In 2019 we climate marched… Now what?
Originally published March 1, 2020
In 2019 we demanded climate action. It was the year that the youth rose. It was the year that across the world more than 2,000 marches in 125 countries took place with more than 1.6 million students, parents, and grandparents coming out and making their voices heard.
We marched on the financial centres (Wall street, Bay street), we protested in front of government institutions and, we posted fervently about it on social media. But what do the marches really mean and what change did we reap?
In 2019 I attended two climate marches, one in Toronto and the massive, record-breaking one in Montreal on September 27. My partner joined me in Toronto for his first ever march/protest with one request: I answer his questions during the march about the ideology behind the protest. Not because he’s a skeptic but because he, like many, wants to understand the hows and whys before committing to a cause. Not a problem, I assured him and myself after all, environmental awareness and activism is kind of my thing. But it wasn’t until I was asked key questions point blank that I realized there are quite a few gaps in the movement.
Question number one: What is the purpose of the climate march? What effect will it have?
Easy answer, I thought: to come together as people affected by climate change to show our government and business leaders that we need them to take climate action. It serves to raise awareness to the wrongful actions they’ve taken that have brought us everyday people to the point of near extinction.
Then I asked myself what the march would actually accomplish: Will this march stop the burning of fossil fuels? Will it put the millions of tonnes of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that humans have released into the atmosphere back into the ground? Will it bring back the polar bears and the coral reefs from extinction? No… The climate march itself won’t do that. What the march does do is give us the opportunity to bring these issues to light and start a conversation about the why and what needs to be done to reduce our GHG emissions.
Which leads to the next questions: What are we hoping to change here, and what is climate action?
This got me thinking: If a climate march is a call to action, what action are we calling upon? Is this march providing a clear path for how we can attain climate salvation?
In the heat of the moment in a protest it’s easy to feel the thrill of being part of a movement, to let out anger and rebel against a system that seems unaffected by the realities of the people on the ground. But from chanting “We can’t drink oil, keep it in the soil! ” and other catchy, spirit-stirring slogans, is our message clear and actually getting across to our audience?
My response to what climate action is admittedly came after walking a block in reflection. To me, climate action looks like:
(1) Companies and institutions divesting from fossil fuels in their investment portfolios because we as human beings cannot afford to keep investing long term in industries that pollute and deplete our planet for short term monetary gain.
(2) Governments creating policies restricting resource extraction to stop further exhaustion of our ecosystems, and policies restricting carbon emissions (such as cap and trade or carbon taxes) to hold the biggest emitters of GHGs accountable to repair the damage they’ve done to our atmosphere.
(3) Investing in green technology, clean energy and improving public transportation. These three are the keys to moving away from fossil fuels and ensuring that we keep our future emissions low.
These are all good examples of climate action, but it took me some time to devise to an answer in the midst a climate march which is supposed to be the epicentre of climate activism. I think this is because collectively, we are not talking about what climate action looks like, nor are we stating clear demands to the institutions that we’re protesting against. There’s no climate march handbook given out at the rallies (of course not, because that would kill trees), and no PDF brochure either. However, if we are raising awareness about the climate crisis, we need to be clear about our message.
The focus of the march should be to educate everyone about the current state of the world’s climate, the political and scientific causes of how we got here, and most importantly, the solutions that will reduce our GHG emissions so that we don’t raise the global temperature above 1.5 degrees Celsius*. Our goal is a united movement towards a future with clean air, water and sustainable access to safe living for today and future generations, and the key to getting there is education and understanding.
As a result of all the climate marches in 2019, more than 1,000 cities and states across the world declared states of climate emergency, not to mention 8 entire countries and the European Union. While this is a huge step in the right direction, it does not mean that we’ve reached an end-goal but rather that the ice has been broken to open conversations and initiate action to address the climate crisis.
So, what does a climate march actually achieve? It starts conversations, it engages people across the spectrum to ask questions, it gets people writing articles like this to educate and continue the dialogue, and most importantly it encourages people to rise up and take action to save the planet. If it weren’t for the climate marches, I would not have come to the realization that we need to do more to show the world what climate action looks like. I learned that passion to save the planet alone is not enough. What is needed is educating others so that we can all unite and make the world better for our successors.
We cannot lose our momentum. In 2020 we need to keep marching, we need to take serious climate action, and we need to do it together.
*The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a panel of independent scientists, has conducted extensive research and has concluded that if our global temperatures rise more than 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century the impacts of climate change will be catastrophic and will change the living conditions of billions of people. The release of GHGs into our atmosphere changes the natural climate cycles of the planet which in turn raises average global temperatures and causes more frequent natural disasters such as hurricanes and droughts. Therefore, we must reduce GHG emissions to prevent global temperature increase, and a key factor to meeting that goal is to drastically reduce fossil fuel consumption.
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