Climate action is already being taken by ordinary people. A fisherman in Indonesia is rebuilding coral reefs. A farmer in Uganda is gathering her neighbors to protect their land. What’s missing is a way into the rooms where global climate decisions get made. 

On 15 October, the Global Citizens’ Assembly convened “People in the lead: How citizens’ assemblies are shaping global climate action”, bringing together assembly members, deliberative democracy experts and climate leaders. The resounding message was: citizens have stepped up and now institutions must do the same. That means building participation into the climate process in a lasting manner, and creating an institutional channel for citizens to contribute to COPs and beyond.

Citizens across the world and real solutions

The 2026 Global Assembly on Food and Climate brought together people from more than 60 countries to learn from one another, face difficult trade-offs and agree shared recommendations. Three members showed what that looks like in practice:

• Ahmad Marzuki, a fisherman from Semarang, Indonesia, watched his catch collapse and lost his home to landslides and flooding in 2019. The assembly showed him how food supply chains, from fisheries to livestock, shape climate impacts. Today he restores coral reefs. 
   
• Abraham Hayariyu, a Wayúu leader from La Guajira, Colombia, called for participation that goes beyond box-ticking consultation, with Indigenous communities treated as partners whose ancestral knowledge helps solve real problems. 
   
• Anna Mbabazi, a farmer from Uganda, arrived worried her own practices would be judged. She left with the confidence to advocate for small-scale livelihoods and oppose the impact of large industrial farms. She went on to convene her own community assembly of around 15 farmers, young people, women and people with disabilities. They wrote resolutions to protect their local environment. 

Communities are not, and should not, be mere recipients of climate policy, they hold knowledge, experience, ideas and real solutions that need to be included in multilateral decision-making. As Kirsten Dunlop, CEO of Climate-KIC and Chair of the Global Citizens' Assembly Advisory Board, pointed out: “What the Global Citizens' Assembly is creating is an immensely powerful movement-building initiative, instrument, voice, scaffold for societal resilience and stability through very difficult transitions.”

Deepening democracy, widening the COP: What the Global Citizens’ Assembly adds

Citizens’ assemblies do something rare in polarized times: they get people to work through hard questions together. Oliver Escobar, Professor of Public Policy and Democratic Innovation at the University of Edinburgh, explained that this builds the legitimacy and public support that ambitious climate action needs. But a local assembly’s influence is often capped by the level at which it operates. That is the gap the Global Citizens' Assembly exists to close. Through the global assembly, support for local assemblies and the Assemblis platform, it seeks to link community-led deliberation to the institutions able to act on it. According to Oliver: “The Global Citizens’ Assembly is already demonstrating something important: citizens across the world are showing that they can step up to the challenge, now we need institutional innovators to step up too.” 

Nowhere would that drive more change than in the COP process itself. Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation and co-architect of the Paris Agreement, pointed out that the Global Stocktake, meant to assess our collective progress, cannot paint a true picture if large parts of the world’s population have no say in it. “Climate is everybody’s concern, you have to widen the spectrum of participants. We are not there. [...] We need a more formal track.” 

From Belém to a Citizens’ Track 

The final panel asked how to turn this ambition into practice, building on the momentum of COP30. Marcele Oliveira, COP30 Presidential Youth Climate Champion, set out the principle: the Brazilian presidency’s Global Mutirão rests on the idea that everyone has a role to play and people mobilizing for change must also help decide what that change looks like. Alice Amorim, Director of Programmes for the COP30 Presidency, turned that principle into a question of design and explained that: “COPs are not an event, they’re a process and as a process, it matters how much people’s voices and meaningful participation can happen in between COPs and in a much more sustainable and informed way.” 

That is a hard shift to achieve but as Kay Merce, Manager for Global Climate Action at the UNFCCC Secretariat, rightly pointed out: “The most innovative and effective climate solutions are often emerging from communities, cities, Indigenous people, youth, civil society and these citizens’ assemblies help to bring this lived experience and practical solutions into the decision-making process.” This is precisely why an official channel for citizens’ meaningful contribution is timely, urgent and important. These solutions are already emerging and being acted upon in communities across the world. They could achieve unprecedented impact if they were taken up, backed and built into the work of those who set the global agenda. 

Two calls to action

Citizen participation must become a meaningful part of how climate decisions are shaped and implemented. 

Two priorities stand out:

1. Institutionalize citizen participation in the UN climate process. 

COP presidencies and climate institutions should develop a lasting Citizens' Track, creating a structured avenue for citizens’ deliberations and recommendations to inform the multilateral process, including the next Global Stocktake.

2. Connect global commitments with local realities. 

Governments and decision-makers should recognize community knowledge, lived experience and ancestral wisdom as essential contributions to climate solutions. Community assemblies can help ensure that policies respond to people’s needs while enabling communities to learn from one another and take action locally.