This Friday 14 and Saturday 15 February a full house of climate advocates and activists will be meeting in Melbourne for the first National Climate Emergency Summit.
Even if you could get to Melbourne, the summit is sold out. But you can watch the plenary sessions by livestream for a donation. The breakout sessions will be recorded and available as podcasts after the summit.
It is appropriate that this summit is held in Melbourne, because the global Climate Emergency Declaration movement began in late 2016 with the City of Darebin in the north of Melbourne voting to ‘recognise that we are in a state of climate emergency. We voted that the climate crisis requires urgent action by all levels of government, including local councils.’
Just three years on entire countries (UK, Ireland, Portugal, Canada, France and Argentina) and major cities like Sydney, New York, Auckland, Milan, Amsterdam and Madrid have declared a climate emergency.
There are now more than more than 1200 jurisdictions in 26 countries who have declared a climate emergency.
The evidence would suggest that declarations alone do not change policy or lead immediately an emergency scale response – see the expansion of Heathrow Airport in London, or Canada’s ongoing mining of tar sands.
But at its most promising, an official declaration of climate puts a government on a “wartime mobilisation” that places climate change at the centre of policy and planning decisions.
Anyway, the program for this summit goes well beyond the declaration of the emergency. It has a very practical focus on what a climate emergency transition could look like at local, national, and global levels.
Sessions with keynote speakers will be live streamed, with all breakout sessions recorded and released as podcasts. Keynote speakers include: Michael Mann (US climate scientist); Peter Garrett (former Minister in Rudd & Gillard governments); Zali Steggall (the independent MP who replaced Tony Abbot); Greg Mullins (head of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action); Ross Garnaut (economist, author of the 2008 Garnaut Report) and Carmen Lawrence (former Premier of WA and psychologist focused on the climate transition).