Knox City Council meeting which passed a motion to declare (not just recognise) the Climate Emergency

From recognition to declaration: Knox City Council

This is a first! Or, at least, to the best of my knowledge Knox City Council is the first jurisdiction anywhere to upgrade an earlier motion recognising the Climate Emergency in order to explicitly join the ranks of local councils that have declared a Climate Emergency.

On 27 September 2021 Knox City Council adopted a new climate response plan, and in association with that they also recognised the Climate Emergency. Then, this week at their 25 July meeting, Cr Jude Dwight successfully proposed a new motion to explicitly declare a Climate Emergency.

Mayor Susan Laukens supported the motion to reaffirm the council’s commitment to act. “It is real, it is happening and climate scientists have been warning us of extreme weather events,” she said. “We need to be advocating and show leadership in this space”.

The new motion begins:

That Council

  1. Officially and publicly declare a Climate Emergency;
  2. Reaffirms strong commitment to the Climate Emergency and climate change mitigation and adaptation, as evidenced through…

To declare or to recognise – what is the issue?

A note on cedamia’s global list of Climate Emergency Declaration (CED) jurisdictions states that:

We include a jurisdiction if their resolution text includes ‘climate emergency’ or the equivalent in the local language. The resolution can declare, note, acknowledge, recognise (or similar) a climate emergency, or it can place climate emergency in quotation marks.

Accordingly, the earlier Knox City Council was recorded in the global list at the time it occurred (but it has now been updated to reflect the change from ‘recognise’ to ‘declare’).

But what prompted this note and this policy?

Warming banner - declare a Climate Emergency

As the above banner says, the grassroots Climate Emergency Declaration (CED) campaign which began in 2016 clearly asked all levels of government to declare a Climate Emergency. That’s what you do when you become aware of an emergency situation. You declare there is one so that everyone knows to take action if they want to remain safe.

In practice, particularly at first, many jurisdictions used words other than ‘declare’. Apparently they were concerned about unintended legal implications of declaring an emergency. (Even so, in general usage, all Climate Emergency resolutions tend to be reported as being ‘declarations’ regardless of the word actually used.)

Climate Emergency declarations in Australia

The first five CED councils in Australia either recognised, endorsed, or acknowledged the Climate Emergency. From 2020 onwards the vast majority used ‘declare’ in their CED motions but overall only half have done so. Incidentally, in Europe Climate and Ecological Emergency or Climate and Biodiversity Emergency declarations are quite common, but in Australia there have only been two of each, and one more that ‘recognised’ the Climate and Biodiversity Emergency.

Chart showing words used in Climate Emergency Declarations in Australia

Declarations in other countries

The first CED in the UK by Bristol City Council in November 2018 adopted a different solution. They declared a ‘climate emergency’, using quotation marks to signal that this was a new concept rather than necessarily having any sort of legal implications. During 2019 many other UK local councils copied that precedent, but these days new UK declarations usually don’t.

A few of the declarations in Canada and USA have used ‘recognise’ or similar, but the majority have simply used ‘declare’, as do all the CEDs in New Zealand and Japan.

Over the last couple of years there have been occasional cases of declarations in Australia and elsewhere that explicitly state that they should not be interpreted as having any particular legal implications. This seems like a practical way of circumventing debate on whether or not there are any legal issues to complicate declaring a Climate Emergency. For example, the Greater Wellington Council CED motion includes a clause saying, “Notes that the Climate Emergency declaration is made without explicit statutory authority or support.”

So…do CEDs have legal implications?

To be honest, I don’t think they do, but I’m not a lawyer. The campaign to declare a Climate Emergency is a bottom-up grassroots campaign. If CEDs were a top-down initiative there would be legislation saying what a CED is and setting regulations about them, but it isn’t. It came as a complete surprise to CED campaigners that the word ‘declare’ was considered a stumbling block considering that the entire CED concept was new and had no official standing.

However, some countries have legislation concerning other types of emergency declarations and the sorts of temporary powers and obligations that apply during those emergencies. It is understandable therefore that council legal teams wanted to take a cautious approach, at least at first.

