The last eight years of international commitment and engagement by Climáximo: let’s build a global movement
What’s the point of international work for the climate justice movement?
If you know of us, you probably know some of the international stuff we were part of. We have been engaged in a lot of international networks, campaigns, projects and platforms. This has many reasons.
Some of the reasons are obvious: we need emission cuts globally, and the climate crisis doesn’t recognize borders. Some are slightly less obvious: the supply chains and the financial streams imply that all big projects (new and existing) involve global capital mobilization, and therefore it’s not possible to address them only locally. Some are perhaps more convoluted: stopping the climate crisis will require massive social, political and economic transformations; so it will imply dealing with power; and power today is organized globally, so we also need to organize globally to build movement counter-power. In any case, international work has been one of the core priorities of Climáximo’s strategy.
In this essay, we will give a short compilation of the main international projects we actively participated in. Our goal is not encyclopedic (this is not an archive), nor are we trying to show off. We just want to give evidence for one specific statement: we are attentive to, interested in, and committed to international, transnational and global coordination efforts. This is a call for a call. We are aiming – simultaneously – for an invitation, a challenge, a request and an offer for ambitious movement-level proposals.
Taxiing
Starting already in 2015 (when Climáximo was launched), we participated in the COP 21 Coalition leading up to the Paris climate summit. Our participation was minuscule because we were minuscule. We were in the meetings, we organized activities in the global days of action (May and September), we joined the Global Climate March, we sent an affinity group to join the Red Lines action and simultaneously organized direct actions and a climate justice march in Lisbon.
We continued following the Global Climate March process, mostly led by international NGOs although the decentralized actions allowed for adapting to local contexts. With our investment, there were now regular climate demonstrations in Portugal (in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2018 (this time global, within Rise for Climate), and early 2019), giving rise to a pseudo-platform at the national level to call for climate marches.
At the same time, we got involved with the International Ecosocialist Encounters. In 2018, we organized the 4th Encounters in Lisbon, taking care of the conception, organization and logistics. These have been conferences prepared by a loose network of political activists.
Take-off
Early 2019 was the take-off for climate justice as a mass movement.
Following up with actions and mobilizations, as part of our participation in the Climate Justice Action network, we received the proposal for the By 2020 We Rise Up campaign. The initial idea was to organize one national action in 2019 (accordingly we did Camp-in-Gas, an action camp against fossil gas) and then converge into semi-centralized actions in 2020. Later, it transformed into calling for waves of actions.
The first wave was integrated into the Global Climate Strike in September 2019. This was an action week, then a mass protest ending with a mass city blockade, and a week later a mass civil disobedience action in Madrid. We also participated in the second wave focused on the finance sector, World Economic Failure, in January 2020; and the third and last wave, Climate Care Uprising, in October 2020.
By 2020 We Rise Up was a European campaign, with low commitment and with a strong emphasis on facilitating movement-wide strategy discussions. We had a coordination and facilitation role in the campaign, and furthermore we managed to create an Iberian campaign with the same vision, Rebelión por el Clima.
Simultaneously, we inserted ourselves to the Global Climate Jobs network. This was a network of national campaigns demanding climate jobs and a just transition. We had launched a campaign in Portugal in 2016 (which is active to this day and has been the main programmatic/policy element for the climate justice movement), organized several international events (the Lisbon Just Transition Gathering in 2018, an organizers’ training in 2022, an online conference in 2022, and a major Global Climate Jobs conference in Amsterdam in 2023). We had a coordination and facilitation role in the global network.
One important aspect of this period is that we have been aligning with existing proposals coming from the movement and investing resources in them.
Plateau
By early 2020, it was becoming clear that the climate justice movement was reaching a level of saturation – a downturn accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
As a follow-up to the By 2020 We Rise Up campaign, we proposed the Glasgow Agreement in 2020. This was a global platform endorsed by hundreds of organizations. Based on a manifesto, it would commit its members to execute a rapid and just transition.
We had a coordination and facilitation role in the Agreement. Furthermore, we supported groups to prepare emissions inventories, we organized the global conferences (one online and another one in Lisbon) and the European conference online. Within this framework, we did the Collapse Total action and the Climate Justice Caravan.
