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We are the rising tide of ordinary people, called by extraordinary times. We are a diverse movement demanding Australia honours our commitment to the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. We are prepared to take whatever peaceful actions are within our power to defend the climate.

Our History

Rising Tide was one of the first grassroots climate groups in Australia. We were active in Newcastle from 2005 until 2012, when our members became involved in climate research or other climate campaigns.

We were known for our community campaigning and ground-breaking nonviolent direct actions; blockading the coal port and railways with small and large groups of people. Our members also took several of the earliest public interest legal challenges regarding the regulation of coal’s climate impacts.

Rising Tide has now restarted, as there’s an urgent need for our type of radical, but targeted and inclusive climate action.

Our Values

Our values underpin everything we do. We ask everyone in our movement to ensure their words and actions reflect that commitment.

  • Justice: Justice is at the core of our motivations. The climate crisis is the greatest injustice ever perpetrated by the powerful few on the rest of humanity and life on Earth. We will not stand by and allow this to continue.
  • Care: We defend that which is precious: all humans, other species and the natural world. We extend this care ethic to each other and ourselves. We engage with kindness and compassion – looking out for each other and respecting the needs for rest and balance in our lives.
  • Community: Supportive relationships are at the heart of creating a resilient, carbon-neutral society and in building the movement to resist climate collapse. We need each other and we’re happier together. We build community through working together and making time for fun, sharing food, stories, music and art.
  • Nonviolence: We value disruptive action to demand attention for our message and demands, but we will only take such action if it is nonviolent and we’ve taken great care to minimise risk to others and ourselves.
  • Impact: We seek to maximise our role in defending the climate and use strategic planning and a pragmatic attitude to do so. Sometimes this will involve escalating our tactics or message, at other times it will be pragmatic to moderate our approach. As long as we remain true to our values, we will do whatever it takes and will not let ideology or ego distort our purpose.

Our Story

Scientists are warning that the next few years will determine the future for all life on Earth. We’re close to catastrophic climate tipping points and we must urgently decarbonise if we are to prevent this and embrace the massive benefits and opportunities offered by this transformation.

Labor’s climate targets are an important shift from the Coalition’s denial and delay, but it’s not enough. Now, only urgent and far-reaching action can address the unfolding global climate crisis. At this point in history, half measures will not prevent catastrophe.

We must listen closely and support First Nations people who resist coal and gas mining on their lands and whose cultures offer insights to a sustainable future. We must join our Pacific neighbours to demand urgent action from wealthy countries like ours, who have caused the crisis. We must unite with school kids and communities around the world to fight for climate justice against the suicidal agenda of a few dozen fossil fuel executives.

The vast majority of Australians are ready to decarbonise our society and embrace a renewable energy-powered future. But the coal and gas lobby’s control of our democracy still stands in our way. Decades of evidence, community lobbying, and countless letters, petitions, rallies and other protests have not been enough to properly overcome this and bring the scale and speed of action that we need.

From the 40 hour working week, to the vote for women, from U.S. civil rights to Indian independence, to fights against uranium mining in Kakadu, the Franklin Dam and gas fracking, civil resistance has time and again brought people-powered victories. Civil resistance is the sustained, nonviolent, escalatory use of disruption by ordinary people to win against injustice. It’s brought us so much that we value in our society today.

That’s why we're targeting Newcastle coal port – the largest in the world and our single largest source of global greenhouse emissions. Like the great struggles of the past, achieving climate justice will take thousands of deeply committed people, unified by common purpose. This is the defining fight of our generation and everything is at stake.

How We Win

Lasting change isn’t accidental; it’s the result of disciplined, intentional action. To achieve our mission, we focus our energy on four proven methods that turn our vision into reality. This is how we win.

Change the Story

By amplifying the frontline voices and disruptively reframing the terms of debate, we can ultimately win the story war against fossil fuel propaganda.

Grow Our Movement

Around kitchen tables, at the pub, and at school pick up, it’s conversations between ordinary people that we need to grow the movement for climate defence. Sharing our personal stories and motivations for action is how we will grow.

Build Momentum

Through a series of well-sequenced, diverse actions and training, we will build momentum. We will use creativity and civil disobedience to bring attention our campaign and draw in new participants.

