The climate movement is a global social movement focused on pressuring governments and industry to take action addressing the causes and impacts of climate change. Citizens, environmental non-profit organizations, and companies have engaged in significant climate activism since the late 1980s and early 1990s, as they sought to influence the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Climate activism has become increasingly prominent over time, gaining significant momentum during the 2009 Copenhagen Summit and particularly following the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2016. It is aimed at raising awareness of environmental issues, changing people's behaviour, and influencing policy and legislation.
Environmental organizations take various actions such as Peoples Climate Marches. A major event was the global climate strike in September 2019 organized by Fridays For Future and Earth Strike. The goal was to influence the climate action summit organized by the UN on 23 September. According to the organizers, four million people participated in the strike on 20 September. Youth activism and involvement has played an important part in the evolution of the movement after the growth of the Fridays For Future strikes started by Greta Thunberg in 2019. In 2019, Extinction Rebellion organized large protests including blocking roads, demanding that the government "reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2025, and create a citizens' assembly to oversee progress.”
History Until the 19th century, Western thought traditionally cast nature, including the climate, as fundamentally unchanging, untouchable by human influence. Thinkers such as George Perkins Marsh, who wrote the 1864 book Man and Nature, began to change this narrative. Most of the early work done to draw attention to human impact on nature was more directly related to ecology than climate, such as Aldo Leopold's 1949 book A Sand County Almanac, but the idea that humans do affect ecosystems was important to the creation of the climate movement.
In 1962, Rachel Carson, a marine biologist, author, and environmental activist, wrote Silent Spring describing how pesticides contaminate the food chain, harm wildlife, and cause illnesses. The book served as a powerful exposé on the environmental devastation caused by indiscriminate pesticide use. Carson’s critique of the government's failure to protect public health and wildlife advanced the global environmental movement.
Since the early 1970s, climate activists have called for more effective political action regarding climate change and other environmental issues. In 1970, Earth Day was the first large-scale environmental movement that called for the protection of all life on earth. The Friends of Earth organization was also founded in 1970.
Activism related to climate change continued in the late 1980s, when major environmental organizations became involved in the discussions about climate, mainly in the UNFCCC framework. Environmental organizations had previously primarily been engaged at the domestic level, but they began to increasingly engage in international campaigning.
Even with the large public support for government action on climate change, there has been little sustained grassroots mobilization in the United States. Since Dr. James Hansen's 1988 testimony before Congress, the institutionalized U.S. climate movement has expanded significantly, supported by international initiatives such as the UNFCC, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 2009 Copenhagen summit. By 2010, over 460 organizations were involved in national climate efforts, yet large-scale citizen activism remained limited, revealing a gap between institutional progress and public engagement.
The largest transnational climate change coalition, Climate Action Network, was founded in 1992. Its major members include Greenpeace, WWF, Oxfam and Friends of the Earth. Climate Justice Now! and Climate Justice Action, two major coalitions, were founded in the lead-up to the 2009 Copenhagen Summit.
Between 2006 and 2009, the Campaign against Climate Change and other British organisations staged a series of demonstrations to encourage governments to make more serious attempts to address climate change.
The 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was the first UNFCCC summit in which the climate movement started showing its mobilization power at a large scale. According to Jennifer Hadden, the number of new NGOs registered with the UNFCCC surged in 2009 in the lead-up to the Copenhagen summit. Between 40,000 and 100,000 people attended a march in Copenhagen on December 12 calling for a global agreement on climate. Activism went beyond Copenhagen, with more than 5,400 rallies and demonstrations took place around the world simultaneously.
In 2019, activists, most of whom were young people, participated in a global climate strike to criticise the lack of international and political action to address the worsening impacts of climate change. Greta Thunberg, a young activist from Sweden, became a figurehead for the School Strike For Climate movement.
Methods
These are several approaches that have been used in the past by climate advocates and advocacy campaigns:
the provision of information, framing of information about aspects of global climate change, and challenging the terms of political debates.
All three of these methods have been implemented in climate campaigns aimed at the general public. The information about the impacts of global climate change plays a role in forming climatic beliefs, attitudes, and behavior, while the effects of other approaches (e.g. provision of information about solutions to GCC, consensus framing, use of mechanistic information) is yet mostly unknown. The third approach is to create space for discussions that move beyond questions of economic interests that often dominate political debates to emphasize ecological values and grass-roots democracy. This has been argued to be crucial to bringing about more significant structural change. Some politicians, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger with the slogan "terminate pollution", say that activists should generate optimism by focusing on the health co-benefits of climate action.
