Michael Sheldrick helps turn public pressure into financial commitments. The Global Citizen co-founder’s work connects the fight against poverty with climate action. At the end of 2025, Global Citizen’s “Protect the Amazon" campaign secured more than $1 billion in pledges from international banks, governments, corporations, and philanthropies. The money is expected to safeguard about 75 million acres of Amazon rainforest by funding conservation, sustainable innovation, and Indigenous protections, as well as helping some 5 million people upskill for employment in the clean energy workforce. —Jessica Hullinger
What is the single most important action you think the public, or a specific company or government, needs to take in the next year to advance the climate agenda?
The most important thing governments can do is stop asking people to choose between climate action and the cost of living. For most people, climate change is not an abstract debate about targets or gigawatts. They are thinking about the cost of electricity and fuel, whether they can find a good job and whether the lights stay on. Climate policy needs to meet people there. The goal should be to make cleaner energy cheaper and more reliable, while ensuring workers and communities benefit from the new industries and investment that come with it.
This matters because people are more likely to support change when they can see and feel it improving their own lives. I've seen that firsthand in the coal town of Collie in Western Australia. Workers were far more willing to embrace a future beyond coal when they could see what it meant for them: investment in their community, new industries and good jobs.
But communities like Collie cannot make that shift on their own. New industries require significant private investment, and governments have a critical role in helping de-risk that investment through targeted public funding, guarantees and incentives. Done well, relatively limited public support can unlock much larger flows of private capital and ensure communities are not left behind.
Australia now has an opportunity to demonstrate this approach through its leadership of the COP31 negotiations. It already has some of the building blocks, from support for household solar and batteries that can lower power bills to programs supporting workers and coal communities. It can build on these measures at home and use COP31 to champion the model internationally, including across the Pacific.
Climate action will move faster when people experience it not as another sacrifice, but as a practical answer to the things they already care about: lower costs, reliable energy, good jobs and stronger communities.
What’s one sustainability effort you personally will try to adopt in the next year?
I want to spend more time sharing stories about climate action that is actually working.
I recently coauthored a Stanford-led study of more than 30,000 people that examined what motivates people to take collective action on climate change. The strongest approach was simple: show people that collective action has worked before and delivered real change. Doing so increased participants’ willingness to act, from sharing climate information and joining climate organizations to signing petitions and contacting elected representatives.
The finding reinforced something I had long argued in my book, From Ideas to Impact: When people see progress, they are more likely to believe their own actions matter.
I see this even around my parents’ dinner table in Australia. With the help of government incentives, my dad recently installed solar and a home battery. He now proudly pulls out an app showing friends how much power he is generating, what he is saving and how much electricity he is sending back into the grid. Inevitably, people want to know how they can do it too.
That is how change can become contagious. So my personal commitment this year is to find and share more stories of climate action working, and connect them to practical ways people can act themselves. In an age of climate anxiety, we need to show people not only what is going wrong, but what they can do about it. Visible progress creates agency, and agency creates action.
What is a climate solution that isn't getting the attention or funding it deserves?
One climate solution that deserves far more attention is policy that helps lower income households overcome the upfront costs of clean energy. Solar panels, batteries, insulation and heat pumps can lower household energy bills for years. But they often require significant investment upfront. That creates a paradox: Households that could benefit most from lower energy costs are often the least able to afford the technologies that deliver them. Renters face an additional barrier because they do not control those investment decisions.
Governments can change that equation through targeted incentives, affordable finance and minimum energy standards for rental properties when they are sold, renovated or major equipment is replaced. The principle should be simple: Those who have the least should not be the last to benefit from cheaper, cleaner energy.
My friend Thom Woodroofe makes a broader version of this argument in his recent book Power, Prosperity & Planet: We need to design the energy transition from the household up. We spend a lot of time talking about how many gigawatts of renewable energy we need to build. We spend much less time asking who gets the savings.
Getting that right matters beyond household bills. When people can see that the transition is making their lives better, they have a stake in its success. That builds the social licence needed to move faster, and makes climate progress harder to reverse. The transition should not ask those with the least to shoulder the greatest burden. It should give them the greatest reason to want it to succeed.
What gives you hope about the future of the planet?
What gives me hope is meeting people who can already see themselves in a cleaner future.
Last year, while working with partners during South Africa’s G20 presidency to help scale renewable energy and the jobs that can come with it, I met two young trainee solar technicians, Luke and Keanu. They were learning their trade at a solar academy, but their ambitions went far beyond installing panels. They talked about starting with rooftop solar, then one day building and supplying solar for Africa’s growing data centers and, eventually, helping power humanity into space.
That stayed with me. We hear a lot about young people being apathetic or pessimistic about the future. Luke and Keanu were neither. They saw clean energy not as a burden or sacrifice, but as an opportunity to learn skills, build a business and participate in industries that will shape their generation.
I heard something similar from coal workers I met in South Africa. There was understandable sadness about an industry that had supported families and communities for generations, but also recognition that change was coming. What mattered was whether they and their communities would receive the investment and support needed to build a future on the other side of it.
That gives me hope. Sometimes we assume people don't understand the scale of the climate challenge or are unwilling to change. I think many understand it perfectly well. They simply want to know there is a place for them in what comes next. Our job is to help make sure there is.
Do you think AI will help or worsen the climate crisis?
AI can accelerate the drive toward cheaper energy, but it won't happen by itself. The crucial question is: What type of energy AI makes cheaper?
It can make clean energy, grids and industrial processes more efficient and affordable. But it can also make oil extraction cheaper and drive greater energy consumption. Greater efficiency alone does not guarantee lower emissions.
The biggest opportunity I see is turning AI’s enormous electricity demand into a financing engine for new clean power, storage and grids. Long-term commitments from companies buying that power could help get infrastructure built, including in places where projects currently struggle to attract capital. Meeting the same demand with decades of new fossil fuel infrastructure could leave us worse off.
So I’m hopeful, but the benefit has to be earned. We already know many of the things we need to build to address climate change, including transitioning to clean energy. AI’s greatest contribution may be helping make it affordable and deployable at scale. We should judge its impact by whether it accelerates that progress and whether countries and communities that currently struggle to finance it can share in the benefits.