As the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) draws to a close, we find ourselves in a painful place. Having billed itself as the ‘last chance saloon’ for governments, who must take decisive action to keep global warming to within 1.5 degrees, the process failed to deliver. The streets of Glasgow are filled with despairing youth - and their supporters - unable to quite believe that their future has been forfeited in this callous way. At a point in time when we had a fighting chance of not falling off the cliff entirely, we’ve put the blinkers on the horses and whipped them forward.

The final days were not only a spectacle of leaders of nations failing to come to agreement, but an equally dispiriting display of mainstream media failing to hold them to account on our (the people’s) behalf. The final attempt to shift blame for the failure of agreement onto China and India, after centuries of (and still ongoing) irresponsible behaviour from the northern hemisphere, was shameful. This was a diminishing rather than a growing willingness to help those victimised by our extractive, insatiable economy; further evidence of brutality unchecked.

For many of us this is not a surprise. Having spent most of our lives trying to ameliorate the effects of myopic national and global leaders, finding them unwilling to address the systemic causes of gross inequality, poverty, slavery, we had low expectations of the COP. As Rupert Read suggested in his closing speech after ten days coverage from inside the Blue Zone, maybe this is the time to stop holding these COPs. After 26 attempts at halting climate change, as an intervention, this must surely be assessed as ineffective.

But where does that leave us - especially those of us who know that the solutions to climate change are available and that the majority of citizens want the government to take appropriate action? The creative and heroic action of clear-eyed protestors - from Greta Thunberg, Fridays for the Future and Extinction Rebellion - have been heard by the people but not the governments.

However, people power is still an amorphous, ambiguous force today and insufficient on its own. We are still addicted to the old growth economy, keeping it alive while wishing it transformed. There are only tentative, scattered and fragile structures for participation and no regular, recognised forms of deliberative democracy. We are in thrall to a mainstream media that only feeds us back our fears but ignores the routes to survival.

Over the past ten days A/UK has been collaborating with media partner Humanity Rising to highlight several paths that could, when integrated, add up to a new socio-political-economic-biological system capable of shifting the narrative around climate breakdown.

In other words, a theory of urgent systemic change that could capture the public imagination sufficiently, prompting new actions and behaviours that defy the failure of governments to take action. The soft power of a strong emergent people-powered movement could reshape government and business goals, always in search of votes and customers. It might also birth the next global economies that could take us out of the burning building - even as those in charge continue to debate and negotiate in a kitchen full of smoke.

Here are some of the elements of that new system arising:

· Regenerative agriculture starting at the level of the soil and extending to the restoration of bio-diversity throughout Nature. Read here for Eduard Muller’s success at creating micro-systems in Costa Rica that can be replicated at the macro level globally

· Establishment of the doughnut - Kate Raworth’s design for agreeing limitations on carbon emissions at city and regional level, now rapidly being adapted around the globe

· Growth of the commons - the translocal, transnational architecture of human potential at the planetary level. This signifies the growing willingness of those with solutions of all kinds to share their blueprints, methods and tools, with anyone who can use it.

· Drawdown – the whole armoury of methods, from carbon capture to ground source heat pumps that can contain the worst emissions of fossil fuels and release the best of new forms of energy.

· Community agency networks (CANs) that connect people to solutions using the infrastructure of collaboratories, cosmolocalism, deliberative democracy, regenerative agriculture. CANs of all kinds lead the way in establishing climate emergency plans to bring their own communities down to net zero by 2030. While they remain entangled in the national climate excesses they are constantly prefiguring the change and informing government how it can be done better at the ground level.

· Emerging next economies and markets that establish the relationship between the flourishing of humans, communities and planet

· Technology that allows social sensemaking, connectivity, decision making, global inclusion – complex governance

· A new media system that can capture the actions of those determined to build this new system and reflect is growing convergence back to them. Not simply a news report but a participatory system, giving rise to intimate conversations between people developing their agency as well as global conferences aligning autonomous action.

The weakness of this emerging plan is that it is barely visible to the people who are yearning to see it. And for that reason, the vast majority are not investing time and energy in self-organising. They are not using the tools available, embodying the practices, building the structures that would engage our power. We could argue that the new media system is the most important factor in all of the elements we’ve showcased - the quickest to fan the sparks of action into flames.

Yet the strength of the plan is that, in many ways, the actions it shares are those that would come naturally to people if they reclaimed their daily lives as citizens living in community. We don’t need blueprints to follow - in fact, they can prove counterproductive when people sense yet another top-down action that might not be in their true interests. We only need to start to move into relationship with those we are easily alienated from and begin. The tools are available when we reach for them.

Two practical events this week illustrated how this complex emergence is manifesting. The first was the launch of the Cosmolocal Reader: a vibrant compendium of activity prefiguring a better future. See our blog for a video of the launch event, drawing together 5 years of research into the peer to peer activity that is giving rise to a global commons.

The second focuses on the growing development of collective, cosmolocal agency in Plymouth, Devon, UK, often going under the title of municipalism. In a highly recommended report co-authored by the Real Ideas Organisation and the New Economics Foundation, The State of Us: Powerful Communities and Economic Democracy, they describe how the diverse range of local actions – social enterprise, community wealth building, trade unions, inclusive theatre, land, fab labs (ref) and new forms of decision making – can add up to whole system change.

In this week’s blog, participant in the conference Indra Adnan reflects on how the work in Plymouth is prefiguring much of the structure and culture of an effective CAN in the new system arising. The potent mixture of a 4th sector economy, cosmolocalism, radical diversity, community flourishing, neighbourhood sensemaking, climate emergency - all of these infused with the values of creativity, inclusion, innovation, intersectionalism - make for inspiring reading.

In the final hour of the last Humanity Rising report on COP26, we included two young social entrepreneurs, Yusuf Karmoa and Alpha Kargbo, innovating climate solutions in their small town in Sierra Leone. They had the energy of builders in the early stages of a massive new project, whose eventual scale they could only guess at. Putting one foot in front of the other, inquiring, discovering, achieving breakthroughs - it was inspiring to see what we call RegenA at work. At the same time, their actions might remain isolated examples of potential unrealised, unless the preceding generations put their weight and every form of capital - cultural, intellectual, social, monetary - behind them, helping realise their vision.

Older generations, directly or indirectly, were a part of the problem manifesting as failure at COP26. What better way to redeem the past?

Alternative Editorial: Hope is dead. Long live Hope