At the same time, in the middle of a global pandemic (in January 2022), we dared organize the 5th International Ecosocialist Encounters in Lisbon. This was intentionally more a workshop than a conference. We had a major role in its conception, organization and logistics.
This period, for us, was marked by us taking more initiative, adapting existing ideas into new proposals and offering capacity to take care of structures and processes.
Lifting Up
By mid 2022, the climate justice movement was in search of new approaches altogether.
As part of the Glasgow Agreement’s call, we organized the This is Our Story network. This was a rapid response action network, connecting different major climate disasters into one story. We had a coordination and facilitation role in the network, and we participated in the decentralized actions in solidarity with Pakistan and Chile.
Another proposal was the Last Winter of Gas framework. This was a loose network for a narrative intervention as well as disruptive actions in Europe. We had a facilitation role in the international network, and we organized a mass action at a gas terminal within this framework.
With the energy crisis, the war in Ukraine, the aggravating climate crisis and the cost of living crisis accompanying all of them, we participated in the European Cost of Living Space and we proposed a mass mobilizations connecting all the dots in September 2023. The action platform was called Their Time to Pay and its objective was to organize European-wide protests to build an international mass movement for social and climate justice. Our role in the platform was of conception, facilitation and coordination. (We also organized it in Lisbon.)
We proposed to the climate justice movement that we cut loose from the UN Climate Summits which have increasingly become crime scenes rather than a negotiation platform. The Earth Social Conference came as part of this proposal, calling for a boycott to the COP process and organizing a people’s summit in Colombia in December 2023. The Conference had the goal of building a counter-hegemonic people’s power anchored in climate justice and in climate deadlines. We participated in its conception, and we had a coordination and facilitation role in it.
Accompanying all of these initiatives, we proposed an organizational and strategic framework to the movement as a whole, in the Handbrake to Stop Climate Collapse presentations.
We were more propositional in this period, bringing new ideas to the table and proposing new strategies to scale up the movement.
Not the Whole Picture
The above is, obviously, not everything we did.
To start with, we are not mentioning any of the national-level coordination work nor any of our actions that were not part of an international framework.
Furthermore, we are part of a variety of platforms and networks without an active organizing role, such as Climate Justice Action, Beyond Gas, Gastivists, and Stay Grounded. We have also participated in hundreds of international conferences, climate camps, and days of action.1
More recently, we reinvented ourselves and we have been presenting the war framework in a series of presentations, workshops and strategy papers.
What Now?
We need a global movement. We need a coordinated movement.
In Climáximo, we have some experience of international organizing. We have also been harvesting the cumulative experience embedded in the social movements before us.
We are consequential, attentive and intentional.
We believe that the above list of activities give solid evidence for our intentions and commitment to international, transnational and global coordination efforts.
This is an important statement for us, because we acknowledge that our past efforts and proposals did not resonate with the larger movement. Some failed to produce excitement, others could not transform the initial excitement into commitment, yet others could not sustain the level of ambition the climate crisis requires of the organizers today. This, by definition, means that we didn’t make the right proposals.
In a way, this is a call for a call. We need ambitious movement-level proposals that can pull the movement and our societies off the civilizational collapse. We are interested in what you have in mind, and we are keen to hear new proposals. And we are ready to allocate capacity and resources to contribute to efforts for international coordination with the initiative and ambition that the movement needs.
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Having said this, we also want to highlight that we are closely accompanying several ongoing processes, such as
the next steps of the World Congress for Climate Justice,
the follow-up to the 6th International Ecosocialist Encounters,
the Encuentro Global por el Clima e la Vida – ANTI-COP 2024 to take place in Mexico in November 2024, as well as
the call from the Amazon to build an Agreement for Life in the face of climate and ecological collapse”, launched by the Movilización de los Pueblos por la Tierra y el Clima process in the post XI FOSPA meeting in June 2024, Bolívia.
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1 Just a few obvious examples: we went to Ende Gelände three times (in 2017, 2019 and 2022); we were in Madrid in 2019 for the people’s summit countering COP-25; we were in the international camp of Les Soulèvements de la Terre this year as well as supporting the international actions Oil Kills; We attended this year Foro Social Pan Amazónico – FOSPA and follow the reborn of ESF and the European Common Space for Alternatives.