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Draft Climate Justice Workshop Description
Related to this project: Climate Justice: organising for effective community action on climate change

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Draft Climate Justice Workshop description

Climate Justice: Organising for effective community action on climate change.
CIVICUS World Assembly, Glasgow, 19 June 2008

Climate change is already affecting every corner of the world, every eco-system and every community, from Los Angeles to the Carteret Islands and from Helsinki to Ushuaia; but its effects are uneven, and the capacity of communities to adapt differs widely. For example, the wealthy North has the financial and technological resources to counter the worst effects of rising sea levels with costly engineering projects such as sea walls, but large swaths of the poor South lack the capacity to minimize the consequences of increasingly destructive climate impacts.

Climate change is not the consequence of a fortuitous cause: it is not just a natural disaster like an earthquake or a tsunami. Climate change is the result of a 250-year process of industrial growth which first ignored, and then dismissed the ecological costs inherent to such process. The resulting accumulation of wealth in the rich North has come at the expense of the Commons both in terms of depletion of natural resources and the devastation of our environment.

Ironically, poor communities in developing and less-developed countries are most vulnerable to climate change and least able to minimise its impacts. It is only fitting that the countries that caused the current climate crisis and benefited disproportionably from market globalisation should assist these vulnerable communities to cope. Indeed, rich countries have a legal obligation to do so under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Our workshop and its 18-month follow-up process aim to facilitate the development of community-based climate adaptation initiatives, capacity-building and best practices, networking and information dissemination, identifying resources, education and coalition-building. The project further aims to promote Climate Change advocacy in connection with the ongoing UNFCCC negotiations in three distinct respects: demanding Just and Equitable outcomes on Climate Change adaptation assistance for vulnerable communities; demanding immediate Climate Change adaptation assistance, and demanding immediate Climate Change mitigation implementation by developed countries, so as to minimize the degree of climate change impacts on vulnerable communities and thus reducing the mounting human and financial costs of adaptation.

The workshop and its Follow-up process are mostly a Youth-led project, but the project is intended to be fully intergenerational, ethnically and geographically diverse, and gender balanced. All sectors of civil society, governments and business are encouraged to participate.

Mindful that CIVICUS is a generic civil society movement where members work on diverse sectorial areas, the workshop will ensure maximum participation and engagement by reaching out to civil society communities that are not necessarily focused on climate change. In the same spirit, with a view to assure inclusiveness and in order to reach out to the widest possible range of people in both the global South and the North, the workshop organizers, and presenters shall remain attentive to differences in cultural attitudes and geographic perspectives on climate change.


Organisers/Main Sponsors: CIVICUS UN and Global Youth Action Network
Co-sponsors: African Youth Initiative on Climate Change
First Peoples Movement
Earth Charter Youth Initiative





May 3, 2008 | 10:33 AM Comments  0 comments

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