Sign the People’s Demands for Climate Justice

To: Government representatives to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC),

We urge you to stand with people across the world — not Big Polluters — and immediately take steps to address the climate crisis.

Climate change is the crisis of our time. Through implementation of the Paris Agreement, you have the opportunity to develop policies that will affect the lives of billions of people.

The urgency of the climate crisis requires a just response centered on human rights, equity, and justice. We demand you:

Keep fossil fuels in the ground.
Reject false solutions that are displacing real, people-first solutions to the climate crisis.
Advance real solutions that are just, feasible, and essential.
Honor climate finance obligations to developing countries.
End corporate interference in and capture of the climate talks.
Ensure developed countries honor their “Fair Shares” for largely fueling this crisis.

Read The Full Demands

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The People's Demands for Climate Justice

Climate change is the crisis of our time. Its intensifying impacts are affecting millions of people around the world, the health of our planet, and is driving species extinction. It is disproportionately affecting the people and communities globally who have contributed the least to creating this planetary emergency.

This crisis requires urgent, vital, and ambitious action. And this ambition must center people’s lives and human rights, and be grounded in principles of equity and historical responsibility. Through implementation of the Paris Agreement, you have the opportunity to develop policies that will affect the lives of billions of people. Countries and industries most responsible for emitting greenhouse gases, and for obstructing and delaying progress on averting the worst effects of this crisis, must be held accountable for their actions, and should bear the greatest responsibility in paying the costs of a global, just, and equitable transition to a 100 percent fossil fuel free future.

These are the People’s Demands, our call to government delegates, grounded in people’s movements from every continent, that demand with one voice what is our birthright: climate justice.

Keep fossil fuels in the ground

1. Developed countries pledge for a just and equitable transition to 100 percent Renewable Energy by 2030.
2. Governments phase out subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and pledge to divest fully from fossil fuels by 2020.
3. Pledge to an outright and immediate ban on fracking and adopt a global moratorium on new fossil fuel exploration and extraction techniques.
4. Agree to an international moratorium on new coal projects effective immediately.

Reject false solutions that are displacing real, people-first solutions to the climate crisis

1. Reject offsets and stop the transition of the Clean Development Mechanism into the guidelines for implementation of the Paris Agreement in the guise of the Sustainable Development Mechanism.
2. Honor the international Moratorium on geoengineering established by the Convention on Biological Diversity.
3. Reject Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) projects, and other technofixes.
4. Stop the conversion of local agricultural lands to non-food production purposes.
5. Reject REDD+, REDD-like projects, Internationally-Traded Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs), and all forms of carbon trading schemes that undermine human and indigenous rights, including indigenous cultures, territorial sovereignty, and integrity.
6. Stop supporting and promoting burning biomass as renewable energy and reject the substitution of biofuels and bioenergy as an alternative to fossil fuels.
7. Reject corporate-fronted schemes promoting so-called “Climate Smart Agriculture”.

Advance real solutions that are just, feasible, and essential

1. Transform energy systems away from corporate-controlled fossil fuels and other harmful sources such as nuclear, mega-hydro, and biofuels to a clean, safe system that empowers people and communities.
2. Support ecological restoration to recover natural sinks, and stop all projects that are extremely destructive of Earth’s natural capacity to absorb greenhouse gases.
3. Support global efforts for a just and equitable transition that enables energy democracy, creates new job opportunities, encourages distributed renewable energy, and protects workers and communities most affected by extractive economies.
4. Commit to policies that embrace agro-ecological practices and food sovereignty in place of “Climate Smart Agriculture”.
5. Facilitate and support non-market approaches to climate action.
6. Adopt a technology framework that recognizes the importance of endogenous and indigenous technologies and innovations in addressing climate change, and enables developing countries and communities to develop, access, and transfer environmentally sound, socially acceptable, gender responsive and equitable climate technologies.
7. Respect and enable non-corporate, community-led climate solutions that recognize the traditional knowledge, practices, wisdom, and resilience of indigenous peoples and local communities, and protect rights over their lands and territories.
8. Ensure participatory and transparent assessment of all proposed climate technologies and reject barriers to technology access and transfer such as intellectual property rights.

Honor climate finance obligations to developing countries

1. Replenish the Green Climate Fund to ratchet up climate action to stay below 1.5 degree Celsius global temperature rise, and fulfill developed countries’ commitment to provide $100 billion a year by 2020.
2. Provide adequate and real money (in addition to Overseas Development Assistance) to scale up adaptation and ensure protection to climate migrants and those impacted by climate change.
3. Developed countries must make new concrete pledges of public climate finance accompanied by a definite timeline for delivery.
4. Commit to climate reparations to those most affected but least responsible for climate change.