All except two of the 20 most recent CEDs in Australia have used ‘declare’, and UK councils no longer bother using quotation marks. Has it now been established that such caution regarding potential legal implications is unnecessary? If you can answer this, please let us know!

In the meantime, I’m not sure if Knox City Council was concerned about legal implications when they used ‘recognise’ in their first CED, or perhaps they were influenced by the precedents set by some other Australian CEDs. Either way, it’s great to see them explicitly declare a Climate Emergency now. It really does sound much stronger.

Global map showing 2,248 Climate Emergency Declaration places - July 2022

Are Climate Emergency Declarations still happening?

Yes! New declarations might not be receiving a lot of media coverage these days but there are now 2,248 jurisdictions that have passed a Climate Emergency Declaration (CED). In just the last fortnight there have been two more CEDs in the UK (North Yorkshire County Council and Swindon Borough Council) and one more in Japan (Hiroshima City).

Certainly the rate of new declarations has slowed since the start of the pandemic, but even the CEDs that are happening now seem to get less media coverage than during the 2019 peak. The ground-breaking declaration by the first Australian state, South Australia on 31 May 2022, received little media coverage, and the April declaration by Nillumbik Shire Council in Victoria received none.

Chart showing the 2019 peak in rate of new Climate Emergency Declarations

In April 2020 there was just one new CED in the US and one in Italy. That suggests that the pandemic that was escalating at the time was a factor slowing the rate of new declarations. But it wasn’t the only factor. The dark purple bars in the chart above show the UK CEDs, a massive 506 before April 2020. Of those, 265 were mid-tier councils in England, of which there are only 333 in total. By 2020 there weren’t enough non-CED mid-tier councils left for such a high rate of new CEDs to be possible. Even so, their numbers did continue to rise. Currently 278 (83.5%) mid-tier councils of varying political persuasions have passed declarations.

Graph showing political control at CED mid-tier councils in the UK

The earliest Climate Emergency Declarations in the UK were by Labour-controlled councils. The first by a Conservative-controlled council was by Devon County Council in February 2019, but thereafter the growth trajectory has been similar across all types of UK councils. For context, at 2020 approximately 41% of the mid-tier councils where any particular party had control were under Conservative control, 33% were Labour-controlled, 14% Liberal Democrat, and Independents were in control at 12%.

National and sub-national CEDs

The following chart suggests national and subnational governments were focusing on the pandemic rather than climate during much of 2020.

Graph showing the increase in national and subnational Climate Emergency Declarations

By February 2020 there were 11 national CEDs, and 32 CEDs by subnational governments such as states, provinces, cantons, or prefectures. The Republic of Ireland was the first national declaration in May 2019, followed by Canada, Argentina, Spain, Austria, France, Malta, Bangladesh, Italy, Andorra, and the Maldives. The graph then flat-lined during mid 2020 before starting a slower but steady rise, reaching 18 nations with the declarations by South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Fiji and, most recently, Peru and Vanuatu this year.

The subnational graph also went flat for much of 2020 before resuming a steady but slower rise. To date there have been 41 CEDs passed by subnational governments, including the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Others include Gibraltar, the Australian Capital Territory, Quebec, 7 cantons in Switzerland, 7 regions of Italy, 6 prefectures in Japan, and the state governments of Hawaii and South Australia.

Is language also a factor?

Language is a third possible explanation for the slower rate of new CEDs over the last couple of years, or more precisely, the rate of new CEDs reported in cedamia’s global list and global maps of CED places.

Graph showing the rise in numbers of Climate Emergency Declarations in selected countries

For clarity, the above graph omits data for the UK, Quebec, and South Korea due to their relatively high numbers of declarations, and also the countries where only a few CEDs have occurred. Countries with a steady increase in CED numbers over the last couple of years are shown with thick lines: Australia, Canada (apart from Quebec), the US, and Japan. All except Japan are English-speaking countries, and language is not an issue for Japan because a colleague there reliably sends me notifications when new CEDs occur.

The only English-speaking countries with flat lines are New Zealand and Ireland. In both cases, the majority of council areas had already passed a CED prior to the pandemic, so fairly flat lines since are inevitable. But have there really been no new declarations in Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Switzerland, and Austria over the last couple of years despite significant activity earlier? Or is it that new declarations in those countries have not appeared in the English-language media articles I see via Google Alerts?

With the language issue in mind, Cedamia and ICLEI recently signed a memorandum whereby ICLEI will eventually become a multilingual reporting destination for new CEDs and we’ll share responsibility for collecting and displaying a shared set of data.

In the meantime, if you happen to know of any comprehensive lists of Climate Emergency Declaration places in countries with other languages, please get in touch!


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Climate Emergency banner on the Wandsworth Council homepage

UK council Climate Emergency banners

Following on from my recent hunt for Climate Emergency Declaration (CED) banners on the websites of Australian local councils who have declared a Climate Emergency, I knuckled down to search the homepage of all 543 CED local councils in the UK. Maybe there are better ways to spend a wet and wintry week, but once I reached the ‘W’ part of the alphabetical list here, I found the wonderful CED banner above just under the main header on the Wandsworth Borough Council homepage.

The Wandsworth banner takes the prize for excellent CED visibility. Any local residents visiting the website to check their bin collection dates cannot fail to see this banner stating that the council has declared a Climate Emergency. Not only that, the ‘Wandsworth together’ slogan gives a clear message that everyone can (and is expected to) help tackle the emergency, and there is a link to find out how to do that.

Local government in the UK consists of a single tier in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, but in England there are three tiers: regional authorities (11), local authorities (333), and the lowest tier consisting of town and parish councils (10,475).

Middle-tier local authorities – borough, county, district, and city councils

The other standout amongst middle-tier websites is the following Climate Emergency call to action in a rotating banner near the top of the Lancaster City Council homepage.

Climate Emergency banner on Lancaster City Council homepage

In general, councils seem to include items that are currently important to them in rotating banners, but the downside of that is that a rotating Climate Emergency item might not be displayed at the time anyone who is just looking for bin collection days scrolls down the page. However, the Lancaster banner rotates fairly quickly and only has two items rotating, so it is unlikely to be missed. It might even be more eye-catching than a static image as the movement tends to attract the eye.

Such excellent CED visibility on the Lancaster website was not a surprise to me. The Deputy Leader of Lancaster City Council, Cllr Kevin Frea, is the brains behind the excellent Climate Emergency UK website, an extremely comprehensive record of UK declarations, Climate Emergency Action Plans by UK local councils, and even a council climate plan scorecard mechanism.

Middle-tier councils in the UK have quite a wide range of functions, so their websites tend to show their numerous main menu items as blocks of icons or images. It is rare for their CED to rate inclusion in these main menu blocks. In too many cases the CED information can only be found by clicking on something more generic, like ‘Environment’, but there are some good examples of giving their CED equal prominence with other main menu items. For example, in the following main menu icons on the South Cambridgeshire District Council homepage:

Menu icons on South Cambridgeshire District Council home page

Or this section of the Somerset County Council main menu:

Screenshot of Somerset County Council main menu

Or the following image panel for featured menu items on the Eastleigh Borough Council homepage:

Climate Emergency as a featured item on Eastleigh Borough Council home page

Or the following Rother District Council main menu using panels of images rather than icons:

Image panel of main menu items on Rother District Council home page

Hopefully the above examples, or these screenshots showing good CED visibility by middle-tier UK councils, will inspire local councils globally to make their CEDs equally visible.

Small town and parish councils

Town and parish councils have a quite limited range of responsibility and power, and therefore less contention for space on a council’s homepage. This might explain why this is the only tier of local government where I found examples of the Climate Emergency being included in the top main menu. For example, on the Bishopsteignton Parish Council website:

Climate Emergency in Bishpsteignton top main menu

And the Chagford Parish Council website:

Climate Emergency in Chagford Parish Council top main menu

Or this link to their CED right at the top of the Dawlish Town Council homepage:

Climate Emergency Declaration link at top of Dawlish Town Council home page

And some parish and town councils give visibility to their CEDs in the body of their homepage, for example this Climate Emergency panel on the homepage of the Glastonbury Town Council website:

Climate Emergency panel on Glastonbury TOwn Council home page

More examples of good CED visibility on homepages can be seen at UK parish council homepages and at UK town council homepages.

