1. In the last few months, Climáximo organized its biggest action (Parar Enquanto Podemos, November 2024, with 300 people) and then proceeded to organize its smallest action (Parar os Aviões, June 2025, with 50 people).
In the meantime, in 2024 the 1.5 ºC was surpassed for the first time, and in late May we lost an entire village in Switzerland to the climate crisis. Also in the meantime, the extreme-right organized a counter-protest during the Carnation Revolution’s anniversary and the extreme-right party came second in legislative elections while the left saw major losses.
Long story short, it’s time to take a deep breath and put everything on the table – both for Climáximo and for everyone interested in keeping a liveable planet. Given the climate emergency, everything we love is already on the table: human extinction is in the cards.
2. This is also the tenth year of Climáximo since its launch in 2015. So, as part of putting everything on the table, let’s have a bit of a retrospective of the ten years of Climáximo.
3. A brief history: We were involved in the movement against oil and gas extraction in Portugal from 2015 until the cancellation of all the contracts in 2020. We were the driving force behind the Climate Jobs campaign from its launch in 2016 until 2023. We organized mass actions in urban centers (Anti-Corpos in 2020, Em Chamas in 2021, Parar Enquanto Podemos in 2023) and in polluting infrastructures (Galp oil refinery in 2021 and in 2022, the gas terminal in the Sines port in 2023). We organized climate camps (Acampamento Anti-Fóssil in 2016, Camp-in-Gás in 2019, Acampamento 1.5 in 2022). We have been in the core organizing teams of the annual Encontro Nacional pela Justiça Climática as well as climate marches by Salvar o Clima (12 demonstrations in eight years). In the last few years, we raised the banner “Governments and corporations declared war against the people and the planet”, their weapon of mass destruction of choice being the climate crisis. And this changed everything. We organized tens of high-profile actions. We had more visibility, more support, more repression, more criticism, and more, much more exhaustion.
4. What does the balance sheet show? History operates through non-linear processes because of complex interactions between various social actors, external factors and historical path-dependence. It is difficult to pin specific relations of causality. This, however, cannot be an excuse to avoid responsibility nor should it make invisible the positive impact we caused.
I will try to recover a few observable impacts of Climáximo’s conscious strategic interventions. This text therefore follows the logical sequence of the Grand Strategy and Reality Check articles published throughout the last years.
I will talk about several categories of impacts, namely: decisive contributions, substantial contributions, the radical flank effect, building movement-capacity, and failures.1
5. By decisive contributions, I mean those movement-level interventions that would most probably not exist without Climáximo’s efforts.
5.1. We can safely say that we now have a climate justice movement in Portugal. In 2014, there were at most a few NGOs with some work on climate change.
Our efforts to build people’s power, through the Salvar o Clima climate marches that put thousands to the streets, the annual Encontro Nacional pela Justiça Climática where hundreds gathered to discuss bottom-up policy and strategy proposals, and many other grassroots initiatives were crucial in this.
We were also at the launch of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future in Portugal, serving these groups with our infrastructure as well as in their initial mobilization efforts.
There are still many countries where there is no climate justice movement in any meaningful sense. There are also many countries where the climate movement couldn’t go beyond carbon emissions to identify the root causes. In Portugal, beyond a transient mobilization wave, there is in fact a climate justice movement. This is something to celebrate.
5.2. At the policy level, there are two issues where Climáximo’s contribution was decisive.
One was the fight to cancel the 15 oil and gas contracts that existed in 2014. We collaborated with local groups, sometimes helped initiate local groups, brought the topic to national agenda, and carried the learnings from one region to another. One by one, the contracts were cancelled, until the last one in 2020 in Bajouca, where the company specifically stated popular resistence as their reason of dropping out.
Another one is that in the Climate Law approved in 2021, there is a specific mention to the State’s responsibility to create climate jobs. While symbolic, this law article would lay the ground for a governmental just transition program, and it is impossible to imagine its appearance in legislation without the Climate Jobs campaign’s persistent work.
