Stakeholders call on leaders to steer us to safety

NEWSLETTER, June 2022—Climate advocates call on G7 to act on climate, welcome ‘Climate Club’ announcement, new cooperative climate incentives and solutions; Climate Diplomacy Workshops kick off…

This was a Month of Action, with citizen volunteers around the world working to build political will for a world that works, sustainably, for everyone. CCI also joined UN Climate Change negotiations, emphasizing the need to mobilize inclusive finance. We also started a collaboration to prepare participants in global climate talks, and rallied nearly 1,200 voices from 80 countries to call on the G7 Leaders to steer the world toward successful climate resilient development.

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Climate Advocates from 80 countries call on G7 to Steer Us to Safety

After months of careful review of civil society calls to action, and engaging with the various thematic workstreams of the civil society engagement process toward the G7 Leaders Summit, global climate advocates from 80 countries sent letters to the G7 Leaders, urging them to:

1. Rapidly redirect financial flows away from fossil fuels and towards an equitable and resilient future. These policies must align with the Net Zero Scenario from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

2. Negotiate the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to complement the Paris Agreement and financially support a rapid, equitable and managed phase-out of fossil fuels.

3. Finance successful adaptation and resilience measures to keep vulnerable communities safe from preventable harm.

We welcome the announcement by the G7 of work toward a cooperative “climate club” of nations. We want to see cooperation toward people-centered carbon pricing, including climate income, and efforts that align with the PARIS Principles, the Principles for Reinventing Prosperity, and which mobilize non-market approaches to accelerate the transition to a climate resilient future.

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Political will for a livable world

June 2022 was our first ever Month of Action.

CCI volunteers in 76 countries worked to develop local chapters and mobilize advocacy for a livable climate future. Volunteer actions included support for the G7 Letter, participation in training and empowerment workshops, efforts to engage media, community, and leaders, and to meet with public officials to talk about smart, effective, people-friendly climate policy.

We are now in the process of gathering field reports and assessing progress, and will be reporting back soon on the overall activity during the Month of Action. Upcoming calls with chapter leaders will feature opportunities to share experiences and to submit field reports through a new user-friendly form, to ensure everyone is recognized for their efforts to pull on the five levers of political will.

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CCI & the Fletcher School launch climate diplomacy workshops

Citizens climate international and Fletcher school at Tufts University co-convened a series of climate diplomacy workshops in advance of the June UN climate change negotiations. The aim was to prepare both negotiators and observers for the fast-moving endlessly complex landscape of the process.

Here are some of the key insights emerging from those workshops:

1. Embracing complexity makes it easier to advance solutions in the global negotiations.

2. Effective negotiators value the constructive contributions of negotiators, observers, media, and UN staff, each in their respective roles.

3. The stakes of this process are existential for billions of people and most ecosystems on Earth; the challenge of high-ambition consensus is “the ultimate test of solidarity.”

4. Addressing loss and damage is not a gift or a loss; it is a moral responsibility and a critical safeguard of every nation’s capacity for sustainable development.

5. Converging and compounding global crises cannot be made easier by ignoring the climate challenge; reducing climate risk is vital for crisis resolution.

6. The negotiations should improve global cooperative performance on the 10 Recommendations from the Stockholm+50 Conference.

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Bonn climate talks call for stakeholder participation & advance ‘non-market approaches’

The SB56 round of United Nations Climate Change negotiations left many participants and observers frustrated at the lack of agreement on creation of urgently needed mechanisms for finance to overcome loss and damage related to human-caused climate change. There were, however, important breakthroughs.

• For the first time, nearly 200 nations worked through various spaces inside the negotiations to identify, share, co-develop, and implement “non-market approaches” to accelerated cooperative decarbonization, under Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement.

• CCI was invited to present its list of existing and emerging areas of policy, investment, and development activity, that can serve as Article 6.8 solutions. We share them here: 

Nations can team up to accelerate decarbonization & build resilience

• Also for the first time, we heard calls in nearly every segment of the process for robust, ongoing engagement with stakeholders, as key substantive contributors to the policy-making process and to the review and implementation of climate solutions.

• CCI outlined a ‘ Capital to Communities ’ strategy, which would connect civic participation and stakeholder engagement with locally led development initiatives, adaptation and resilience measures, and the mobilization and monitoring of climate finance.

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