Declaration of State of Climate Emergency within Climáximo – 2024/2025

A year ago, we looked at reality straight in the eye: governments and corporations fully know the devastating consequences of increasing greenhouse gas emissions and deliberately move on to condemn millions of people to death every year by building new weapons of mass destructions – new projects that would emit even more than today. We told the truth to ourselves and to the general public: the climate crisis is a war unilaterally declared by the governments and the corporations against the people and the planet.

This reality is horrifying, but it also enables to see that while the governments and the corporations are guilty of the state of emergency we live in, it is the responsibility of the ordinary people alive today to stop this war. Given this, we made the biggest leap in Climáximo since 2015, a leap that had personal, organizational and political ramifications. During the last year, we experimented and failed. Despite the drastic change in comparison to what we were before, we are still far from what the climate crisis demands. The climate catastrophes of the last few months are sufficient to keep anyone awake at night: the floods in Brazil left thousands without homes and hundreds dead; tens died in India in scorching temperatures beyond human limits; and this is probably the hottest summer ever registered in Europe. Simultaneously, the attacks against life have been intensifying: globally emissions continue rising, and in Portugal as well as in the world new projects of mass destruction (such as a new airport or a new gas pipeline) are being set forward. The state of climate war in which we live will play to the hand of extreme-right. We need a popular resistance to stop the rise of extreme-right, but that resistance is doomed to failure if it doesn’t stop the climate collapse at the same time.

We need to pull the emergency break – with a powerful, radical and wide social movement. This did not happen last year, and we acknowledge our failure in this.

Since September, Climáximo forced into public debate the climate crisis and the way of stopping it – never have our actions had such visibility and reach. However, we failed to make the climate crisis to be perceived by the society as the war that it is [See commitments a) and d), below]. For the first time, we presented a Disarmament Plan and a Peace Plan, reviewed by various organizations. However, we couldn’t give them enough visibility and provoke a public debate about them, and the Plans did not become a tool for different organizations [See f).]

We introduced a new anchor on the climate crisis and what it requires from everyone alive in this decade. We celebrate the support and engagement we found, as well as the number of people who publicly took a position on the existential threat hanging over humanity. Yet, we are not satisfied with the results, in comparison to what is necessary for our societies to stop this existential threat. We offered a new framework (climate emergency as a state of war), and it takes time to settle; but we failed to find appropriate ways of accelerating this introduction. Part of this failure is due us not having managed to break the false separation between “activists” and “ordinary people” and in finding better strategies for every person to stop consenting to the destruction of everything we love and to start taking action [See g).] Our failure to get better results is also due to our reduce responsiveness: we adapted ourselves to antecipated elections but let pass various other opportunities. We learned that we need to be more agile and responsive to the changes in our context, without losing our focus. [See h)]

Even ourselves, in Climáximo, in diverse moments we had difficulty in accepting the reality – that we live in a state of war –, being carried away by the normalization of the climate violence, by the personal and colective consequences or by the emotional intensity of the frequent action cycles. With time, we increased support structures and our legal, financial and organizational resilience. Today, we are facing big personal and organizational consequences of the leap we made. We are scared, but we know that this state of war has much bigger consequences in the lives of millions of people and that we will need to take new risks to put an end to climate chaos. [See b).]

In terms of the social movements in Portugal, in the last year, Climáximo introduced a new framework and a new anchor for the way in which we build our movements. This caused a variety of reactions in other groups and activists, such as sympathy, respect, excitement, confusion, frustration and curiosity – sometimes all of them at the same time. Much beyond the narrative and tactical aspects, this novelty has implications on strategies and organizational cultures. Despite a couple of attempts, we couldn’t transmit this aspect sufficiently. By the end of this year, we ourselves now have more clarity on the kinds of doubts, worries and fears that emerged in other organizers. [See i).]

Also, we couldn’t build the international movement we needed to have by this summer. At the international level, Climáximo contributed to delegitimizing the spaces where war crimes are being planned (like the UN Climate Summit, COP), but we couldn’t manage to get a significant part of the movement to accept the need to break off with the system within the climate deadlines. [See c) and e).]

We risked a lot at the personal and collective level, but we are facing the biggest threat humanity ever faced, risking everything before losing everything we love is the only option. Based on what is known to be necessary to put an end to this climate war and based on the lessons we drew last year, in the following twelve months, Climáximo will 1) continue to take risks in order that the climate crisis is perceived as the war that it is; 2) experiment new forms of making the resistence grow in a way to stop this war, at the national and international levels; and 3) strengthen our internal resilience as well as creating a more agile and responsive organizational culture throughout the year.

For this, we will continue doing what brought us forward or is on the way to bring us forward, into making the climate crisis to be seen as a unilateral act of war by the governments and corportations, and we will pay attention to the results.

a) We will organize actions every month to put the climate crisis into public agenda. We will continue doing actions of public disruption as well as disruption of destruction.

b) Given the intensification of the repression of the climate justice movement around the world and in Portugal, we will strengthen our collective resilience through legal support, financial support and carework.

c) We will be attentive to new proposals of international coordination that show initiative and ambition that the movement needs.

We will also experiment new things and take new risks. We will

d) mobilize everyone in Portugal with publicly announced mass actions of resistance in the Autumn and Spring;

e) attempt at a call for a decentralized action in Europe in Spring against the weapons of climate mass destruction;

f) take the Disarmament Plan and Peace Plan into public debate;

g) innovate our communication on the basis of emotional honesty, breaking the idea of an “activist”, make explicit the impacts of the climate crisis and recall that history is still to be written and each person has an active role in it;

h) aim at a responsive attitude and focused on the changes in the context and on the emerging oopportunities, adapting and changing our initial plans whenever necessary; and

i) at the level of the social movements in Portugal, we will finalize the process that started last year and clarify our proposal/invitation/challenge to other organizations in the movement. We will do this via articles, meetings and workshops in the next months.

We will continue risking everything because everything we love is at risk if humanity fails to stop the climate war. In six months, we will come back to evaluate and everything will be at stake again. We are horrified by the possibility of being one year farther to win the fight of our lives. We take our task at face value and we grasp it with the courage to make history.

2025 can be a the time the society turns the tide and avoid the climate hell the governments and corportations are pushing us toward.

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Further reading:

Throughout the last year, while we were experimeting new stuff, took new risks and drew new lessons, we have written different texts to clarify our strategies, experiences and attempts. These texts will continue guiding us next year:

• What’s the grand strategy?

• 2023-2024: Climáximo stepping into uncharted territory

• Why do both public disruption actions and actions to disrupt the destruction?

• Strategy paper elections: How should the climate justice movement face the biggest election year in history?

• Travar a crise climática não está na mesa de voto. E agora? (Stopping the climate crisis is not in the ballot box. What now?)

• Declaring a state of climate emergency within our organizations