In most countries, even where the movement is quite strong, such policy wins did not yet happen. In many countries, the climate justice movement did not manage to articulate such sophisticated demands as climate jobs, not to mention getting them written into law. This is something to celebrate.
5.3. At the social level, we had put for ourselves the task of normalizing civil disobedience in Portugal. We were successful in this. In 2014, when we started, civil disobedience was a non-topic. It is now part of the repertoire of all social movements, with hundreds of people trained in several countries, and recognized by the general public and the media as a valid and sound tactic.
I consider these as “movement-level interventions” because they were deliberate moves to influence the movement configuration. It goes without saying that none of them would be possible without other organizations.
6. There are also areas where we have a substantial contribution, even if not decisive. By this, I mean a movement-level intervention that influenced the terms of the discussion, while not determining it. So, it is possible to imagine these things being achieved without Climáximo, but without Climáximo their shape and content would be quite different. Here I am also including some of the indirect influences.
6.1. The very existence of a Climate Law in Portugal as early as 2021 is a movement victory, a movement we were a substantial part of. In 2019, the parliament was even forced to recognized some empty concept of “state of climate urgency”, but the legal framework for all future climate policy documentation is a crucial step forwards in consolidating victories. (Mind you, the Climate Law guarantees to consume all of Portugal’s carbon budget by this decade. We are not celebrating its content but its existence, which serves as a ratchet for future struggles.)
In the overwhelming majority of countries in the world, there is no legal basis on which the movement is fighting. This means that all victories are precarious and as volatile as the political environment. The existence of Climate Law is a victory to celebrate.
6.2. The Climate Law further legislated the prohibition of oil and gas exploration in Portugal as well as the use of coal for electricity generation. This is not one law, it’s a “framework law”, conditioning all future laws and policies. There is no “natural” reason for it to include such irreversible measures. It was the result of movement pressure, and everyone was aware of this.
Climáximo’s insistence on a fossil fuel phase-out narrative carried the topic beyond local frontline struggles into national policy. We contributed to the creation of limits to fossil capital’s growth and saved thousands of lives around the world.
6.3. Framing the fossil fuels within the larger climate crisis allowed for avoiding sectoral blindspots. Accompanying the (unacceptably slow) decarbonization of the electricty sector (which still maintains gas power plants with no closure dates) came the transport sector. While definitely not the only movement actor, we contributed substantially to strengthen the movement for public, collective transport.
By 2025, we had reduced-priced monthly pass for integrated metropolitan public transport as well as nationally-applying railway passes. There is obviously a long way to go, but it is worth celebrating the social and political consensus created around cheap public transport.
7. The way in which we contributed for the above items also matters. Direct action, civil disobedience, a radical narrative, accompanied with a solid political position, created a space inexistent beforehand.
The radical flank effect is about shifting the Overton window. While the extreme-right is vocally questioning the well-established conquests of the Carnation Revolution in a context where the centrist and left parties pushing us to climate collapse, we need to redefine what is acceptable, what is mainstream and what is sensible. Climáximo’s radical and high-profile actions created breathing space for more moderate movement actors to emerge. Among these, we can mention Linha Vermelha, Jornadas pela Democracia Energética, the political magazine Ebulição, Extinction Rebellion Portugal’s latest reemergence with citizens’ assemblies, Quercus’ more recent reconfiguration, Alecrim Ativismo, Alvorada as well as the the Público Azul section in the mainstream Público newspaper.2
8. These contributions of Climáximo’s ten years will have long-lasting impacts in all social movements. But we also created movement capacity that can be carried directly to future organizations, campaigns and mobilizations.
8.1. The creation of a trainers’ collective, Fermento, has been underrated even within the climate justice movement. An organization that can carry over the organizational tools, methods and lessons while innovating and experimenting with new approached is crucial for movement learning. The lack of such an organization is why each mass mobilization has to start from scratch and therefore reaches only a certain depth and breadth until it loses breath.
Fermento created and gave trainings on action, strategy, organization and communication. These are useful for all social movements, as capacity-building tools.
8.2. A special mention goes to the Legal Support Manual developed by Fermento. Any organization or movement that is planning to take direct action and can therefore face repression will benefit from this document, which was inexistent when Climáximo started. We noted that many groups would rely on the same few lawyers to clarify the same trivial legal questions, simply because no one was carrying the knowledge forward. Now, Fermento’s manual does exactly this.
8.3. At the policy level, Climáximo’s work resulted in two reports, unparalleled in the climate justice movements in other countries.
One is the Climate Jobs campaign report, that shows, sector by sector and in solid detail, that 200-300 thousand new decent jobs can cut Portugal’s emissions by 85-90% until 2030.
Another more recent document is the Disarmament and Peace Plan. The Plan is part of the “climate as state of war” framework launched in 2023 and describes the logistics of the mass destruction. In turn, the Plan also shows what Climate Justice would look like here and now.
These two reports crystallize and consolidate the movement learning process of ten years. Any new organization whose work intersects with climate justice will now start with these resources available for them.
9. There were a few other contributions we wanted to have achieved, but we failed to do so.
These failures can be due to strategic mistakes, our incompetence or factors external to us. As with all other contributions, the success a movement-level interaction is always dependent on other movement actors’ positioning and reactions. Without evading our responsibility, we should continue to reflect on these items in the immediate future.
9.1. We failed to introduce the climate agenda in the labor movement. We experimented with a variety of strategies since the launch of the Climate Jobs campaign in 2016, but the trade union movement still sees the climate crisis as a topic among topics at best.
9.2. We failed to find/produce allies in the parliamentary parties who would raise the banner of climate emergency as a popular rallying point. Climate Jobs, the Disarmament Plan or in some other form, we had hoped to get allies among the institutional actors that would take the climate emergency as serious as it is. To our despair and anguish, we didn’t find them.
9.3. In the larger movement ecosystem, we had hoped to bridge the ambition gap. We had hoped to contribute to a reconfiguration of the social movements in Portugal where everyone acknowledged the climate emergency as the context in which we live, fight and strategize. We couldn’t do this, nor could we find partner organizations to collaborate with, with the exception of Fridays for Future Lisbon. We couldn’t build strategic alliances that could go beyond the tactical agreements.
9.4. At the larger, societal level, we must recognize our profound failure: there is no social consensus on the state of climate emergency in which we are and the role that the governments and corporations have played in it.
We extended our hands, demonstrated our availability and commitment (virtually all of us have at least five ongoing court cases).
The people did not come.
We refuse the conformism of blaming the people (or other movement actors). We also refuse to accept to live in climate collapse. This means we must have a creative, ambitious and honest reflection anchored in the climate crisis.
10. Many climate justice groups in Europe are going through a phase of evaluation, reflection and analysis. Paying attention to new experiments as well as past experiences, we will have to reinvent Climáximo once more.
1 I will specifically not talk about other movements. In the last ten years, we have been actively collaborating with the Black Lives Matter mobilizations, the Feminist Strikes, the housing movement, Vida Justa and the anti-mining struggle, just to name a few. These are all connected to climate justice because everything is connected through capitalism, but they have different topics as starting points and therefore Climáximo’s role, influence and impact is less distinguishable. From a movement strategy perspective, a meaningful conclusion would be harder to draw.
2 Two disclaimers here: Firstly, I do not mean that Climáximo created these things. They were all created by their respective organizers. What I do mean is that Climáximo’s strategy created the space for these initiatives to be received better than otherwise, therefore contributing to their success. Secondly, I don’t mean these examples are necessarily more moderate than Climáximo in their vision. I do mean that they have more moderate statements than “we are in a state of war, unilaterally declared by the governments and the corporations” and that their image is read to be more mainstream.