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We can keep warming below 1.5°C. But it will take a profound transformation of our societies and systems to create a better world, while avoiding climate breakdown and dangerous technologies, according to the world’s climate science body, the IPCC.
Science is a foundation for effective climate action. The best united science currently available provides a basis for building solutions, addressing impacts, and achieving climate justice and equity.
To be effective, our responses to the climate crisis must address root causes. This will require systems change through people-centered solutions at all levels, scaling up resistance to powerful polluters and elites, and mobilizing people everywhere to stabilise the climate and defend life on Earth.
To prevent climate breakdown we need to stop exploring for more fossil fuels, and decline existing production. Frontline communities are leading the way. Early action by wealthy producers, and protections for workers, communities and economies, will help end the fossil fuel era, and transition to a 100% renewable energy future.
The world’s energy system has destabilized the climate, while leaving a billion people without electricity. We can address the twin energy and climate crisis by ending dirty energy, transitioning to 100% renewables, and ensuring the poor have access, through a global transition that curbs pollution, creates new jobs and empowers people and communities.
What we eat, and how it is produced, is affecting the climate. Climate change, in turn, is affecting the systems we rely on for food, livelihoods and well-being. Climate and land solutions must work for people and nature, and avoid the dangerous distractions that will make things worse.
Climate change is already impacting the lives and livelihoods of people and communities around the world. Legally, countries must act to address climate-related loss and damage, through international bodies like the UN Warsaw Mechanism, with the effective participation of affected people.
The impacts of climate change are not the same for everyone, and are often worse for women, particularly those working in threatened sectors such as agriculture, or lacking access to resources, information or participation. Gender must therefore be at the heart of effective climate responses at every level, local to global.
1.5°C requires cutting climate pollution essentially to zero as soon as feasible, while restoring the Earth’s forests and other living systems to remove and store carbon from the atmosphere. These safe natural solutions are different from dangerous “geoengineering” technologies, which risk more harm to people and nature.
The climate crisis has been driven by large corporations, which are responsible for a majority of climate pollution. Many of them are undermining climate science, policy and action, while influencing UN negotiations to protect their interests and “greenwash” their activities. Let’s hold corporations accountable, protect against vested interests, and ensure that polluters pay.
Rather than cut their emissions, wealthy polluters want to shift the burden to the poor through carbon markets and “offsetting”. Carbon markets have not worked, are unfair, and risk deferring the urgent action needed to avert climate breakdown. Instead of carbon markets, let’s focus on real climate solutions.
A small group of elite engineers, billionaires and former climate deniers are trying to distract us from real climate solutions, with dangerous technologies to “geoengineer” the Earth’s oceans, lands and atmosphere. They want to continue to pollute and profit, while threatening adverse impacts from both climate change and dangerous techno-interventions.
A wealthy minority of the world’s countries, corporations and people are the principal cause of climate change; its adverse effects fall first and foremost on the majority that is poor. This basic and undeniable truth forms the foundation of the global climate justice movement. A fair and science-based solution calls on wealthy polluters to pay for climate solutions and to “make whole” those most affected by the climate crisis.
To meet the Paris Agreement’s goals, the global effort will need to be shared fairly between wealthier and poorer countries, and between wealthier and poorer people, according to the major study by civil society on fair shares and the climate emergency, the Civil Society Equity Review.
We are at an unprecedented time in world history -- a time at which we must act urgently, with unity and clarity, to avert climate breakdown, build a better future, and defend life and Mother Earth.
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