People Get Real was established in June 2023 by former journalist and communications adviser Marc Lopatin, and chartered management accountant and sustainability consultant Helena Farstad. We met one another while supporting the UK-based Climate Majority Project, where much of the thinking behind People Get Real was incubated.

As deep critics of the existing mainstream narrative on climate action, we use audience insight and campaign methods to help shift the existing consensus which we argue stands in the way of meaningful action for the betterment of all. Our aim is to agitate for a collective response to climate breakdown and ecological destruction, capable of limiting the danger currently posed to civilisation.

We understand this might be a difficult truth for scientists, campaigners, business leaders and politicians, to accept. But refusing to publicly call time on implausible climate targets, is costing the world precious response time to the environmental crisis.

It is why, in our view, widespread public concern does not extend to anything like a citizen-led insistence that governments honour the multilateral climate targets they signed up to.

Fortunately, the results of a nationally representative survey, that we commissioned from Ipsos in September 2023, offers hope going forwards. As Sir Bob Watson says in his foreword to our report, the poll findings read like a vote of no confidence in our collective response to climate breakdown.

We describe this as hopeful because believing ‘it’s now too late’ for an implausible climate target to be met, doesn’t mean giving up. In the same way that maintaining there’s ‘just enough time’ for the same target, doesn’t mean believing urgent action is likely to happen.

Agency does not simply disappear as a result. There is agency – whether taken up or not – in deciding how much more danger civilisation is willing to admit, knowing that climate breakdown and ecological overshoot are non-linear threats.

Following the publication of our launch report, People Get Real will now begin exploring how to realise a citizen-led reality check of the mainstream story being told to the public by the climate movement.

If the above strikes a chord, please get in touch at hello@peoplegetreal.org or use our contact form on the home page.