Secure rights are the foundation of rapid transition. Without secure rights and a say over how to address climate change, decisions imposed from above may be resented or rejected.
Story of change
Educating girls is more effective in the climate emergency than many green technologiesHydrogen powered superyachts and donations from billionaires often grab headlines in the fight against climate change. Whilst more simple and potentially more effective ways to tackle the climate...
For rapid transitions to work for all, they have to be just, and based on real, accessible and democratic decision-making. All kinds of positive rights have been agreed internationally over decades. Access to food, shelter, dignity, and freedom from persecution for all, sit alongside the rights of the child. But too often economic systems become entrenched that make securing these rights practically impossible, and climate breakdown is a further assault on all of them.
Sometimes the conflicts become stark and unmissable, such as when land, forest or fishing waters are grabbed from communities for remote, private gain, or a privatised water system prevents access to safe water. Finding ways to reclaim basic rights and see them properly realised and respected is a fundamental part of the picture of rapid transition.
Showing page 1 of 4
Commentary
Climate Justice must be central to an inclusive and effective COP26 agendaA summer of record-breaking heatwaves, floods and fires have seen calls for the world leaders meeting at COP26 to take urgent action, realistically bold...
Story of change
Courting rapid change – the rise of holding polluters to accountAs catastrophic weather events, made more likely and extreme by human greenhouse gas pollution, cause havoc internationally, citizens around the world are...
Story of change
Building back better: South Korea shows the challenge and opportunity of green stimulus spending for Covid recoveryIs the world poised to learn from the missed chance of 2008 and take the opportunity of rebuilding after a huge economic shock to make a rapid, low carbon...
Report
Cambridge Sustainability Commission report on Scaling Behaviour ChangeA major new report by the Cambridge Sustainability Commission on Scaling Behaviour Change calls on policy makers to target the UK’s polluter elite to...
Resource
Lessons from Lockdown: Looking after each other betterThe way in which individuals, organisations and governments responded to benefit the wider community points the way toward a world where this way of...
Story of change
Nature and local democracy – how a River Parliament shows what community control can doIt is often said that democracy is too slow to win urgent ecological progress. But when communities in Rajasthan, India, formed a special parliament to...
Story of change
The land is ours – movements reversing legacies of inequality and modern land grabsFood security is one of the first victims of the increasingly extreme weather patterns linked to the climate emergency. People face even greater insecurity...
Briefing
Crisis conversations – Reset #4: time, work and sharing economic benefitsA decade of economic hardship seemed to have transformed for increasingly urban workforces the promise of shorter working weeks and better work – life...
Story of change
When behaviour changes overnight – from stay-at-home, to smoke free air and switching sides of the roadHow quickly, in peacetime democracies, are people prepared radically to change their behaviour? The Covid-19 pandemic provides some clues. One of the most...