Five-Year Plans to End the Climate Emergency
At the January 2022 Workshop for Leaders in the Climate Emergency, I asked everyone to draft a five-year plan to end the climate emergency and share it with the other participants.
The workshop was also an opportunity to get ourselves in good shape [condition] for our next steps in tackling this big challenge. I wanted us to work on
- distresses that keep us from seeing our work as important in ending the climate crisis;
- discouragement about the progress not being made;
- the racism that undermines all our work;
- the attacks we can expect; and
- staying connected with others as we do this work.
It seemed to me that having five-year plans would help us discharge on the above and also give us a road map in the face of patterns that can make us forget about, and divert us from, our goals.
I asked everyone to make it a five-year plan (as opposed to a one-year or ten-year plan) because I think that our actions in the next five years will be critical in averting a full-blown climate crisis.
I didn’t spend time on the facts. This group was familiar with them. What I wanted was for each of us to face how fast the crisis is unfolding and decide to play a big role in stopping it. And I wanted us to get connected and be ready to support one another as the emergency deepens and things get harder.
Saying “five-year plan to end the climate emergency” got most of us discharging. And then the thinking came!
At the end of this article is a list of predictions of when the temperature rise will pass 1.5°C. Each year scientists conclude that the situation is more dire than what we thought the year before. The release of the 2022 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Report confirms this again.
We posted our five-year plans on Google during the workshop, so we could look at them. However, Google isn’t secure enough, so I have taken them down and am inviting people to post their plans on the RC website. If you would like to join us—in developing, posting, and periodically updating your five-year plan—please do the following:
- Make a PDF of your plan. Don’t password-protect it if you want others to be able to read it.
- Use the following naming convention: first name + last initial + city.pdf. (Don’t include the “+” characters.) For example, my plan is named dianesshoreline.pdf.
- E-mail the plan to me at dshisk@me.com.
You can find the five-year plans on the RC website here: <www.rc.org/publication/environment/five_year_plans/contents>
Thank you for engaging with this big topic and for doing it together.
2019—The IPCC warned that global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if emissions continue to increase at the current rate. To avoid 1.5°C, we need to reduce emissions by 45% by 2030.
2020—We will pass 1.5 degrees in 6 to 11 years unless we make a radical drop in emissions.
2021—It is probable we will reach 1.5 degrees in one of the next 5 years.
2022—We will probably overshoot 1.5 degrees for decades (or more if we don’t take the actions needed to reduce emissions).
Shoreline, Washington, USA
(Present Time 207, April 2022)