Every year, global leaders gather in places like New York Climate Week and the UN's General Assembly to discuss the challenges shaping our future. Meanwhile, all around the world, people are already taking action to solve those same challenges. They are organizing in their communities, building on lived experience and finding ways forward to work together for change.

What is missing is not participation. It’s connection.

These efforts too often remain fragmented: important within their own communities, but disconnected from one another and from the global decisions being made elsewhere.

Putting people at the heart of global decision-making

The Global Citizens' Assembly exists to connect this growing movement.

By bringing together assemblies and participatory processes happening across the world, the Global Citizens' Assembly helps individual efforts become part of something larger: supporting people to learn from one another, engaging with expert knowledge and deliberating together to develop shared priorities and solutions.

When the People in the lead paper was launched during New York Climate Week in 2025, the argument was that citizen participation was already growing around the world. The opportunity was to connect that movement - across communities, regions and countries - and create a clear route for citizens’ collective intelligence and lived experience to inform climate decision-making.

Over the past year, this connection has begun to emerge.

Connecting the global to the local

In January 2026, the first Global Assembly was ran on the theme of food and climate, bringing together people from over 60 countries around food systems and climate change. For 42 hours across seven weeks, people with completely different backgrounds learnt from one another, navigated difficult trade-offs and developed 22 Calls to Action.

At the same time, community assemblies have been taking place in different parts of the world, creating spaces for people to organize around the issues that matter where they live. 

These are not separate from the global story. They are the global story.

The opportunity lies in connecting them: communities learning from one another, local experience informing global conversations, and ideas travelling back into communities where people can use and adapt them.

Opportunities for action on food and climate

Over the past year, people have deliberated, communities have organized and Assembly Members have taken what they learnt back into their own lives and communities. Different experiences of the same global challenges have revealed where people agree, where they differ and what they believe needs to change.

On October 15th this work will come together.

People in the lead 2026 will bring Assembly Members, community organizers, experts and climate leaders together to share what has emerged from the 2026 Global Citizens' Assembly.

Attendees will hear directly from people who took part, connect insights from global and community assemblies with expert perspectives, and look at where people see the greatest opportunities for action on food and climate.

Making COP31 count

The People in the lead event is an important milestone in this cycle of the Global Citizens' Assembly: a chance to bring together what has emerged so far, before carrying it towards COP31  to ensure people’s insights and experiences count in global decisions on the climate crisis.

The testimonies and insights shared through the process will contribute to a collective message to COP Presidencies: to recognize citizens as contributors to climate decision-making, and use the outcomes of the Global Citizens’ Assembly to help inform the priorities, policies and actions emerging from the COP process.

It is a moment to bring together what people have learnt, developed and put into action, share it more widely, replicate it and use it to shape what comes next.