thanks to citizens, associations and companies. These are the forces that have forced politics to seriously tackle the problem, and it is thanks to them that after Paris the battle for a renewable future will continue. And be won. Simoni Alberto

Translators: Nabeelah Shabbir, Alberto Nardelli, Aleksandra Sygiel/ VoxEurop