«Without pressure and social engagement, climate emergency declarations run the risk of ending up as nothing more than discourse»

 

The Global Climate Strike scheduled to take place on 27 September is a worldwide event calling for governments to implement effective measures to combat the climatic emergency. As we approach the 'zero hour' when only the transformation of human habits and economic practices will ensure survival, researcher and urban adaptation policy and climate change resilience expert, Mar Grau Satorras emphasises the important role cities will play in the bid to tackle the climate emergency. According to the researcher, citizens must be ensured access to the relevant decision-making processes associated with changing the climatic model.

 

 

 

The Global Climate Strike scheduled to take place on 27 September is a worldwide event calling for governments to implement effective measures to combat the climatic emergency. As we approach the 'zero hour' when only the transformation of human habits and economic practices will ensure survival, researcher and urban adaptation policy and climate change resilience expert, Mar Grau Satorras emphasises the important role cities will play in the bid to tackle the climate emergency. According to the researcher, citizens must be ensured access to the relevant decision-making processes associated with changing the climatic model.

 

 

The application and development of existing legislation would be a first step. Take Catalonia, for example, where a pioneering law on climate change has been approved, albeit with insufficient resources for its implementation and governance and transparency tools that are still a work in progress (such as the Social Committee on Climate Change). There are also other similar cases, such as that of the National Climate Change Adaptation Plan approved in 2006 by the Ministry of Environment at that time, whose latest evaluation report highlights the need to provide sufficient resources for the plan's implementation and to clarify the budget assigned to each measure.

The second step is to set more ambitious goals than those currently in place which would speed up and promote a real socio-environmental transition, such as making a full commitment to the use of renewable energy and to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero. And, obviously, the public must be ensured access when it comes to the relevant decision-making associated with these processes of model change.

We can ask ourselves whether cities are part of the problem or part of the solution. If we move beyond that kind of dichotomous thinking, however, we can appreciate the fact that cities, rather than being a homogeneous space, are areas of environmental conflict and (in)justice with enormous potential. On the one hand, in addition to potentially effective and ambitious urban policies, the citizens themselves are collectively experimenting with and fighting against climate change every day. Our focus within the framework of the ResCities research project, funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, is to identify these often invisible social initiatives working at grassroots level to build urban resilience to climate change. On the other hand, the global north is home to the cities that are primarily responsible for causing climate change. The cities researcher Dario Kenner recently called them "the polluter elite". Thus, cities will play a fundamental role in addressing the challenge of climate change.

The Global Climate Strike scheduled for Friday 27 September, as well as the actions taking place the week before that, aims to inspire the organization of demonstrations and protests in numerous towns and cities. The strike may extend beyond traditional workplace scenarios and centres of education to consumption or, as in the case of the feminist strike, household management. Giving prominence to consumption makes sense to the extent that it calls the current economic model and its contribution to global warming into question.

The concept of a 'fair transition' is being popularized, ie one that minimizes the impacts of climate action on working and vulnerable people, while ensuring low emissions and decent job opportunities. For example, one of the calls being made by fair transition advocates is for the inclusion of a labour impact assessment as part of climate change plans to forecast the type and quality of jobs that will be generated.

The Mauna Loa Observatory has been measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide since the 1950s and the trend shows a consistent increase every year. Although if we extend the temporal perspective further to take the industrial age into account, the picture becomes even clearer. According to the figures published in the fifth report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), CO2 concentration levels rose from 278 ppm in 1750 to 390 ppm in 2011. If in addition to climate change, we also consider changes related to land use (such as deforestation), water consumption and pollution, everything points to unprecedented environmental change on a global scale, which is why many scientists are using the term 'Anthropocene' to refer to this new era in which humanity is acting as the main geological force.

Cities in the global north can and must develop policies for and with local residents that support meaningful climate emergency declarations. As I said before, focusing on the contradiction between being the problem (producing too much waste) or the solution (leading the fight against the climatic emergency) is a pointless exercise. We need to acknowledge urban complexity and act accordingly. 

Similarly, without pressure and social engagement, declarations of climatic emergency run the risk of ending up stuck in the discursive arena, something we have already seen with climate change summits, such as the 15th UN Conference in Copenhagen (COP15 2009), where the expectations outlined and reflected in the Hopenhagen campaign (with the emphasis on hope) ended up thwarted in practice. It is essential for climate change policies to adopt a transversal approach and provide collective benefits for the entire population. For example, guaranteeing universal access to basic supplies. The commitment to zero energy poverty is both a strategy to ensure decent living conditions and a measure for adapting to some of the effects of climate change. Similarly, ensuring access to green spaces or climate-controlled facilities in all neighbourhoods also facilitates the development and democratization of a climate shelter network for incidents such as heat waves.

In my opinion, universities can play a part on three main fronts. Firstly, students, employees and governing bodies can play an active role by supporting the declaration of a climatic emergency and adding their voices to the protest movements. Changes can be implemented by the university community in areas such as mobility to and from university centres, the consumption of materials, energy and other resources, travel to international conferences, among others. Secondly, universities are a space for debate and reflection to facilitate critical thought on how to approach the problem, to identify false solutions and propose alternatives. Finally, course structures must be open to responding to the changes and demands of society. We must make it possible for students to acquire the necessary skills to enable them to work in multidisciplinary environments.

A few years ago now, one of the authors of the IPCC report warned that climate change ran the risk of being dropped from the public agenda and instead being seen as a chronic problem for which there was no solution. In other words, the perception of a problem is key when it comes to developing (and demanding) solutions. That is why we welcome all those Gretas around the world who have felt the call to act, who explain the impacts of climate change in their different realities and who think about what they can do to change the situation.

Social media has enormous potential but there is also a risk in terms of spreading alarmist or uninformed messages (fake news) about climate change. For example, if you think about the disastrous floods seen in recent weeks, we need to be wary when it comes to identifying climate change as the cause. At the same time, social media not only provides a platform for the opinions of experts to be heard, but also for those of other information sources: local experts who live with the effects of climate change on a daily basis. In terms of the youth movement behind the most recent series of climate mobilizations, in the coming weeks we will see their capacity for taking their demands, which have so far mainly been channelled through social media, to the streets and the circles of power.