Climate security as a civic priority
Climate security as a civic priority
NEWSLETTER, February 2023—Catherine McKenna fireside chat; Mutare, Zimbabwe; Talanoa Dialogue on Climate Ambition; Canada onboarding calls; new publications and media; the Notebook.
Climate crisis response is not one action, one issue, or one moment in time. Responding to and overcoming the climate crisis will require critical interventions in every aspect of human experience. Education, health, public safety, food systems, infrastructure, and disaster response, are all part of the climate resilience project. This is what makes climate hard to talk about, and why climate-related civic engagement is so important.
Catherine McKenna joins fireside chat with CCL monthly Group Leaders call
Catherine McKenna, head of the United Nations Secretary-General’s net-zero integrity panel and former Environment Minister of Canada, joined a fireside chat with Citizens’ Climate chapter leaders and coordinators on February 14. We share below a video of her talk combined with her answers to questions from participants in the meeting.
SPOTLIGHT
Volunteers in Mutare focus attention on peaceful, cooperative climate civics
Citizens' Climate volunteer work in Mutare, Zimbabwe is led by Jussa Kudherezera. On Friday, April 20, 2018, we activated his group with a unique WhatsApp-based training. The unconditional giving of the volunteers in the Mutare has never failed to amazed us. They work under the umbrella of the Manica Youth Assembly (MAYA). With our help they built a beautiful website in 2019 and webmaster it themselves.
They have just launched their first newsletter: Voices. They cover tree planting events, local environmental and civic policy negotiations, the effort to transition informal economies to more formal modes of sustainable development, and a call for peaceful engagement in elections.
UPCOMING EVENT
CCI will host a Global Talanoa Dialogue for Climate Ambition
On Thursday, April 20, CCI will host a global online event to share insights from a stakeholder-driven Talanoa dialogue. The Talanoa Dialogue was established by the Fijian presidency of the COP23 United Nations Climate Change negotiations, as an open space for person-to-person sharing of climate-related experiences, values, and goals. The aim was to build stakeholder insights into high-level climate policy, and to ground global climate crisis response in life at the human scale.
The core questions stakeholders are asked to answer are:
Stocktaking: Where are we now? What are we experiencing? What is the human experience of the climate crisis?
Livable future: What do we need to do to address and overcome the climate crisis? What are our goals?
Strategies: What strategies, policies, cooperative approaches, and innovative solutions can get us there?
Participants are asked to submit short videos telling their story about climate conditions and what is needed to make the future climate-safe.
VOLUNTEER EMPOWERMENT
Canada holds new round of onboarding sessions
CCL Canada conducted a series of onboarding calls to grow the troupes of carbon pricing advocates in Canada on every Monday in February. They recruited well over a dozen new carbon pricing champions and informed over 40 people in Canada about their work. Using a proven theory of change, CCL Canada volunteers achieved something rare: they got what they lobbied for.
CCL Canada volunteers are living the words of Margaret Mead:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Publications & Media
Climate-related financial and tax policies in 2023
André Dumoulin, Citizens' Climate volunteer leader in Panamá, has published a new piece outlining climate-related financial and tax policies in 2023, both globally and in Latin America. He reports that:
In the developing countries, the landscape of tax measures related to climate change is changing rapidly, however, sometimes states take urgent and specific measures to face environmental and climate challenges, and state-level policies have little multilateral coordination: There is often a competition between short-term energy investments and national policies with environmental policy frameworks of energy transition and biodiversity preservation.
CCL Canada on Reasons to be Cheerful podcast
On Monday, February 20, CCL Sudbury member Sophia Mathur was a guest on the Reasons to Be Cheerful podcast with former UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, and Sony Award-winning radio host Geoff Lloyd. It is a small world, because one week after the podcast was aired Sophia's mom, Cathy Orlando, lobbied Labour MPs Alan Whitehead (Shadow Minister for Energy and the Green New Deal) and Kerry McCarthy (Shadow Minister for Climate Change), alongside CCL UK members Gina Cook, James Collis, Amanda Lake, Katie Clague, and Ed Atkinson.
CCL Copenhagen "Fredags Skolen" ("Friday School") podcasts
CCL Denmark leader Martin Snoer hosts the Fredags Skolen podcasts named out of respect for Fridays For Future International. It is a place where all adults who want to act in the climate crisis can find education and guidance for this. In episode 4, Cathy Orlando of Citizens Climate International is interviewed about how to lobby politicians and other decision-makers to lower greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere in a socially just way.
Climate change affects peace and security, and human rights
Rapid sea-level rise means coastal jurisdictions are generally not prepared to deal with the hard impacts of persistent flooding and unprecedented storm surges. This can result in some major population centers becoming unlivable after shock events. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, is now warning of an unprecedented crisis of mass migration and destabilization.
CCI is covering this climate security discussion through Resilience Intel and in the new Dispatches section of this newsletter. In his remarks to the Security Council, Guterres called climate change a threat multiplier and said:
“People’s human rights do not disappear because their homes do.”
The Notebook
In 2023, we have added four new laser talks or short policy notes to the Notebook section of the CCI Newsletter: