Declaration of a State of Climate Emergency 2025/2026
This summer, as we once again assess how we are fighting to stop the climate crisis, marks ten years since Climáximo was founded. But this summer is different. It is scarier than ever. This summer, the area burned by fires far exceeded that of recent years, and the heat killed like never before in Portugal. This year, the devastation caused by the climate crisis was more visible to us than ever. It wasn’t just Portugal that burned. We saw the world in flames from Spain to Turkey and California. We saw thousands of people drown in floods in Pakistan, Cape Verde, and Texas. We saw temperature records repeatedly being broken, with more countries reaching 50°C for the first time. Still, that’s not what scares us the most.
Two years ago, we made the biggest change in the history of Climáximo. We set out to act so that society would accept that the climate crisis is a war declared on society and the planet and take action to stop it before it is too late. What scares us most when we look at reality is that, despite having managed to bring the climate crisis into the public debate at various times over the last two years, faced with one of the most visible and shocking manifestations of the climate crisis in our own country—a highly destructive season of fires — the narrative that dominated this summer was not about the climate crisis or what is needed to stop it. Nor did the conversation around these fires treat them as the premeditated and coordinated attack by governments and corporations against the people that they are. Two years ago, we decided to be radically honest and break the false sense of peace that existed. We decided to make visible the premeditated attacks by corporations and governments against all of us, mobilizing people who were fed up with this system and anxious about the climate crisis, leading to the emergence of organizers capable of building a new movement in Portugal. You can read here how we failed to achieve this change. Given the current reality, we are now transforming who we are and taking the risk of doing something completely new for us.
We understand it will be necessary to broaden and organize the social base of the movement to mobilize thousands of people to stop the climate crisis and respond to the outrageous moments it causes. There are at least two angles from which to approach this task: we can look at the causes and we can look at the effects.
The cause is the fossil fuel industry. On this side, the End Fossil 2030 mobilizations by young people in recent years are noteworthy. Now, society has a decision to make: to unite behind the End Fossil 2030 demand or to be complicit in condemning all living generations to an uninhabitable world. We are combining our organizational capacity with the mobilization capacity of the Student Climate Strike in order to stir up the whole of society to take a stand. Thus, we will have a common End Fossil Fuel campaign, which will be led by students. To fight side by side with the student movement for this existential demand, the campaign aims to mobilize teachers, mothers, health professionals, artists, and anyone else who does not consent to condemning young people to the destruction of the physical conditions of life. We will also offer the necessary organizational support so that young people can exponentially increase their organization.
On the effects side, as Portugal is a critical warming zone, all territories are on the front line of fires, heat waves, and drought. Together with the communities in the most affected territories, we will, by next summer, understand how to make these effects of the climate crisis visible and act to avoid the worst scenarios. This implies not only active solidarity, but also community organizing. We do not have much experience with the latter. We will have to learn, listen, and co-design this campaign—which will occupy the coming months ahead of us.
We are committed to invest in these two strategic priorities in the coming months. Although they share the same root and feed the same global solidarity, the two angles reveal different information and highlight different social sectors.
We will accompany this dual strategy with internal restructuring and external reorientation. Looking beyond the ashes of the fires, we saw other terrifying signs this summer: the rise of the far right and racism and xenophobia, barbaric policies against migrants, misogynistic policies and policies against working conditions, as well as other attacks on people’s basic living conditions, perpetuating the crises in housing, health, and the cost of living. Although there are organizations doing a much better job than ours in mobilizing and organizing society against these attacks, there is a fundamental agreement missing among these organizers—that the response to all these crises needs to be anchored in the deadlines dictated by the climate crisis. This is a frightening reality, since ignoring the material reality of deadlines will not only intensify authoritarianism and attacks on basic living conditions on a scale never seen before, but barbarism will also be inevitable. We have already seen the beginning of this with the rise of fascism, the intensification of militarization, and the atrocious genocide in Gaza. Over the next year, we will participate in spaces for coordination against some of these attacks on life. We will seek not only to identify new opportunities for action, but also to bring to these spaces the ambition and deadlines to win any fight for justice and dignity.
After a year in which we were attentive and curious about new spaces for coordinating the movement at the international level, we found spaces with ambition and focus, but we also saw a frightening and aggressive tendency in Europe to give up on stopping the climate crisis and focus on adaptation. We know that abandoning the fight for mitigation will condemn entire peoples and all future generations to certain death, or at the very least, to lives of unbearable suffering and misery. That is why we will: i) continue to follow some of the most promising areas of international coordination; ii) propose coordination between groups in southern Europe against fires, drought, and heat waves, with a focus on preventing social and climate collapse within the timeframes set by science.
We will not be able to do anything we propose if we do not break with our own conformism, if we do not remain focused, and if we do not create new practices. Therefore, we remain connected in the state of war in which we are forced to live and will continue to support each other to do so. We will seek external training that allows us to learn how to do the kind of work we have no experience in doing (in particular, grassroots organizing) and share our learnings with each other. Collectively, we will also explore and work on the collective and individual habits we want to transform in order to be who we need to be.
We are frightened by the galloping pace of social and climate collapse and by the lack of a movement—national and international—capable of putting an end to the attacks by governments and corporations against life on this planet before it is too late. But we refuse to give up in the face of likely scenarios—the destruction of everything we love by governments and corporations—and cling to what is possible: building a movement capable of changing everything in a very short time.
Last year, we failed to tell you the results of our assessments and new decisions every three months, breaking our commitment to you. We apologize for this oversight, which reflects our fatigue and lack of focus. This will not happen again. At the beginning of next year, we will take stock of the situation. Until then, join the fight.