Our 10 Principles

What defines us is not just what we achieve, but how we achieve it. These 10 Principles guide our decisions and interactions, aligning our individual efforts into one powerful, cohesive movement.

1. We are safe and nonviolent

Only through nonviolent action will we be able to build the mass participation necessary to achieve our goals. Violent action would turn the public against us and jeopardise our movement. We also prioritise safety and mitigate the risk of harm to ourselves and others.

2. We target coal and gas corporations and their enablers

We cannot change everything all at once, so we focus on the part of the system that is primarily driving the climate crisis: coal and gas corporations and their enablers, particularly their political supporters. We do not target ordinary people. Instead we expose and isolate our opponents to build the “greatest us, and smallest them.”

3. We win the story

Stories are crucial for shaping what the public believes, and how our politicians act. Therefore, whoever controls the story has the greatest influence on public opinion, political action, and ultimately government policy and laws. The story is therefore the most critical arena where we fight our opponents.

We use our words and actions to tell clear stories where we are the heroes fighting for justice, and the coal and gas corporations are the villains destroying the planet. This is how we “win the story” - telling more compelling stories than our opponents, shaping public opinion, and winning public support.

4. We are disruptive

We often use disruptive protest to draw attention to injustices that may otherwise be ignored. It challenges our opponents’ moral legitimacy, tells a powerful story and creates a sense of urgency in the public and those in power to respond. Disrupting coal and gas corporations and their enablers is how we build enough pressure to force those in power to yield to our demands.

5. We build momentum

Momentum is key to building our power to drive change. We need growing numbers of people, increasing skills and leadership, and the story of our movement becoming more widespread. Whenever we consider an action or event, we ask: “will this build our power?”. We don’t do actions that take more energy than they build, and we don’t repeat actions, unless we can see that they’re building momentum.

6. We are justice-centred and inclusive

We prioritise justice and inclusion through our actions in the world as well as our organisational culture and how we relate to each other. There is a strategic as well as a moral need for justice in our work: it is the foundation of our power. Justice is the reason people volunteer their time and make sacrifices. Exposing the injustice of the climate crisis, and amplifying the voices of those on the frontlines is how we tell powerful stories. Standing in solidarity with other struggles, like First Nations and global justice movements, has the potential to build lasting, systemic change.

Being justice-centred and inclusive doesn’t mean just saying that everyone is welcome, it means actively confronting oppressive structures and behaviours that many of us maintain through our own interactions. We do this through remaining aware of our own privilege, actively organising to support diversity in our movement and taking proactive...

7. We help each other learn and grow

To grow a large, powerful social movement, we must meet people at their current level of understanding, build relationships of trust as we work together, and kindly challenge each other when we see oppressive culture or ignorance within our movement. We need to believe that people, including our own selves, can learn and grow, and support each other to do so. This includes an openness to giving and receiving feedback, being self-reflective, being open to forgiveness and working together to improve our ways of relating.

8. We encourage each other to take leadership

At Rising Tide, we believe that true leaders create more leaders, not followers, and that they empower rather than dominate. By valuing initiative, we aim to build a ‘leaderful’ movement, where the greatest number of people are able to help build social movement power to achieve our shared goals. When people step up to leadership, we aim to support them to succeed.

9. We prioritise community care

Community care is at the heart of a healthy social movement. Community care protects against stress, trauma, conflict and burnout, and nourishes people to remain involved. It also attracts new people because they find a supportive culture of the type we want to live in. Community care means investing in personal and group culture change, allowing us to build deeper, more supportive relationships, including emotional and practical care for each other. When we actively care for our community, we start to shift dominant norms, and build our personal and our collective capacity for action and change.

An important part of community care is a practice of ‘mutual aid’. During crises, we often see people support each other according to their capacity and needs, (rather than private wealth and financial transactions). To build a mass movement to confront the climate crisis, we must encourage a culture of mutual aid, and extend...

10. We embrace collective joy

We celebrate life and aim to bring fun and joy to our events and activities, recognising that this inspires, connects and sustains our movement. In these times of growing despair, embracing joy has helped us to attract people and build our power. At the same time, we recognise the importance of allowing space for authenticity and grief, as the rolling losses of diversity, safety, and the injustices of the climate crisis unfold.