yard sign promoting Ann Arbor City Council climate action tax

Funding council Climate Emergency action plans

Funding is a key challenge for local governments who have adopted ambitious Climate Emergency Action Plans. That is one of the main topics that will be discussed on 3-7 October at Daring Cities 2022, along with engaging the entire community and ensuring climate actions are equitable. You can register for this free online event here.

Daring Cities 2022 registration invitation

In the meantime, below are a few of the funding strategies local councils are already adopting, and a proven and empowering funding model being used by a grassroots non-profit group.

Ann Arbor City Council, USA: Community to vote on proposed climate action tax

Ann Arbor adopted its A2Zero carbon-neutrality plan in 2020, with a target of achieving community-wide carbon neutrality by 2030 and 100% renewable energy for the entire community. But this ambitious action plan requires funding, so as part of their elections in November they are asking the community to vote on a proposed 20-year tax. This would cost the average householder around $200/year and bring in $6.8 million in the first year, all of which would be spent on actions to help the entire community become carbon neutral.

Importantly, council has published action lists showing how the money would be spent so that residents know what their money will be achieving, and local climate groups have joined in a campaign to help build a ‘yes’ vote for the tax.

Often local councils seem reluctant to ask much of their residents even though the goal of their climate emergency actions is to protect their local community (and the rest of the world). But rises in rates or taxes tend not to be popular, so it is hoped the transparent planning and collaboration with local climate groups will prove to be an effective way of building community support.

Brighton and Hove Council, UK: Reallocation of budget

Reallocating budget is one of the simplest and quickest ways of funding at least some climate emergency action. Brighton and Hove Council was one of the earliest UK councils to declare a Climate Emergency, on 13 December 2018. Just prior to that they had set their new budget, but they quickly decided to revise it via the following budget reallocation decision:

£500,000 which was earmarked for the redevelopment of Brighton Town Hall will now be used for investment in “sustainability and carbon reduction”.
Labour leader Daniel Yates said: “We need to deal with the climate emergency facing the city and create a fund for those who wish to fight climate change.”

West Berkshire Council, UK: Community climate bonds to raise funds for climate emergency action

People in West Berkshire can invest in a ‘community bond’ for as little as £5, which will go towards plans to install solar panels and plant trees across the district and hopefully raise £1 million. The interest rate would be a bit lower than other options for borrowing, so it would save council (and ratepayers) money, but it could also be a very effective means of empowering local residents who want to ‘do more’.

Several other UK councils are also raising funds via climate bonds as promoted by the Green Finance Institute and administered by Abundance Investment.

Leicester Council, UK: Bid for government funding for £8m home insulation scheme

Leicester Council is retrofitting hundreds of older social housing and other affordable homes with wall insulation, enabled by a successful bid to receive £1million from the UK Government’s Green Homes Grant Scheme.

Stage 2 of the insulation scheme will be backed by £7million from the Government’s Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund, following a successful joint bid by the city council and local housing associations.

Grants from higher levels of government may require council to match the funding, but even so it’s a good way of stretching a council budget further than otherwise if council can come up with a compelling business case for a grant bid.

Many local councils, everywhere: Schemes facilitating community expenditure on climate solutions

Bulk buy schemes are a classic example. Local householders and businesses might hesitate to install solar or upgrade their space heating to heat pumps, for example, simply because they don’t know which products are best and which tradespeople will do a good job. Councils can leverage climate-beneficial expenditure by the local community simply by organising a quality-controlled bulk buy scheme that the community can trust.

Or it could be a scheme that is partly funded by local government and partly by the local community, such as the scheme adopted by the Government of Jersey for subsidised commercial auditor training. They also subsidise audit costs and energy efficiency upgrade costs for both householders and commercial premises.

CORENA, Australia: Crowd-funding to pay for practical Climate Emergency projects

Not a local council! CORENA is a tiny non-profit community organisation run by volunteers, so the scale of their funding model is small compared with what a local council could manage with its much greater resources. However, their successful donation-sourced revolving fund provides proof of concept and could easily be adapted for local councils.

The funding model is incredibly simple and takes advantage of the fact that many of the practical initiatives that reduce carbon emissions, like energy efficiency and solar installations, also reduce subsequent operating costs. CORENA uses donations from the public to give interest-free loans to cover the upfront cost of practical climate projects. The loans are repaid into a revolving fund via subsequent savings on operating costs, meaning the donated money is used over and over again. Accordingly, the $500,000 donated so far has paid for $1 million worth of climate projects.

revolving fund cartoon showing donations coming in, loans going out, and loan repayments coming back in

Adapting the revolving fund model for local councils

For a local council, the first step is to identify an appealing goal that suits local circumstances. For example, the goal might be for everyone in the community to replace oil or gas space heating with efficient reverse-cycle air conditioners (heat pumps), with the added benefit of keeping vulnerable people cool during heat waves. Or it might be solar installations, or insulation, or whatever else would reduce local community carbon emissions most cost-effectively.

