Climate action summit to meet in Canberra

Hundreds of grassroots climate activists will meet in Canberra from March 13-15 to attend the second Climate Action Summit. It will build on the success of the first summit, which occurred in January 2009 and attracted more than 500 people, representing about 150 climate action groups

Simon Butler | Green Left Online | 21 February 2010

The 2009 summit agreed to a number of ambitious campaign objectives that included: preventing the Rudd government’s flawed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme from becoming law; campaigning for green jobs and a just transition to 100% renewable energy by 2020; and to agitate for a long-term target of cutting atmospheric carbon dioxide to a safe level of 300 parts per million.

The summit also adopted a shared vision statement. It said: “We face a climate emergency. Our vision is to work together at emergency speed to restore in a just way a safe climate in time for all people, all species and all generations.”

A number of speakers have been confirmed for the summit. These include Ian Fry, the chief climate change negotiator for Tuvalu; David Karoly, climate scientist and a lead author for UN Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change; Bernard Keane, a journalist with Crikey.com; Christine Milne, the deputy leader of the Australian Greens; and Walden Bello, the executive director of Philippines-based Focus on the Global South.

The summit will be structured around five separate campaign streams. Participants will discuss a climate campaign strategy for 2010 and try to reach shared goals and activities for the year.

The themes of the five campaign streams are: 100% renewables for Australia; quit coal; vote climate/ election strategy; responding to the climate emergency; and trade unions and green jobs.

The summit will also include a discussion stream for the Community Climate Network — a network of grassroots climate action groups. In December 2009, more than 100 groups signed up to the CCN.

The network stream will focus on how to use the CCN to extend and strengthen the work of climate action groups, as well as helping build the campaigns decided upon by the summit and the broader grassroots climate movement.

The stream will also help facilitate any remaining steps needed to get the CCN fully functional, as well as discuss how to improve its functioning.

For more details, or to register for the summit visit www.climatesummit.org.au.

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