The numbers

Of the 544 local councils in the UK with known Climate Emergency Declarations (CEDs), 65 (11.9%) have made their declaration clearly visible on the homepage of their website. While this figure is disappointingly low, it is significantly better than what was found for CED councils in Australia.

Chart showing the number of UK councils with Climate Emergency on their Home page
* The devolved governments of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have all also made country-level CEDs
** Almost definitely there are more town/parish councils that have passed CEDs but these are less well reported in media

The small town and parish councils have the highest percentage of CED visibility, with 38 (18.7%) featuring their CED on their homepage. None of the huge regional combined authorities do so even though 9 of the 11 regional authorities have declared a Climate Emergency.

The near misses

In addition to the above, 20 UK councils have either an eye-catching homepage rotating banner, static image panel, or popup that links to comprehensive information about their declarations, action plans, and information for engaging the local community. The only downside is the lack of the ’emergency’ word. For example, the popup announcing climate action investment (more on that in a future blog post!) below on the Telford and Wrekin Council website homepage:

Climate action investment popup on the Telford Wrekin home page

Or the following rotating climate action banner near the top of the homepage of the West Sussex County Council website:

Rotating climate action banner near top of West Sussex County Council home page

Or the following zero carbon banner on the homepage of the Gateshead Council website:

Zero carbon banner on the Gateshead Council home page

Despite not using the term ‘climate emergency’, the above are highly visible to anyone visiting those websites, and they do indicate that the councils are placing a high priority on climate action.

There are another 149 (27.4%) of the UK CED councils that also publish quite comprehensive information on their declarations and action plans, and in most cases also material designed to engage the entire community. However, website visitors will only see that information if they go out of their way to look for it. In about half of those cases website visitors can look for ‘climate’ in a long list of menu items. However, in other cases website visitors need to first click an ‘environment’, ‘sustainability’, or similar menu item, then click down through submenu layers to find links to the Climate Emergency content.

In conclusion

I don’t think my week was wasted. A large part of the point of declaring a Climate Emergency is to make the local community sit up and take notice. For that a council’s declaration needs to be clearly visible…to everyone, not just to those who are already engaged in climate action and actively seeking information on what their own local council is doing.

I’d like to think some other CED councils will be inspired by the good examples above. Please tell us all in the comments below if your council decides to add a Climate Emergency banner or something equally visible on the homepage of their website!


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Philip Sutton and his model Climate Emergency legislation

Lest we forget Philip Sutton’s Climate Emergency legacy: how we restore a safe climate

This article by Bryony Edwards and Adrian Whitehead originally appeared in the Vote Planet blog and is reposted here with permission.

Since his sudden death on 12 June, much has been written about Philip Sutton, the visionary thinker behind the “climate emergency declaration”. Philip’s prolific lifetime of work is captured in this Guardian obituary

Since the 1970s, Philip has published two seminal climate books, authored environmental legislation still in use, drafted legislation that the climate movement should be lobbying governments on, and shaped the climate conversation globally. 

Philip was not a climate scientist but he grilled climate scientists to reveal the assumptions and realities behind often opaque scientific statements.

Philip worked long hours every single day at the theoretical “coalface” of climate thinking. Below the grassroots, down the end of a long tunnel – far from light, air, recognition, financial support. The work’s urgency was his drive; the urgency for a future for his kids and all vulnerable populations and ecosystems. 

Anyone that recognised Philip’s brilliance is wondering how we carry on his legacy. Philip’s consolidated climate thinking on Climate Rescue is perfectly summarised in this November 2021 interview. Philip’s immediate thinking preceding his death is summarised in this email to the Victorian Climate Action Network. A group that was to work on his current Climate Rescue project is continuing that work. 

Philip was always decades ahead of the “mainstream” climate movement, which has recognised and used some of his thinking but not the more difficult aspects. It is inevitable that we will have to engage with the these more difficult aspects if we decide to have a future.

