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	We need to tell the truth by Danny Sriskandarajah CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation   Global wave of protests driven by national and international governance failures, says new report''Mass public protests that have grabbed headlines around the world during the last few years reflect a failure of governance at the national and international level, says a new report by the global civil society alliance, CIVICUS.   “In many countries around the world people see formal democratic processes and party politics as failing to address the issues they care about. Instead these systems are seen to serve the interests of political and economic elites,” said Dr Danny Sriskandarajah, the CIVICUS Secretary-General on launching the organisation’s 2014 State of Civil Society Report.   “One would hope that those being repressed, marginalised or excluded at the national level would be heard and protected by institutions at the international level – but global governance is not working either. Many of our international institutions and processes are out of date, unaccountable and unable to address present-day challenges effectively. International governance institutions with limited scope for people’s participation risk becoming irrelevant.   “To make matters worse, the things millions of people are expressing their anger about – inequality, lack of voice, low wages, unemployment – are not being tackled by international institutions, and in some cases they are complicit in promoting the interests of global capital.   “Millions of citizens are therefore facing what we call a `double democratic deficit’: at both the national and international level citizens are not heard and their voices not taken into account,” said Sriskandarajah.   These are the findings of the CIVICUS State of Civil Society Report 2014 which draws on contributions from more than 30 of the world’s leading experts on civil society. The report also contains the results of a pilot project, based on research conducted by CIVICUS with more than 450 civil society representatives, which assesses how intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) engage civil society.   In reviewing `the year that was’, the report shows that the latest waves of protests are taking place all over the world, including in countries like Brazil, Turkey and Venezuela that are democratic on paper and have had high economic growth. The report also shows striking commonalities across countries and regions, including the escalation of protest from an initially local grievance, to broader issues of dissatisfaction with the behaviour of the economic and political elite, corruption and rising inequality. Often the spread of protest is unintentionally encouraged by heavy-handed state responses to largely peaceful dissent.   CIVICUS says that in many cases, governments respond to the rising tide of citizen action by stepping up efforts to further close down already diminishing civic space. This is being done through a combination of dubious legislation, the demonisation of protest movements and direct harassment of civil society activists and their organisations.   With regard to global governance, the report finds that there are huge disparities in who gets to have a say: with the wealthiest states and corporations disproportionately influencing international agendas and norms. Global governance remains remote and often disconnected from the people whose lives it impacts and therefore needs to be democratised to support greater participation of citizens in decision making, and to create an environment that enables civil society to substantively engage in these processes.   The report provides several recommendations for governments and intergovernmental organisations, among them arguing for a need to move away from the state-centric model of international governance towards a citizen-oriented model. There is a call for exploring radical new forms of representation and oversight, such as citizens’ panels and assemblies that have real power. International institutions are urged to make their decision-making processes more open and democratic. The notion of promoting equality between states and removal of arbitrary veto powers by some states is emphasised.   There is a call for greater parity between official and civil society delegations and a need to address imbalances in access between Northern and Southern civil society actors.   The CIVICUS State of Civil Society Report also has recommendations for civil society. Civil society organisations (CSOs) are encouraged to deepen their understanding of the impact of global decision-making on their local conditions, create linkages with new protest movements and build coalitions and networks that enable the sharing of resources and the connection of diverse parts of civil society.   Larger, better resourced CSOs that have an established presence in international forums are encouraged to democratise the space and share their access with a wider range of civil society groups.   “We in civil society have our work cut out. We need to both drive and be the change that we want to see,” said Sriskandarajah.   http://civicus.org/index.php/en/media-centre-129/press-releases/2057-global-wave-of-protests-driven-by-national-and-international-governance-failures-says-new-report http://civicus.org/index.php/en/media-centre-129/press-releases   Put People Power back at Center of Citizen Action, by Danny Sriskandarajah. (CIVICUS)   A few weeks ago, I co-signed perhaps the most import open letter of my career. It was an open provocation to my fellow activists and colleagues, to the members of our organization, and to all those who, like me, earn their living in the civil society sector.   CIVICUS, the organization I lead, exists to strengthen civil society and citizen action throughout the world. Yet, I signed my name to an open letter that is critical of civil society; that says that our work has begun to reinforce the social, economic and political systems that we once set out to transform; that we have become too institutionalized, too professionalized, co-opted into systems and networks in which we are being outwitted and out-manoeuvred.   This issue of civil society “co-option” matters so much because we are losing the war – the war against poverty, climate change and social injustice. Many courageous, inspirational people and organizations are fighting the good fight. But too many of us – myself included – have become detached from the people and movements that drive real social and political change.   “Our work has begun to reinforce the social, economic and political systems that we once set out to transform; we have become too institutionalized, too professionalized, co-opted into systems and networks in which we are being outwitted and out-manoeuvred.”The corporatization of civil society has tamed our ambition; too often it has made us agents rather than agitators of the system.   Our intention in publishing this letter was not to berate, but to spark a debate; to challenge all of us to engage in re-configuring, re-imagining and re-energizing civil society. A first and small step was to host a Twitter conversation, calling for responses to the ideas expressed in our letter. And it would seem that many civil society activists around the world share our concerns.   As a result we will be devoting as much time as possible during the International Civil Society Week that will take place this November in Johannesburg to discussing the issues raised in the letter. We are expecting more than 500 activists from all over the world to come together to discuss, analyse, challenge, learn and share experiences to tackle the obstacles we all face worldwide.   The week will take the theme ‘Citizen Action, People Power’, and feature more than 40 events – covering topics from good grant-making to new ways of promoting people-powered accountability – that are being organised by our members and partners from around the world.   The week will culminate in the CIVICUS World Assembly and close with the Nelson Mandela-Graça Machel Innovation Awards ceremony.   I still believe passionately in the power of civil society to change the world. Only we can formulate a new set of global organising principles, a new paradigm and an alternative model to the current narrative.   But, in order to do so, we will need to put the voice and actions of people back at the heart of our work. The global partnership that will make up the International Civil Society Week will be bound by this common aim – centred on the voices and actions of the people.   Our primary accountability must be, not to donors, but to all those struggling for social justice. We must fight corporatism in our own ranks, re-connect with the power of informal and grassroots networks, tap into the wisdom of diverse activists, and re-balance our resources. This should not entail abandoning the organisations we have created; but evolving them to be truly accountable to those we seek to serve.   My hope is that the dialogue we have begun will help to re-connect us to an understanding of civil society as a deeply human construct, as a facilitator of empowering social relationships. In this, it will be crucial to reflect on the role of our own organisations. For only solutions that are at once pragmatic and radical will be sufficient to meet the challenges we face.   http://blogs.civicus.org/civicus/2014/08/06/an-open-letter-to-our-fellow-activists-across-the-globe-building-from-below-and-beyond-borders/ http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/people-power-what-do-we-know-about-empowered-citizens-and-development/ http://blogs.civicus.org/civicus/   The Global Day of Citizen Action on 7th June 2014 is part of the Be The Change campaign to raise awareness about `civic space’, why it’s important, and why we need to protect it.   Civic space exists when individuals and organisations have the freedom to speak out, organise and take action. In other words, to freely express, associate and assemble.   Sign up and add your voice to that of thousands of others around the world: letting the world know what you think about your rights in your country.   Be The Change is a new global public awareness campaign around citizen action and `civic space’.   The Be The Change platform seeks to connect people from across the world, through the sharing of stories, skills and lessons learnt. We invite you to share stories of campaigns from across the world and become part of a growing global movement for positive social change. You can also offer skills to help other campaigns or find people that can help you!   Be The Change seeks to inspire and celebrate citizen action and thereby raise awareness about `civic space’, the importance of it and our need to protect it.   The freedom to speak out (freedom of expression), to organise (freedom of association) and to take action (freedom of assembly) are all part of what is called `civic space’ and no one has the right to deny you these rights.   In many parts of the world these rights are being reduced or interfered with but thousands of people around the world are speaking out, organising and taking action and we aim to celebrate that and create awareness about the need to protect these rights.   How the platform works   You can get involved either through sharing a story of actions or campaigns that you or someone you know have undertaken, or that you find inspiring, that has successfully led to positive social change. You can offer help to other campaigns or seek help for your campaign – or, simply just browse to get an idea of the inspiring things that people around the world are doing to make a difference.   Through the platform you can share photos and videos; comment on, like and share your own posts and those of others (like you would on social media) and you can browse the `lessons learnt’ by others around the world as they play their part in being the change.   http://www.civicus.org/bethechange/ http://civicus.org/bethechange/gdca/ Visit the related web page
