Declaring a state of climate emergency within our organizations
Climáximo, V3 (March 2024)
What does it mean to live under a state of climate emergency? What does telling the truth to ourselves look like in this context? What does this mean for the work we should be doing, for how we need to organize ourselves and the culture we need to establish? These are the questions we asked ourselves in 2019, when we first declared state of climate emergency within Climáximo.
Since our first declaration five years ago, we had 5 different climate emergency declarations and around 15 reviews. Here’s us, then, sharing with you why we believe that having an internal climate emergency declaration is a fundamental step for groups who are serious about executing system change in the short-term, and how we write and maintain this state of climate emergency in our group.
In this document:
– What is a climate emergency declaration and why should ours groups have one?
– What does it look like in practice?
– How to maintain, evaluate and re-write your declaration?
What is a climate emergency declaration and why should our groups have one?
An emergency means that something is or became a priority in our lives that we need to address urgently. An emergency would change your day, week, month, or next years. Although most emergencies we face are not caused by us, if we don’t respond to it, we will probably end up causing more harm to ourselves and/or others; so it remains our responsibility to address and try to fix them. To do so, we need to change the ways we were living our day or our lives prior to the emergency, and we need to re-prioritize, adapt and refocus. If the way we are addressing that emergency is not solving it, we need to re-prioritize, adapt and refocus again until the emergency is being taken care of properly.
The climate emergency declaration follows the same logic, with the difference that what we are addressing 1) is a planetary emergency; 2) has very tight deadlines for the size of the transformation that needs to happen, while at the same time means a reorganization of our life not just for one week or two months, but for several years; 3) will have brutal impacts for the lives of millions of people (alive and yet to be born); 4) requires not only a personal, but also a collective work. So, the climate emergency declaration is a collective agreement within a group of how we are going to respond to the climate emergency, both at a strategical and organizational level.
It allows us to:
anchor ourselves in the meaning of living under a state of climate emergency;
be honest about the task and the plan of action (what we should be doing that year if in X years we need to dismantle capitalism);
get clarity about what capacities we need to develop in order to be able to achieve our task;
recognize our failures and work on why we failed;
be accountable to the public and to ourselves about what we did and didn’t do to stop climate collapse;
establish a culture of honesty, accountability and flexibility within the organization;
refocus in the face of distractions;
break habits that aren’t serving us for our goal, always having on the table the possibility of total transformation.
With that being said, it’s also important to say that a climate emergency declaration is not:
just another piece of paper: it reflects our groups’ DNA and is also the major “tool” to transmit it. It reflects and maintains our organizational culture and integrity.
something for “climate” groups only: regardless of the main topic of your organization (if any), we all live under the same climate emergency, and so all feminist, housing, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist groups need plans that are compatible with climate deadlines.
the same for every group: it needs to be anchored on climate deadlines, anti-capitalism and ambition, but it also needs to correspond to your current context and capacities.
static: every year it can drastically change, which will have huge impacts in your work, your life, and hopefully society.
What does it look like in practice?
The declaration includes both strategical and organizational priorities. It is a public document and has a more detailed internal part.
It typically involves:
A brief analysis of where we are at and what changed since last year and where we want to be on the next year (e.g. “we want to make the climate crisis one of the most discussed issues”);
Items of what kinds of public initiatives we will do to achieve such goal; in particular, what we will do in our country (what kind of actions; what kind of targets; what kind of alliances; etc.) and what we will do internationally (challenging other groups to declare climate emergency; de-legitimizing COP; etc.).
Organizational and transformative aspects to be able to fulfill such commitments, grow and be more resilient [what we want to about sexism in the organization; what kind of leadership building we will adopt (1-1 coaching?, trainings?, etc.); how will we be more financially resilient; etc.]
The internal part would then have a more concrete objectives, a more detailed to-do list and also a list of accountables per task.
Notes and tips for a first climate emergency declaration:
We did not come up with any of this before starting to implement it in 2019. The only things we knew since the beginning were: (1) avoid habits, creating a culture of agility and flexibility (hence, reviews every three months); (2) accountability (hence, public statements). The rest was developed more organically.
One interesting thing that we did when we established the climate emergency declaration for the first time was to challenge all members to write about what it means for them to live under a climate emergency.
You can check the examples of the public texts of our declarations here: 2019; 2022; 2023.
As you can see, we usually translate our declarations to English, because we are also accountable to the international movement.
How to maintain, evaluate and re-write the declaration?
After a group has its climate emergency declaration (Step 1), it needs to make sure it’s being implemented, to evaluate it regularly and to adapt it or even re-write it (and therefore re-invent the organization) recurrently. Here are the steps we follow:
Step 2: In three months, we review the Declaration.
The review would take around 2 weekly meetings and 1 report by each accountable folk/team. The accountables would make changes to their operations based on feedback.
There would be a public statement on this.
Step 3: Every six months, we revisit the Declaration.
This would involve separate strategy meetings (as opposed to Step 2, where we would dedicate half of our weekly meetings to the revision). Accountables would make presentations and recommendations.
There would be major changes, including changes in team structure or changes in accountables.
Ideally, the to-do items of the declaration would be done by now; so there would be new items invented. (For instance, if we agreed to coach 4 new team coordinators, this should be finished by 6 months, so we’d have several options: who else should coach and be coached?, should we move from coaching to group trainings?, do we consider leadership building task as complete for now?)
There is also a public statement.
Step 4: Every year, the Declaration is rewritten.
This is a longer process, typically taking 2 months of reflection and finished with a strategy retreat (a three-day-weekend).
This could change the entire structure and the entire strategy. At this level, we can reinvent what a “weekly regular meeting” means, what a “coordinator” means, what an “alliance” means.
There would be a public statement on this, as well.