How can climate activists be more successful in 2025? And where have they gone wrong?

Kumi Naidoo has a storied career as an activist. At just 15 years old, he started out as an anti-apartheid campaigner and organiser in South Africa, before fleeing the country and attending Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where he received a PhD for his research into the resistance movement in South Africa.

After Nelson Mandela was freed, he returned home to help organise Mandela’s campaign to become President, and later became the head of both Greenpeace and Amnesty International.

Naidoo has turned his energy to a new campaign, one that focuses specifically on the phase out of fossil fuels: the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. The Initiative, founded by former Cleaning Up guest Tzeporah Berman, seeks to establish a binding agreement amongst the most ambitious nations to phase out fossil fuels. So far, it has been endorsed by 16 nation states and 131 subnational governments and cities.

Naidoo joins Bryony Worthington to talk about what he's learned from 45 years of campaigning, from hunger strikes to occupying oil rigs in the Arctic, where he thinks activism needs to go from here, and why he believes the Fossil Fuel Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative is the path forward.

Leadership Circle

Cleaning Up is supported by the Leadership Circle, and its founding members: Actis, Alcazar Energy, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP of Portugal, Eurelectric, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit https://www.cleaningup.live.

Links and more:

The Fossil Fuel Endgame: Inside The Non-Proliferation Treaty — Ep197: Kumi Naidoo

Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change