This blogpost aims to capture the aspects of Philip’s core thinking that has not been widely understood or embraced by climate movements. It is a call for climate movements to understand and rally around Philip’s thinking in the quest to restore a safe climate. 

The grief that many are feeling to lose this brilliant, big-hearted, deep thinker must be harnessed to implement what is likely the only path that will save us. A pathway that Philip envisaged over a decade ago.

How we restore a safe climate

Twenty years ago, when NGOs such as Greenpeace were campaigning on cuts of 60% emissions, Philip and a couple of others (Adrian Whitehead and Matt Wright) were looking at zero emissions. Not net-zero emissions still talked about today but true zero or a near zero emissions society achieved at emergency speed. 

Philip’s thinking can be summarised by what we need to achieve for a viable future. The fundamentals have not altered in more than a decade and are increasingly validated by IPCC and other bodies as they catch up:

  1. Zero emissions, all sectors, achieved at emergency speed (less than 10 years).
  2. Massive drawdown of excess greenhouse gases to restore safe concentrations (100 years or so based on land use needs).
  3. “Cool the planet” (at emergency speed). We’ve already set off numerous feedback loops that make the first two actions alone not enough to save us.

The key here is that the only safe position is to reverse global warming and restore a safe climate (i.e. safe greenhouse gas concentrations and whatever else it takes). Without the combined three actions (zero, drawdown, cooling), we risk tipping into runaway climate change or Hothouse Earth, from which there is no conceivable return. The idea that we can stop warming at an arbitrary point and stay there is conjecture. Targets such as “zero by 2050” are political, not scientific; and suicidal based any analysis of the science. 

And these three actions are required to occur at emergency speed. Philip was at pains to emphasise that acting at emergency speed requires:

  • a declaration of the climate and ecological emergency so that firstly, everyone knows it’s an emergency and secondly, government has the authority to act, followed by
  • mobilisation – acting on the emergency at emergency speed. 

Elements of Philip’s thinking that got “mainstream” legs include

  • The Climate Emergency Declaration. This got legs in 2016, when Philip’s council, Darebin (Vic) passed a motion recognising that we are in a climate emergency and all levels of government have responsibility to act. As some would be aware, this quickly spread to a handful of other Australian councils. Cedamia has tracked the global spread of the declarations since that point. Some positive change across participating governments resulted and has generalised to non-declared governments, but mobilisation, an intent of the campaign, was not adopted. The count is now over 2000 governments with national and state governments included. South Australia is a recent addition.

Philip’s (and David Spratt’s) thinking is succinctly captured in this Breakthrough paper, Climate Emergency Explored.

Elements of Philip’s thinking that have been adopted by the leading edge of the climate movement are:

  • The idea of less than 10 years to zero emissions (ie not “net zero”) typified by the work of Beyond Zero Emissions and their Zero Carbon Australia plans, or Extinction Rebellion’s call for zero emission in five years.
  • Drawdown to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations to pre-industrial levels. Two relevant books include Tim Flannery’s 2015 Atmosphere of Hope and Drawdown (2017) by Paul Hawken.

Two of Philip’s central ideas have have not gained traction with the leading edge or broader climate movement but are absolutely central to avoiding global climate catastrophe and restoring a safe climate are:

  • The imperative combination of declaration PLUS mobilisation. Mobilisation (for emergency speed) is the goal; a declaration is the enabler. Mobilisation was put in the too-hard basket.
  • Cooling the planet. Recognising that zero emissions, even if achieved today, is extremely unlikely to spare us from global climate catastrophe and that active solar radiation management would be needed. 

Mobilisation and Cooling the planet are discussed in more detail in sections below.

