When you think of a climate protest, perhaps you see tens of thousands of people holding signs marching through a big city, like the 75,000 people who took to the streets of New York in 2023 to call for a ban on fossil fuels. Perhaps you picture dramatic shock tactics, like the Just Stop Oil protesters hurling tomato soup at a Vincent Van Gogh painting in London’s National Gallery. Or maybe you visualize activists who have since become celebrities, like Greta Thunberg, who sat outside the Swedish parliament in 2018 calling for a school strike for climate.
A few years ago, we noticed that thousands of climate protests were occurring every year, but only a fraction received significant media attention. In addition, protests occurring among the Global Majority were not receiving the same level of media coverage as their counterparts in the West. Many of the people who heard about protesters interrupting a tennis match in New York City were unaware of the Thai citizens protesting against a major hydroelectric project. So in 2022, we launched the Climate Protest Tracker, a tool to help researchers, decisionmakers, and journalists understand how demands around climate policy are spurring civic action.
Now, the Climate Protest Tracker is relaunching with an improved format and new features. We’ve also updated the methodology to distinguish between two main categories of protests: those with a clear policy goal or action item, and those that call for more general climate action.
Defining a Climate Protest
Distinguishing climate activism from other movements is a challenge due to the nature of climate impacts, which often intersect with environmental, economic, social, and political issues. The effects of climate change exacerbate existing inequities and are frequently embedded within broader social movements that respond to those challenges. This makes it difficult to isolate climate-related activism from other movements. To guide our work, we adapted a definition from researcher Francisco Garcia-Gibson to define climate activism as confrontational activity that aims to prevent perceived bad or unjust outcomes caused by anthropogenic global warming.
The Climate Protest Tracker understands climate activism to be distinct from environmental activism of the sort seen at the first Earth Day protests in April 1970, which were predominantly driven by concerns around local pollution and issues that included pesticides and lead poisoning. The tracker defines climate activism as centered around human-caused global warming and the need to decarbonize, so protests that are concerned with protecting the natural environment and preserving biodiversity may not be included in this database.
There might be some overlap, most commonly seen through events tagged as “anti-climate protest.” One such example is protests in Serbia over the environmental impacts of mining lithium, a key material for low-carbon technologies. This reveals the uncomfortable reality that decarbonization goals have negative externalities and may come at the expense of biodiversity and protection of the natural environment, creating a growing ideological rift between the environmental and climate movements. This might account for the rise in anti-climate protests that we’ve noticed over the years: Anti-climate protests in 2024 more than doubled those in 2023, driven in large part by protests against clean energy infrastructure.
But climate activism as a unique social movement is relatively young, with the movement peaking in 2019—from the school strike for climate led by Fridays for Future, to the 4 million protesters participating in the Global Climate Strike. While climate protests predominantly occur in Europe, they are a growing and global movement. The momentum of these large-scale protests slowed in the aftermath of the pandemic lockdowns of the early 2020s, but is slowly picking up again, with the number of protests we have tracked increasing every year.
As climate activism continues to grow and evolve in response to a warming planet, it is likely to become increasingly complex. In turn, detailed analysis of protest data will become essential to understand the evolving landscape.
Questions of Magnitude
Protests with clear policy goals tend to have smaller peak sizes, and the tracker includes such protests with at least a hundred individuals. Examples include 500 protesters in March 2024 demanding the passage of the Climate, Jobs and Justice package at the capitol in Albany, New York, or the 200 protesters in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, protesting against the EU-Rwanda critical raw materials agreement.
On the other hand, we only include general climate action protests without a clear target beyond increasing awareness and climate action if significant crowd sizes are achieved, like the million protesters who participated in the September 2023 Global Climate Strike. For the purposes of this tracker, “significant crowd sizes” are 10,000 individuals for free countries (according to Freedom House classification) and 1,000 for protests in countries that are deemed to be partly free or not free. Peak crowd size is estimated by considering the total number of individuals gathered for a single event, which could entail multiple locations in the same city or even multiple countries for a global rally. For instance, the June 2024 Netherlands Climate Action Rally saw over 10,000 participants gathered in over ten cities to form a chain along the Dutch coast to demand more climate action.
The Climate Protest Tracker now also includes further tags that allow the database to be sorted according to protest targets, including four categories of key goals: fossil fuels and emissions, mining and mineral resources, agriculture, and climate adaptation. Protests can be tagged with multiple filters and objectives.