	Time is running out to act on Climate Change by Climate March, Agencies   Time is running out to act on Climate Change, by Thom Hartmann.   This week, government officials and climate scientists from all over the world are meeting in Berlin, Germany, to finalize a U.N. study on climate change and its solutions. While the study hasn’t been released yet, a draft of it has, and it’s pretty stunning. The draft report from the International Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, says that time is quickly running out for world powers to slash their use of fossil fuels and stay below the 2 degree Celsius limit on global warming that 200 nations agreed upon in 2010.   More importantly, the draft suggests that we only have 10-15 years to take the proper actions needed to safely reach that global warming limit. Not 100 years, not 50 years, but just 10 years. This meeting in Berlin comes just a week after the IPCC released another report in Japan, which highlighted the sudden, catastrophic, and devastating effects that climate change is already having across the globe. Meanwhile, as the world’s top climate scientists are meeting in Berlin, the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, is worrying about the effects that climate change is having on world-wide access to food and water.   In an interview ahead of next week’s meeting of the World Bank, Kim argued that battles over food and water will erupt across the globe within the next five to 10 years because of climate change. Kim said that, “The water issue is critically related to climate change. People say that carbon is the currency of climate change. Water is the teeth. Fights over water and food are going to be the most significant direct impacts of climate change in the next five to 10 years. There’s just no question about it.” And arguably, as we saw with the events of the Arab Spring, they’ve already started.   Kim said that he has urged climate change activists, government officials, and scientists across the globe to learn lessons from the way protestors and scientists came together and joined forces in the battle against HIV and AIDS. He also expressed concerns over the amount of research that’s being done on renewable energy and solutions to climate change, saying that, “Is there enough basic science research going into renewable energy? Not even close. Are there ways of taking discoveries made in universities and quickly moving them into industry? No. Are there ways of testing those innovations? Are there people thinking about scaling up those innovations?”   Unfortunately, here in America, things are stalled. Despite the mountains of proof and scientific evidence, Republicans in Washington, and across the country, are continuing to push climate change denial policies and legislation at the behest of their Big Oil, Coal, and Gas “donors.” Just last week, Republicans in the House tried to pass a bill introduced by climate-change denying Congressman Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma, that would have forced NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to quit studying climate change and its effects so much, and instead just study and discuss “weather.” This was, of course, to help “the economy” – Republican code for fossil fuel barons like ExxonMobil and the Koch Brothers.   Fortunately, much to the displeasure of climate-change deniers in Washington, Democrats amended the bill to clarify that it would only deal with NOAA’s weather prediction work, and not cut or stop its research into climate change. It’s time to put an end to all of the pseudoscience and climate-change denial talk.   Whether Republicans want to admit it or not, not only is climate change very real, but it’s also hitting us a lot harder, and a lot sooner, then we once thought. Just a few years ago, the world’s top climate scientists were saying that we had decades to address and solve the climate change crisis. But now, we have just a matter of years to convert our energy systems from fossils to sunlight.   We’ve waited long enough to address the climate change crisis, and in the process, we’re already creating havoc. From superstorms, droughts, and killer cold- and heat-waves to the crop failures in the Middle East that touched off the Arab Spring, climate change is here, now.   We need to mobilize our nation and jump headlong into the 21st century, thus solving the problem of the world’s largest polluter and providing an example for the rest of the world. And we need to start today. Time is running out.   Is Climate Change a Crime Against Humanity, asks Tom Engelhardt.   Thanks to a grim 2013 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we know that there is now a 95-100 percent likelihood that “human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming [of the planet] since the mid-20th century.” We know as well that the warming of the planet—thanks to the fossil fuel system we live by and the greenhouse gases it deposits in the atmosphere—is already doing real damage to our world and specifically to the United States, as a recent scientific report released by the White House made clear.   We also know, with grimly reasonable certainty, what kinds of damage those 95-100 percent odds are likely to translate into in the decades, and even centuries, to come if nothing changes radically: a temperature rise by century’s end that could exceed ten degrees Fahrenheit, cascading species extinctions, staggeringly severe droughts across larger parts of the planet (as in the present long-term drought in the American West and Southwest), far more severe rainfall across other areas, more intense storms causing far greater damage, devastating heat waves on a scale no one in human history has ever experienced, masses of refugees, rising global food prices, and among other catastrophes on the human agenda, rising sea levels that will drown coastal areas of the planet.   From two scientific studies just released, for example, comes the news that the West Antarctic ice sheet, one of the great ice accumulations on the planet, has now begun a process of melting and collapse that could, centuries from now, raise world sea levels by a nightmarish ten to thirteen feet. That mass of ice is, according to the lead authors of one of the studies, already in “irreversible retreat,” which means—no matter what acts are taken from now on—a future death sentence for some of the world"s great cities. (And that’s without even the melting of the Greenland ice shield, not to speak of the rest of the ice in Antarctica.)   All of this, of course, will happen mainly because we humans continue to burn fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate and so annually deposit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at record levels. In other words, we’re talking about weapons of mass destruction of a new kind.   From oil wells to fracking structures, deep sea drilling rigs to platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, the machinery that produces this kind of WMD and ensures that it is continuously delivered to its planetary targets is in plain sight. Powerful as it may be, destructive as it will be, those who control it have faith that, being so long developing, it can remain in the open without panicking populations or calling any kind of destruction down on them.   The companies and energy states that produce such WMD remain remarkably open about what they’re doing.   