Emergency declaration + mobilisation only work hand in hand

Declaration and mobilisation go hand in hand – with mobilisation the ultimate goal and declarations just a mechanism for mobilisation. For example: 

  • The COVID lockdowns and over 100 billion dollars made available (regardless of how well it was implemented) could not have happened without the initial state and federal declarations of the COVID emergency (Federally this was the COVID-19 Emergency Response Act 2020, states had their own acts).
  • UK war mobilisation against Germany couldn’t have occurred without the UK intuitively declaring war. Naturally, the war could not have been won without ensuing mobilisation. Almost all efforts became focused on surviving and winning the war. For example, car manufacturers switched to making tanks, children from towns were moved to the country.
  • Government and community responses during a bushfire emergency would not exist without first letting everyone know about the emergency (the declaration) and enabling emergency services to act quickly without red tape (mobilisation). 

Philip outlined what a national Climate Emergency and Mobilisation Act would look like. It involved a lot of government restructuring and goal setting to prioritise the work needed to reverse global warming.

Philip emphasised the appropriate steps for target setting:

  1. Ask what we want to save (eg, Pacific Islands? Bangladesh? Coastal cities? The Great Barrier Reef). 
  2. Backcast to ascertain what action is required to save what we want to save. 
  3. Set targets based on the speed required to achieve the outcome.

Over the decades of inaction, the required action has become more urgent and extreme. There is no carbon/greenhouse gas budget. 

Policy makers and mainstream Environmental NGOs (ENGOs) prefer to set targets based on what they think is “realistic” with a few tweaks to business as usual. This is suicidal when winning slowly means losing.

In 2013 Philip, working with a team that included Adrian Whitehead and Tiffany Harris,  developed a plan for what mobilisation could look like at the local government level. This work later became core material that underpins the work of CACE (Council and community Action in the Climate Emergency).

Mobilisation is hard; local governments simply do not have the budget to achieve all that needs to be  done. State governments and federal governments with their big economic and regulatory levers are the levels of government that could truly implement an emergency response, but state and federal governments in 2016 weren’t anywhere near declaring a climate emergency let alone mobilising. That’s why the Climate Emergency Declaration campaign was focused on local government. As far back as 2008 in this ABC interview with Robyn Williams and in his seminal 2008 book with David Spratt, Climate Code Red, Philip talked about going down to any level of governance – down to the household or individual if required, for traction on mobilisation. 

Declaration + mobilisation is inconvenient. It cannot exist in a neoliberal frame, which prioritises infinite growth and the welfare of corporations. Mobilisation is a green-new deal, hard targets and working out what we do to meet those targets. It also means regulation to stop bad things, not just economic signals to slowly phase them out. Central governments need to wrest back power from decades of neoliberalism to make mobilisation happen.

On the idea of “economic signals”, Philip recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation for a carbon tax that would get us to zero in under ten years. He estimated the tax would need to be around $300 a tonne – up a bit from the “ambitious” $50 we might hear. As Philip then said, “a $300 carbon tax would lead to chaos”. While a tax might have a role in subsets of activity, we need central planning to guide this kind of massive infrastructure work.

Cooling the planet

Point three of the pathway to restoring a safe climate, cooling the plant, is perhaps the most misunderstood. 

Geoengineering as a whole is frowned upon by many people keen on saving the planet primarily because it is seen as an “out” for fossil fuels – that they might use it as a reason to keep emitting. Needless to say, we need to campaign for both “negative emissions” and cooling the planet at emergency speed.

The term geoengineering represents a broad range of options to cool the planet but Philip usually only referred to solar radiation management (increased albedo to reflect the sun) for cooling the planet, as in general solar radiation management represents a much lower risk option to create a global cooling than some of the options more broadly defined under the term geoengineering (eg BECCs).

Solar radiation management includes relatively low-tech options such as painting roofs white or highly reflective roads, to more complex options as reflecting sunlight back out into space by enhancing cloud formation, or maintain (reflective) levels of sulphur dioxide in our atmosphere as we progressively shut down coal power plants.

To reject the imperative of solar radiation management or alternatives outright is to not understand the inconvenient reality that at “equilibrium”, we have already reached around 2.5C of warming and built in 25 metres of sea level rise; most of this warming has not yet manifested in average surface temperatures due to:

  • The thermal mass of the ocean that has absorbed the vast majority of warming; there is about a 30-year lag to this warming manifesting as surface temperature.
  • Global dimming. We are currently “geoengineering” around 1C of cooling via global dimming or what would be solar radiation management if we were doing it intentionally. Sulphates from burning coal and other fossil fuels increase albedo. As we stop burning fossil fuels we will quickly need to maintain current rates of albedo if we want to avoid climate catastrophe. The IPCC has started to incorporate this reality into their modelling.