Tracking the Trends
Within the database, protests are categorized according to their objective and target. The tracker distinguishes between protests that seek to accelerate climate action and those that seek to inhibit it—with the option to filter for “anti-climate action.” There are a multitude of reasons why individuals might organize against climate action: Some are opposed to the economic consequences of emissions-reducing policies like carbon taxes, or to the environmental impacts of green technology mining or manufacturing. Others may think wind turbines are ugly.
Protests about wind—whether pro–wind power or anti–wind turbines—currently account for more than 10 percent of the total tracked protests. Among all clean energy sources, wind power has been particularly vilified. On U.S. President Donald Trump’s first day in office in 2025, he issued a memorandum that specifically targeted offshore wind leasing and federal permitting practices for wind projects.
But the dislike of wind power as a global phenomenon extends far beyond the executive office and often originates from misinformation spread through social media platforms. Wind projects are particularly divisive in local communities, with residents’ complaints ranging from annoyance over the flickering shadows cast by turbines, to (unfounded) fears over the potential health effects, to concerns that the turbines “do not fit into the landscape.” Part of the opposition to wind power also comes from within the environmental movement: Birds die when they collide with offshore wind turbines, and geophysical surveys to situate offshore wind turbines could interfere with whale echolocation, leading to fatal ship collisions. Although wind power, accounting for 8 percent of global electricity generation in 2024, still has a larger market share than solar, this is likely to change in the near future. Wind power has largely stagnated while the solar boom continues—global solar generation has doubled over the past three years—in part due to regulatory difficulties and local protests against wind power.
Limitations of the Climate Protest Tracker
One of the primary criteria for inclusion in this tracker is the size of a protest, which we recognize is not a reliable indication of a movement’s strength. Protests with a policy goal must consist of at least a hundred individuals before they are included—a necessary concession to limit the scope of this research. The focus on mass action also means that the tracker does not include smaller-scale mobilization that might attract significant media attention, such as the Last Generation activists gluing themselves to the tarmac in German airports to protest flights. As a result, the Climate Protest Tracker fails to capture any potential radical flank effect—the influence that more disruptive factions within a movement can have on public perception—that could shift public opinion on climate policy. Some researchers argue that radical flanks within movements could increase support for a more moderate component of a movement, and climate protests are no exception. Research conducted around a Just Stop Oil motorway blockade in London during November 2022 found that such nonviolent disruptive protests increased support for other, more moderate climate groups—in this case, Friends of the Earth. The exclusion of small-scale, high-media-attention protests from the database thus limits its ability to reflect that potential effect.
Moreover, a focus on crowd size as a criteria for inclusion skews the tracker toward democratic societies where large civic mobilizations are normalized. Countries that have closed civil societies with significant political repression or without protest culture may struggle to mobilize a hundred individuals for protests. While some exceptions to that size requirement were made for countries with closed civil societies, they still remain underrepresented in this tracker. We recognize that in such societies, organizing and dissent might also occur in the digital realm instead of through physical mobilizations. While the tracker currently lacks the capacity to accurately monitor and catalogue such digital movements, this is something that we are working on for a future update.
The Emerging Frontiers of Climate Activism
Currently, the tracker records civic activism with a direct relation to climate policy. However, as the climate crisis intensifies, we anticipate seeing a rise in protests driven by indirect effects of climate change—such as food insecurity or displacement—that may not explicitly reference climate policy but are nevertheless influenced by or related to upstream climate policy. For instance, heat waves and droughts contributing to rising food prices could contribute to cost-of-living protests in the Mediterranean. The deployment of emerging climate technologies without sufficient safety guardrails also might garner large-scale civic backlash, as illustrated by Sámi opposition in northern Sweden to solar geoengineering experiments.
Although this tracker differentiates between the environmental and climate movements, both movements could converge again. One possible intersection may be over recent U.S. moves to reinvigorate the “clean coal” industry while loosening regulations around emissions control for coal-fired power plants in the Clean Air Act. This may lead to a rise in protesters taking to the streets to address local pollution again—with clear climate demands.
Ultimately, the Climate Protest Tracker is a predominantly quantitative database that cannot capture the many nuances of climate protests and large-scale social movements. We welcome the use of this database to support further research efforts. Later this summer, we will be releasing a volume of work that aims to tease out more of the trends surfaced by the database update. We aim to analyze and classify trends in climate activism, drawing upon different movements around the world to answer the question of how people are mobilizing to respond to the climate crisis and the costs of combating it.