Climate disobedience
Climate disobedience is a form of civil disobedience, deliberate action intended to critique government climate policy. In 2008, American climate activist Tim DeChristopher posed as a bidder at an auction of US Bureau of Land Management oil and gas leases of public land in Utah, won the auction, reneged on payment, and was imprisoned for 21 months. In September 2015, five climate activists known as the Delta 5 obstructed an oil train in Everett, Washington. At trial, the Delta 5 were allowed the necessity defense, that is, breaking a law in the service of preventing a greater harm. After testimony, the judge determined the grounds for the necessity defense were not met and instructed the jury to disregard testimony admitted under the necessity defense. The Delta 5 were fined for trespassing but were acquitted of more serious charges.
The first example of a judge accepting the climate necessity defense was on March 27, 2018 when Judge Mary Ann Driscoll acquitted all 13 defendants of civil charges from a protest held in 2016 in Boston, Massachusetts.
Declaring emergency state
Enacting a state of emergency may be composed of two elements: declaring a state of emergency that has formulated real-world i.e. legal effects and the associated enabling or ensuring of rapid complementary large-scale changes in human activity for the articulated purposes. To date, many governments have acknowledged, sometimes in the form of tentative text-form "declarations", that humanity is essentially in a state of climate emergency.
In November 2021 Greta Thunberg with other climate activists begun filing a petition to the United Nation calling it to declare a level 3 global climate emergency. This should lead to the creation of a special team that will coordinate the response to the climate crisis in the international level. The response should be at least as strong as the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
It has been proposed that the national security sector could play a unique role in the development of a global climate-emergency mobilisation of labour and resources to build a zero-emission economy and enact decarbonization.
Commentators and The Climate Mobilization have suggested mobilisation of resources on the scale of a war economy and other related exceptional or effective measures.
Focus on climate justice
Shifting away from a focus on impacts on the natural environment, in recent years people have called on decision-makers to move towards equitable mitigation strategies for all people.Islam, S. Nazrul. "Climate Change and Social Inequality"(PDF). Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Archived(PDF) from the original on 16 January 2019. Climate justice acknowledges that some regions and populations are more vulnerable to climate change than others, and that in addressing climate solutions we must consider "existing vulnerabilities, resources and capabilities." A study of 800 websites and documents from Australian environmental groups identified six different dimensions of climate justice including Distributive Justice, Procedural Justice, Recognition Justice, Relational Justice, Intergenerational Justice, and Transformative Justice.
In the United States, organizations such as the Climate Justice Alliance work towards the goal of resilient economies and communities, placing "race, gender and class at the center of the solutions" by working to unite the voices of frontline communities.
Legal action
In some countries, those affected by climate change may be able to sue major greenhouse gas emitters. Litigation has been attempted by entire countries and peoples, such as Palau and the Inuit,Inuit suing the US in regards to global warming as well as non-governmental organizations such as the Sierra Club. Investor-owned coal, oil, and gas corporations could be legally and morally liable for climate-related human rights violations. Litigation is often carried out via collective pooling of effort and resources such as via organizations like Greenpeace, which sued a Polish coal utility and a German car manufacturer.
Proving that some weather events are due specifically to global warming is now possible, and methodologies have been developed to show the increased risk of other events caused by global warming.Stott, et al. (2004), "Human contribution to the European heatwave of 2003", Nature, Vol. 432, 2 December 2004
For a legal action for negligence (or similar) to succeed, "Plaintiffs ... must show that, more probably than not, their individual injuries were caused by the risk factor in question, as opposed to any other cause. This has sometimes been translated to a requirement of a relative risk of at least two."Grossman, Columbia J. of Env. Law, 2003 Another route (though with little legal bite) is the World Heritage Convention, if it can be shown that climate change is affecting World Heritage Sites like Mount Everest.Climate change 'ruining' Belize BBC November 2004
Of countries' governments Besides countries suing one another, there are also cases where people in a country have taken legal steps against their own government.Climate Justice Ongoing Cases
In the Netherlands and Belgium, organisations such as the foundation Urgenda and the Klimaatzaak in Belgium have also sued their governments as they believe their governments are not meeting the emission reductions they agreed to. Urgenda have already won their case against the Dutch government.
In 2021, Germany's supreme constitutional court ruled that the government's climate protection measures are insufficient to protect future generations and that the government had until the end of 2022 to improve its Climate Protection Act.