Take ExxonMobil, one of the most profitable corporations in history. In early April, it released two reports that focused on how the company, as Bill McKibben has written, “planned to deal with the fact that it and other oil giants have many times more carbon in their collective reserves than scientists say we can safely burn." He went on:   The company said that government restrictions that would force it to keep its [fossil fuel] reserves in the ground were "highly unlikely", and that they would not only dig them all up and burn them, but would continue to search for more gas and oil—a search that currently consumes about $100 million of its investors’ money every single day. "Based on this analysis, we are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become "stranded."   In other words, Exxon plans to exploit whatever fossil fuel reserves it possesses to their fullest extent. Government leaders involved in supporting the production of such weapons of mass destruction and their use are often similarly open about it, even while also discussing steps to mitigate their destructive effects. Take the White House, for instance. Here was a statement President Obama proudly made in Oklahoma in March 2012 on his energy policy:   Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That"s important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across twenty-three different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.   Similarly, on May 5, just before the White House was to reveal that grim report on climate change in America, and with a Congress incapable of passing even the most rudimentary climate legislation aimed at making the country modestly more energy efficient, senior Obama adviser John Podesta appeared in the White House briefing room to brag about the administration’s “green” energy policy. “The United States,” he said, “is now the largest producer of natural gas in the world and the largest producer of gas and oil in the world. It"s projected that the United States will continue to be the largest producer of natural gas through 2030. For six straight months now, we"ve produced more oil here at home than we"ve imported from overseas. So that"s all a good-news story.”   Good news indeed, and from Vladmir Putin’s Russia, which just expanded its vast oil and gas holdings by a Maine-sized chunk of the Black Sea off Crimea, to Chinese “carbon bombs,” to Saudi Arabian production guarantees, similar “good-news stories” are similarly promoted. In essence, the creation of ever more greenhouse gases—of, that is, the engine of our future destruction—remains a “good news” story for ruling elites on planet Earth.   Giant energy companies have funded so much climate-change denialism and false science over the years. For the Republican Party as a whole, climate-change denial is by now nothing less than a litmus test of loyalty.   These are no more weapons of mass destruction than are uranium-235 and plutonium-239. In this case, the weaponry is the production system that’s been set up to find, extract, sell at staggering profits, and burn those fossil fuels, and so create a greenhouse-gas planet. But with climate change, there is no simple weapon to focus on. But then there is deep-sea drilling, the pipelines, the gas stations, the coal-fueled power plants, the millions of cars filling global roads.   All of it—everything that brings endless fossil fuels to market, makes those fuels eminently burnable, and helps suppress the development of non-fossil fuel alternatives. The CEOs of the planet"s giant energy corporations are dangerous, the true fundamentalists, of planet Earth, since they are promoting a faith in fossil fuels which is guaranteed to lead us to some version of End Times.   Perhaps we need a new category of weapons with a new acronym to focus us on the nature of our present circumstances. Call them weapons of planetary destruction (WPD) or weapons of planetary harm (WPH).   The burning of fossil fuels may end in a series of “irreversible” disasters that could essentially burn us and much other life off the Earth. This system of destruction on a planetary scale, facilitated by most of the corporate elites on the planet, is becoming the ultimate “crime against humanity” and, in fact, against most living things. It is becoming a “terracide.”   http://www.thenation.com/article/179980/climate-change-crime-against-humanity http://www.thenation.com/article/181621/climate-change-peoples-shock http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jul/10/climate-will-we-lose-endgame/ http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/13/averting-climate-change-catastrophe-is-affordable-says-ipcc-report-un http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/aug/28/renewable-energy-capacity-grows-fastest-ever-pace http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/climate-change/   http://www.dw.de/figueres-if-we-want-to-prevent-conflicts-we-have-to-address-climate-change-now/a-17928114 http://www.edf.org/climate/act-now-key-opportunity-support-carbon-limits1 http://www.nrdc.org/ http://peoplesclimate.org/global-media/ http://peoplesclimate.org/partners/ http://www.commondreams.org/more/4 http://350.org/ http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/rockefellers-to-sell-oil-assets-as-part-of-50b-global-warming-fight-1.2773771   http://ourfuture.org/20140928/why-an-unequal-planet-can-never-be-green http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/china-the-climate-and-the-fate-of-the-planet-20140915 http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/10/opinion-planet-racing-towards-catastrophe-and-politics-just-looking-on/ http://www.globalintegrity.org/posts/inaugural-environmental-democracy-index/   http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/tag/climate-matters/ http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2014/04/09/earth-institute-scientists-speak-out-on-climate-change/ http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/ http://www.worldwatch.org/bookstore/publication/state-world-2014-governing-sustainability http://iri.columbia.edu/news/8-ways-we-can-strengthen-development-and-increase-climate-resilience/ http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/12/opinion-climate-justice-is-the-only-way-to-solve-our-climate-crisis/ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/29/us/global-warming-poll.html http://www.futureearth.org/ http://www.futureearth.org/blog/archive Visit the related web page
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