For householders who cannot afford the upfront cost themselves, council would use the donated funds to give interest-free loans to cover the cost, with the repayments set to fall within expected savings on operating costs. (For everyone else, they could organise a quality-controlled bulk buy scheme to make it easy for those who are time-poor rather than cash-poor.) If loan repayments are attached to the property rather than an individual, then loan repayments could be a simple extra payment added to rates payments, and even people who are unsure how long they will continue to live at their current premises can participate with confidence.

Empowering the local community

Finally council would ask everyone in the community to donate to help achieve the stated community goal. Quite apart from providing necessary funding, this is a great way of engaging the local community in collective action, with good opportunities to give visibility to the number of people ‘doing their bit’ to tackle the climate emergency. We all know we can’t do it alone.

For donors it is very empowering to see tangible climate actions they are helping to achieve, and even more so when they see their money being used over and over again in subsequent climate projects. By setting up the above type of donation-sourced revolving climate fund, council is providing a structure that enables everyone to ‘do more’.


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A semon representing new fossil fuel projects and a smiley-face world for a safe climate

Quebec: Climate Emergency Declaration and fossil fuel ban

Quebec declared a Climate Emergency in 2019, and in April 2022 Quebec banned all new coal, oil, and gas extraction and production. This ban is a massively important precedent, but I’d not heard about it until I saw this announcement from the David Suzuki Foundation.

Quebec has ended fossil fuel exploration and development projects on its territory — a historic victory for its ecosystems and population … proving that it’s possible to act on the science the climate emergency requires.

Charles Bonhomme, Public Affairs and Communications Manager

Quebec has huge amounts of hydroelectricity, perhaps making a fossil fuel ban easier to achieve than in many other jurisdictions. But even so, the Suzuki article mentions a handful of proposed oil and gas projects that now will never be able to go ahead. It also claims Quebec is the “first jurisdiction on Earth to ban fossil fuel development in its territory — a visionary lead for all of Canada, and the world.”

It is certainly visionary and makes Quebec an inspiring precedent to emulate, but it isn’t actually the first. The first subnational jurisdiction to ban new fossil fuel projects was the Australian Capital Territory when it signed on to the Fossil Fuel Non-proliferation Treaty in June 2021. In May 2022 the state legislature of Hawaii also signed that treaty. However, neither the ACT or Hawaii had current or proposed fossil fuel projects, so in that respect the Quebec ban could be counted as the first to achieve a really tangible benefit.

Fossil fuel bans as a follow-on action to Climate Emergency Declarations

Banning new fossil fuel exploration and extraction seems like such a very obvious first step to take after declaring a Climate Emergency for any jurisdiction that has control over such things. It is essential even if it is hard to achieve. However, so far Quebec, the ACT, and Hawaii are the only ones I’ve heard of doing so out of the 41 subnational jurisdictions (states, provinces, etc) and 18 nations globally that have passed a Climate Emergency Declaration (CED).

South Australia has declared a Climate Emergency, and like Quebec has much less dependence on fossil fuels than many regions. Could South Australia be the next jurisdiction to sign the non-proliferation treaty and/or simply ban new fossil fuel projects?

In Australia it is the state governments that make fossil fuel decisions and building regulations rather than local councils, but Darebin (and maybe some other CED local councils) have sought state government exemptions to enable them to ban gas connections to new buildings in their area. Local councils can also sign on to the Fossil Fuel Non-proliferation Treaty like five of the Australian CED councils have done (Sydney, Darebin, Maribyrnong, Moreland and Yarra), and they can lobby their state governments to do so too.

Climate Emergency Declarations in Quebec

Climate Emergency awareness seems to be unusually high in Quebec.

In Montreal 150,000 people turned up in May 2019 for the first of the really large global school climate strikes, by far the biggest turnout anywhere. For that particular strike, numbers of 30,000 or less were reported for other major cities. The September 2019 global school climate strike in Montreal was even bigger, with an estimated 500,000 attendees, compared with 100,000 or similar in other major cities.

GMob campaigners promoting climate emergency declarations in Quebec
Promotion of GMob Climate Emergency Declarations in Quebec

Climate Emergency Declarations in Quebec have taken a different path to those elsewhere, with no apparent cross-fertilisation between Quebec and other regions. The GMob Climate Emergency Declaration (Déclaration d’Urgence Climatique) is a strong declaration statement that was drafted by the GMob team. They lobbied all Quebec local councils to sign that declaration rather than having each council develop their own CED motion. In most other countries – South Korea was an exception – each council has been responsible for developing their own declaration text albeit with a degree of copying and pasting from earlier declaration texts, particularly in the UK and USA.

