In 2022, three protesters entered London’s National Gallery and threw soup over the glass protecting Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888), a painting valued at an estimated $95 million. The activists were members of Just Stop Oil, a nonviolent civil resistance group notorious for disruptive climate action with high-profile disruptions, including road blockades, spray-painting private jets, interrupting live sporting events, defacing Charles Darwin’s grave, and throwing orange powder on Stonehenge.

Disbanded in 2025, Just Stop Oil represents the radical flank of the climate movement, which uses provocative nonviolent civil resistance to draw attention to the climate crisis. The group was a key grantee of the Climate Emergency Fund, a nonprofit founded in 2019 to support disruptive climate action. Other grantees include Extinction Rebellion, Climate Defiance, and Scientist Rebellion.

The Climate Emergency Fund’s theory of change holds that “movements without a disruptive element are all too easily ignored.” From this perspective, nonviolent civil resistance functions as a strategic tool for securing media coverage and political leverage, even if it is often controversial.

Today, a growing body of research documents the measurable impacts of climate change, which are estimated to claim millions of lives each year. A report from the World Economic Forum projects that climate change could cause 14.5 million deaths by 2050 as a result of extreme weather events, including floods, droughts, heat waves, tropical storms, wildfires, and rising sea levels. Against this backdrop, campaigners turn to disruptive protest as a means of forcing change.

Disruptive Climate Action: Interrupting Business as Usual

The Climate Emergency Fund doesn’t participate in protests or direct grantees’ actions but provides the resources that make their work possible. “We have a very specific role in the movement ecosystem, and that is to provide financial resources to these groups,” says Margaret Klein Salamon, executive director of Climate Emergency Fund and a clinical psychologist. Salamon is leaving her position in early March 2026 to assume the role of board chair and will be succeeded by Philip Eubanks, current deputy director.

What exactly is a disruptive protest? “Basically, it means intervening in some way in business as usual,” Salamon explains. Examples include campaigning with banners or interrupting a politician’s speech with chanting—any nonviolent action that can “hack the media ecosystem” to direct attention to events and issues that would otherwise be overlooked.

Read the full article about building a climate-activist ecosystem by Tim Keary at Stanford Social Innovation Review.