Climate Emergency Meeting

DECLARE A PLANETARY CLIMATE EMERGENCY 

PUBLIC MEETING on Monday, 29 April 2019

Friends,

The climate crisis is beginning to hit the poor and other species in various parts of India with greater urgency and severity in the last few years. Extreme events such as intense rainfall, droughts, and severe heat stress are becoming more common, widespread, and intense. Erratic, irregular rainfall regularly damages the standing crop, and has just killed over 50 people across four states of northwest India. Drought is staring farmers in the face in over 250 districts for the fourth consecutive year, exacerbating the agrarian crises small and marginal farmers already face.

Across South Asia, similar impacts are being felt by farmers, fishers, the urban poor, forest dwellers, and other communities. Indeed, across the world, droughts, heat stress, forest fires, hurricanes, and melting ice have been damaging ecosystems and communities in innumerable countries. A crisis on a planetary scale already stares us in the face.

It is sobering that these grave impacts are being felt at barely 1.1 degree Celsius of average warming. Recent authoritative reports by the IPCC inform us, yet again, that the window to prevent catastrophic climate change is fast closing. Clearly what we are facing is not climate change, but a climate emergency. The time has come for all governments and elites to recognize that emergency, and for us to pressurize them to do so.

In order to discuss different facets of the climate crises, we are organizing a public meeting with Sagar Dhara of Ecologise Hyderabad. This is part of a series of meetings being held in different regions of the country as part of a campaign, in India in particular and South Asia more broadly, to declare a national and global climate emergency. Among the campaign’s demands are that emissions from countries the global North be cut sharply to net zero by 2025, and from the global South by 2030. It also states that all nations take responsibility for climate change-induced displacement, loss, and damage, in proportion to their historical emissions. Some of the other demands and arguments are included in the accompanying one-page note shared by the speaker. 

The meeting will be initiated by a 45-minute presentation, followed by an open discussion. We invite you to share your own thoughts, views, experience, and perspectives on the planetary climate crisis and the campaign to declare a climate emergency. 

About the speaker: Sagar Dhara is a member of Ecologise Hyderabad. He has worked, campaigned, and written on the climate crisis, energy issues, peak oil, EIA, and other political‒ecological concerns for over twenty years. He can be contacted at sagdhara@gmail.com 

Date: 29 April 2019

Venue: Room No 410, Indian Social Institute, Lodhi Road

Time: 3 pm onwards

Nearest Metro: Jor Bagh (Yellow Line) or Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium (Violet Line)

 Organized by: Climate Crisis Group, Delhi 

Contact numbers: 8178596425, 9560184842, 8800423111, 9910476553