To reject the imperative of solar radiation management is to condemn millions of people to drowning land masses and all the other horrors that 2.5C+ of global warming can produce.

As such, zero emissions alone, if achieved today, would very likely not save us. Zero emissions alone is a narrative hangover from decades ago. It persists in climate circles. Zero emissions alone ignores the numerous feedback loops we have tripped that are speeding up warming, the 1C of cooling we are currently engineering, and the global lag in realised surface temperature.

If we care enough about people, populations, ecosystems, the web of life, a future for ourselves and our kids, we will take radical action to cool the planet. Any action should aim to minimise negative side effects; however, we’ve left it too long to imagine we come out of this unscathed. We need to go with the lesser of many evils.

Climate campaigns coming together?

Can the climate movement get behind Philip’s framework to restore a safe climate?

In a call for them to lead, the role of E-NGOs has to be highlighted here. There is a strong case that the large E-NGOs (yes, all of them) have held back progress as they clung to the idea that telling the truth wasn’t good business and campaigning for incremental action was the best way to get outcomes. 

E-NGOs vehemently fought “emergency”, the E-word, until grassroots campaigns – starting in Darebin Vic, got the ball rolling with the initial climate emergency declaration in 2016. 

There were tears, including Philip’s, among campaigners that had lobbied Darebin council when that first climate emergency motion passed in December 2016. (Special mention here to other Darebin campaigners, such as Adrian Whitehead for campaigning the council on a climate emergency declaration, Jane Moreton and her booklet that went global Don’t Mention the Emergency?, and Margaret Hender and Mik Aidt for their work on the Climate Emergency Declaration platform.) 

When the large ENGOs finally noticed the emergency campaign had gone global, by about 2019, after it spread like wildfire through the UK councils, they raced to catch up to the bandwagon. Once they’d wrested the reins from grassroots campaigners, the large E-NGOs steered the wagon away from the trackless unknown of what a climate emergency declaration and mobilisation entails back onto the sealed road of feelgood rhetoric and incremental change. Targets were watered down, the idea of mobilisation vanished and the declaration plus a few council actions was the outcome. 

Councils that had declared were looking at each other for guidance on how to mobilise. Some of them had a bit of a go and CACE provided a framework for that mobilisation. While there was resulting innovation that has influenced higher levels of government, none wanted to go too far out on a limb. This Breakthrough paper is a survey of what declared Australian councils had progressed around February 2020 with regard to climate emergency imperatives, and there is a 2022 Australian survey by Cedamia.

Since 2019, the rise of Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg and Friday’s for Future (School Strikes) mean that grassroots are again visibly leading. However, ENGOs have become intertwined with School Strikes around the world.

 XR’s demands are:

  • Zero emissions by 2025 
  • Tell the Truth
  • Citizens’ Assemblies to define appropriate action. 

Fridays for Future’s (School strikes) demands are 

  • Keep the global temperature rise below 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels. 
  • Ensure climate justice and equity.
  • Listen to the best united science currently available. 

The Climate Emergency framework, as set out by Philip, goes a step further to outline non-negotiable actions required for a safe climate (zero, drawdown, cooling, all at emergency speed) and the essential mechanisms (declaration plus mobilisation) to achieve this.

Last word

Most governments will take the easiest path available so campaigners need to be laser sharp and unanimous in their messaging if they want a meaningful outcome. 

Rather than campaigning for what we think governments will tolerate we need to campaign for what actually needs to be done, ie we need  to campaign to reverse global warming and restore a safe climate. 

Philip was optimistic that saving the planet was still feasible if we adhered to emergency speed to negative emissions (zero plus drawdown) and cooling the planet, underpinned by declaration plus mobilisation. 

Can we rally around Philip’s core thinking to save ourselves?


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