At the time of the first 20 Quebec declaration sign-ons in September 2018 there were already four CED councils in Australia and four in USA, but Quebec campaigners told us they had not heard about those. There were another 80 declarations in Montreal in November 2018, around the time of the first CED in the UK, but similarly we in Australia did not hear about any of the Quebec declarations till much later.

As of April 2021, 525 local councils, representing 83% of the population of Quebec, have signed the GMob declaration. Of those, 403 councils had already signed by the time of the Quebec state-level Climate Emergency declaration in November 2019. Quebec has thus been one of the few regions where the pattern campaigners expected has materialised: first a groundswell of climate urgency support at the local level, then a state-level CED, followed by major state-level actions such as the recent ban on new fossil fuel projects.

The power of precedents

The global spread of CEDs has been helped along by the power of precedents, with clear cross-fertilisation firstly from Australia to USA, then from USA to the UK before becoming widely visible and spreading to Europe, the rest of Canada, South America, and Asia.

It is hoped something similar will happen with bans on new fossil fuel projects, but precedents only have power if they are seen!

If you want South Australia to follow its CED with a ban on new fossil fuel projects, you could try telling your MPs about the precedents set by the ACT, Hawaii, and Quebec. If you want your local CED council to restrict fossil fuel use in new buildings, or sign on to the fossil fuel treaty, they are likely to prick up their ears if you tell them about the other CED councils that have already taken those initiatives. And please tell us all in a comment below if you know of other fossil fuel bans I’ve missed!


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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.

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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SA Parliament House, with Susan Close MP holding 10,000+ petition signatures

South Australia declared a Climate Emergency


On 31 May 2022, South Australia became the first Australian state to declare a Climate Emergency, although the Australian Capital Territory did set a precedent for a sub-national region to do so back in 2019. The SA declaration was passed by both Houses of Parliament. The Liberal opposition proposed amendments, which were rejected, with the original motion then passing unanimously in the Lower House. The Liberal opposition voted against the motion in the Upper House but it passed with Labor and cross bench support.

The motion stated:

That this house —
(a) notes the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report confirms that greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and current plans to address climate change are not ambitious enough to limit warming to 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial level — a threshold scientists believe is necessary to avoid more catastrophic impacts;

(b) notes that around the world, climate change impacts are already causing loss of life and destroying vital ecosystems;

(c) declares that we are facing a climate emergency; and

(d) commits to restoring a safe climate by transforming the economy to zero net emissions.

Background

In September 2019, Mark Parnell MLC (Greens) moved a Climate Emergency Declaration (CED) motion in the Upper House. At that time, the ACT had already done so in May 2019, and around 45 local councils around Australia had too. The SA upper house CED motion passed with support from Labor and most of the cross bench, but was opposed by the Liberals. It was not debated in the Lower House at that time.

Soon after new legislation was passed in SA such that formal on-paper citizen petitions with over 10,000 signatures would be ‘taken seriously’ due to the effort require to achieve that – would be tabled in parliament, entered in Hansard, and be guaranteed a ministerial response (either in support of or rejecting the petition). Accordingly 3 ‘ordinary citizens’ started such a petition, and a wide range of grassroots helpers (individuals and members of climate groups) put many hours into collecting signatures. You can see the petition text here.

Helpers could download the petition sheet online and print it themselves, or collect printed sheets from a centrally located petition box at the Conservation SA premises. Signed sheets were returned either through a slot in the petition box or sent to a PO Box set up specifically for that purpose.

By Jan 2020 the team had already collected around 6,000 signatures, so we sounded out Labor MP Susan Close (opposition party at the time) about tabling the petition when we reached 10,000 signatures. She jumped at the chance to do that and indicated willingness to also propose a CED motion alongside tabling it. But then Covid struck and made signature collection really hard, so it ended up taking until mid-2021 to reach 10,000 signatures.

In August 2021, Susan Close tabled our petition and proposed a CED motion, with a large show of support from people on parliament house steps on the day she did that. Her motion was eventually allowed to be put on the debate agenda, but ultimately there was not sufficient time for it to be debated before the state election.

The 2022 state election saw Labor back in power, so the CED motion was put on the agenda again as a first order of business. In speaking to the motion Susan Close, now Deputy Premier, positioned the motion as being in response to clear community demand for urgent climate action. She also announced two initial climate policies for putting words into action: a green hydrogen project and removal of an EV tax.

You can see a global list of jurisdictions that have declared a Climate Emergency here, or click on the pins in this map.


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