As the international community gathered in Warsaw last November for the annual UNFCCC climate negotiations to come up with an action plan towards a global agreement in Paris in 2015, a very productive meeting took place just a few blocks away at the University of Warsaw.
Be the Movement, a daylong international workshop on strategies to expand and strengthen the global climate action movement, drew more than 500 attendees from 50 countries and an even larger online audience of 300,000 Twitter users.
A report on the day's proceedings, Knowledge4Climate Action, includes recommendations for building up the movement and is now available for download.
The workshop was organised by Connect4Climate, the World Bank Group's initiative for raising awareness and building capacity on climate change, in cooperation with the University of Warsaw. Participants included prominent climate change activists and scientists, representatives of the media, private sector companies, NGOs and international organizations, as well as students and concerned citizens.
The workshop's dominant theme, expressed in its title: Be the Movement, was that each person can make a difference when it comes to climate change by taking individual actions to mitigate global warming.
The event's small brainstorming groups, panel discussions and speeches all centered on strategies for growing the climate action movement, and especially for engaging more youth. A key focus on the presentations was how to reach the millions of people not yet aware of climate change, its impacts, and the climate solutions that need to be urgently implemented.
"The question is, how do we get to the masses? How do we get into people's daily behavior? How do we get to the people who don't know, who don't care, or maybe are just waiting for a better solution?" Lucia Grenna, program manager of Connect4Climate, said in her opening remarks to the workshop.
The Knowledge4Climate Action report contains summaries of small working groups that focused on creative ways to deal with five essential concerns of the climate action movement. Those concerns include communicating climate change to new audiences; empowering educators to give environmental information; innovating new climate change campaign strategies; considering costs and demonstrating that economic development does not conflict with climate change mitigation policies, and the need for bold leadership to implement climate solutions.
Quotes from the workshop's engaging panel discussions, presentations and addresses by notable speakers and links to videos of these are featured in the report. Recommendations on how to invigorate and grow the climate action movement in fourteen ways make up the report's last chapter.
While the report recognizes that progress has been made to advance the climate change movement, it also underlines the fact that there is still a long struggle ahead to prevent dangerous climate change. As long as carbon emissions continue to rise, the use of fossil fuels is not limited, and an international agreement on managing climate change is not in place, the movement for climate action will be needed.
The need to mobilise public opinion on this issue has never been greater. Numerous scientific reports have documented that unless urgent action is taken, our planet is on the path to warm by 2° Celsius over pre-industrial times by mid-century. This would cause untold damage and hardships, especially to the poor.
Kelly Rigg, executive director of the Global Call for Climate Action (GCCA), underscored the urgency of tackling climate change in her address to the workshop. "We are running out of time," said Rigg. "We need to reach people who are probably increasingly concerned about [climate change] but don't quite know what to do or how to engage. We all need to do the right thing, and we need to all play a role."
And Professor Zbigniew Kundzewicz from the University of Poznań and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, stressed in his remarks to the workshop that it is crucial that there be a much wider acceptance of the fact that "without anthropogenic [human] emission of greenhouse gases, we cannot explain the warming" of the earth. "The majority of the increase is indeed due to humans."
The workshop stressed that strengthening coalitions among climate change initiatives is important to the mission of making climate change a mainstream concern around the world. By doing so, and by leading local actions everywhere, it is hoped that the movement for climate action will be able to help spur international agreement to tackle climate change by 2015.
As World Bank president Jim Yong Kim has said, "What we need is a social movement, a social movement that will finally and for once get serious about tackling this epidemic. In order to do it, we cannot think about small-bore solutions anymore … We have got to get serious … We have to listen to the scientists. But we have to connect."
Content produced and managed by Connect4Climate
