Category: International Political Engagement

QUNO Geneva has published “A Negotiator’s Toolkit – Second Edition” to support climate negotiators in their work to engage busy Ministries with reasons for urgent, rights-based climate action.

Ministers and other decision makers face competing demands and priorities, but they may also be more receptive to one argument over another. One person may better respond to economic concerns, for example, another to scientific findings. The booklet offers ten concise summaries compiled from expert voices in climate change related sectors. We hope these summaries help negotiators engage with colleagues back home on why urgent, rights-based climate action is critical to the long-term well-being and stability of their countries.

The summaries are based on presentations given by experts at a side event in May 2017, during the climate change conference in Bonn. The Healthier World Argument was compiled following this event. We are thankful to colleagues at Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University and at Newcastle University, for co-hosting this side event in May 2017.

Eileen Flanagan is helping people to make their activism more effective through her online courses. For five years, she has served as board chair of Earth Quaker Action Team, a  group which successfully pressured one of the largest banks in the US to stop financing mountaintop removal coal mining.

Read more about Building a Nonviolent Direct Action Campaign

Previously from Eileen Flanagan:
Building a Nonviolent Direct Action Campaign

We Were Made for this Moment: Finding Your Role in Strategic Activism

Alan Burns from the Charlotte Friends Meeting (U.S.) runs a website called ThinkGlobalGreen, which he updates regularly with climate news from around the world. An article about how his website came to exist was published in Quaker Earthcare Witness magazine. He keeps up to date on climate action lawsuits against world governments, such as the Juliana lawsuit (where young people aged between nine and 20 claim the federal government has promoted fossil fuel production, worsening climate change and therefore violating their constitutional right to life, liberty and property) that is at last going to trial, possibly late this year.

There is a weekly newsdesk page which gets updated each Saturday for the latest climate action news.

The COP23 which took place last month brought to light an important aspect of the struggle to stop climate change: governments agreed to integrate gender equality as a guiding principle for climate action by adopting the first UN Climate Gender Action Plan. This aims to highlight the role of women in climate action and advance gender-responsive national and international climate policy work.

To read the full article by QUNO Geneva’s Isobel Edwards click here.