End corporate interference in and capture of the climate talks

1. Advance a conflict of interest policy that protects Paris Agreement implementation and global climate policy from obstruction by Big Polluters, and mandates governments take action at the national level.
2. Prohibit industries that profit from fossil fuels and the climate crisis from influencing international and national climate policy forums.
3. Reject every attempt by corporations and their proxies to insert themselves into the negotiations.
4. Advance a call to hold corporations accountable for the impacts of decades of misinformation and political interference in climate policy.

Developed countries must honor their “Fair Shares” for largely fueling this crisis

1. Developed countries must publicly recognize and act on their greater historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions.
2. Ensure developed countries take ambitious action in accordance with their historical responsibility and capacity, with ambitious domestic targets (including the rapid phase out of fossil fuel extraction and dirty energy subsidies), international cooperation, and support for global climate finance and Just Transition in developing countries.
3. Drastically increase the ambition of domestic commitments and global targets to limit warming to 1.5 Celsius and ensure such commitments are set in accordance with science and equity.

Statement on COP24 sit-in

December, 2018
Katowice, Poland

Governments must take responsibility and provide real leadership to halt climate breakdown. They are failing completely to do so, and their failures are on full display here at COP24. These negotiations are not on track to pass the tests of science … — Governments must take responsibility and provide real leadership to halt climate breakdown. They are failing completely to do so, and their failures are on full display here at COP24. These negotiations are not on track to pass the tests of science and justice.

We are in the midst of a climate emergency, facing droughts, storms, and ecosystem collapse of an unprecedented intensity. The lives and livelihoods of billions are at risk, with the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people bearing the brunt of a climate crisis that fans the flames of injustice everywhere.

In October, the world’s scientists made clear that to limit warming to 1.5ºC – a goal set in the Paris Agreement – we must take immediate action, including policies for stopping all new fossil fuel projects, drastically scaling up finance and technology transfer from rich countries to the global South, and eliminating dangerous distractions like carbon market schemes. To be truly effective, we must do this in a way that is fair and just for grassroots and frontline communities, ensuring that the burden does not fall on the poor and those who are most affected by – but least responsible for – the climate crisis.

As people of the world, we demand climate justice and a safer climate with under 1.5ºC of warming. Governments must take responsibility and provide real leadership to halt climate breakdown. They are failing completely to do so, and their failures are on full display here at COP24.

These negotiations are not on track to pass the tests of science and justice. The forces of fossil fuel corporations and the politicians they pay are strong – industry logos are plastered throughout the conference and their influence is felt everywhere. Rich country governments who are heavily invested in fossil fuel production – including the US, EU, Australia, and Japan – have abandoned their responsibilities. They say they will not provide real money for real solutions in poorer countries. Nor will they cut their own emissions, begin a managed decline off the fossil fuel industry, or support communities facing irreversible and devastating impacts from climate change.

In this context, it is no surprise that the rules for the Paris Agreement which will be agreed at this COP are not going to be strong enough to give us the transformative action we need. Nobody expected one conference to solve the climate crisis by itself. But we did expect better than this – and we do deserve better.

That is why hundreds of thousands of people around the globe have launched the People’s Demands for Climate Justice, laying out a clear vision for the world we need. We are already taking action to stop fossil fuel projects on our land, resist the corporations profiting from climate destruction, and target the merchants of chaos in banks and the financial sector. Now we need everyone to join this fight.

We welcome the fact that school children, responding to the call of 15-year-old Greta Thunberg, are going on strike – not for their tomorrow – but for their today. And we stand in solidarity with environmental defenders around the world who are laying their lives on the line to fight dirty energy and false solutions on the frontlines.

Inside these halls, we are calling on the rich polluting countries to stop obstructing progress and to support the just transition we need. Outside after this conference, we join with existing movements of impacted communities to support their demands – the People’s Demands – refusing to accept world leaders’ failures to keep fossil fuels in the ground, to reject false solutions like carbon markets, bioenergy and techno-fixes, to invest in real solutions, provide finance and technology for developing countries, protect environmental and human rights defenders, and address the needs of communities hit hardest by climate impacts.

The recent IPCC report underscores a stark reality: we must act now to define a just and equitable path forward to avert climate chaos. To that end, we call on all rich polluting countries to immediately commit to revised global commitments and enact domestic policy that ensures a managed decline and just transition off fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy within the next 12 years.

Today, we demand that countries commit to action in line with the urgency of the crisis. Tomorrow, we will continue to build our movements at home calling for these governments to implement that urgent action to create a just and sustainable world.

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Collectively shaped by people’s movements around the world, these demands are an international statement rooted in southern movements, and with input from numerous climate justice organizations and people’s movements around the world.

The People’s Demands lays out a vision for a truly just international climate policy. We must ensure the demands of people, not the fossil fuel industry and other Big Polluters, is what is centered in the lead up to and during COP24 in Poland this December, 2018.