Climate Action
Climate Action Network Canada
Climate Action Network Canada – Réseau action climat Canada (CAN-Rac Canada) is perhaps the best Canadian online resource for providing an overview and connections to the numerous climate action organizations in Canada. A coalition of more than 100 organizations across the country, it is unique in being an organization with a mandate to promote the climate movement as a whole, rather than the interests and programs of any one organization.
A different resource provided by Seth Klein (see below under Climate Mobilization) is also excellent at providing overviews and links to many different climate action organizations all of whom are “joining the mobilization” to address the climate emergency. The link to that site is here.
Extinction Rebellion
Extinction Rebellion (XR) started in 2018; perhaps the most prominent protest movement in terms of media coverage, XR is a decentralised, international and politically non-partisan movement using non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade governments to act justly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency. XR Chapters are distributed across the globe – including XR Canada.
Fridays for Future
Inspired by Greta Thunberg and her solo protest outside Swedish Parliament beginning in August 2018, Fridays for Future is a youth-led and -organised global climate strike movement. (Also called, variously, School Strike for Climate, Youth for Climate, Climate Strike or Youth Strike for Climate.) Every Friday throughout the school year, students strike from school to lead other activists around the globe to protest outside their local parliaments and city halls. Perhaps the peak protest point to date was the Global Week of Climate Action, Sept. 20-27, 2019, which drew more than 6 million protesters (more than 7.4 million according to 350org) worldwide on the two Fridays of September 20 and 27.
350.org
Based on the work of scholar and activist Bill McKibben, 350.org is one of the most active and organized grassroots climate action organizations. They were key, for example, in organizing the Global Week of Climate Action. The title of the organization refers to the parts-per-million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, with 350 marking the dangerous threshold beyond which we ought not to pass (as of the year 2021 we had reached 412 ppm).
Climate Reality Project
Inspired by former US Vice-President Al Gore, the Climate Reality Project is committed to supporting action across every sector of society with its primary focus on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Its primary mode of operation is via education and grassroots movements, disseminating climate change awareness as broadly and urgently as possible.
Project Drawdown
Project Drawdown, a non-profit dedicated to researching when and how global warming can be reversed, is the creation of Paul Hawken. Based on his book Drawdown, The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, one hundred concrete achieve-able solutions are laid out to address climate change. Moving beyond the usual emphasis on freezing current emissions levels and mitigating current levels of climate change, Project Drawdown points out that the ongoing, accelerating, and long-term build-up evident in global warming has “overshot” planetary thresholds and earthly limits, and thus in addition to addressing current contributors to climate change, we will also need to reverse the “overshoot” by “drawing down” the carbon build-up in order to restore a sustainable global equilibrium. Hawken’s current work in turn moves beyond the Drawdown concept into that of Regeneration, “the first book to describe and define the burgeoning regeneration movement spreading rapidly throughout the world.” (book to be published September 2021)
Climate Mobilization
Clinical psychologist Margaret Klein Salomon left her private practice in 2012 to begin, with Ezra Silk, the US-based Climate Mobilization organization. Using the potent metaphor of “mobilization”, referring to the United States’ effort in World War II to rally the country from disinterest and noninvolvement to a full-blown involvement, the argument is that the climate emergency today demands analogous full-scale mobilization. A key aim of Climate Mobilization is pushing governments at all scales – rural, municipal, regional, and state – to declare climate emergencies as a step toward mobilization. Salomon outlines the background and psychological rationale for her work in her book Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth.
The motif of society-wide mobilization by analogy to the war effort resonates far beyond the United States. In Canada that argument is made by Seth Klein in his 2020 book A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency
