A Climate for Change
A local campaign to enable us all to take action to address our climate crisis
EMPOWERING ACTION
Unfortunately we are still needing to talk about Climate Change. So we've developed a social media based communications campaign and Top 10 Tips focused on East Canterbury in 2021 to enable us to understand the crisis, talk more about it and share actions that all of us can do and support much needed change.
#1 Plant-Based Diet
#2 Grow Your Own Food
#3 Plant More Trees
#4 The Good Home
#5 Reduce Fossil Fuels
#6 Reduce Waste
#7 Get Involved
#8 Matauranga Maori
#9 Get Informed
#10 Love Nature
Thanks to Rata Foundation and Christchurch City Councilfor supporting this initiative 2020-2021.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, says to avoid disaster we must limit warming to within 1.5 degrees. Yet our current trajectory has us on course for a 4 degree rise. We have left it late, the climate change is already impacting many other countries across the world including the increase of bush fires in our neighbour Australia, and now Western America, Arctic, Alaska and the Amazon.
What about Canterbury?
The whole world and Canterbury is going to be hit by major disruptions and breakdowns with collapse at different levels. Those already vulnerable will be hit first and hardest. Most media – depending where they fall on the political spectrum – are sharing climate science and local information. Stuff has created a great column called ‘Quick! Save the Planet’. But if we don't carry that conversation into our daily lives, no strategies are thought through, no plans are formed. No one takes action and the planet continues to heat. Flooding, heatwaves, droughts and wildfires will become more frequent, Christchurch's summers get hotter and drier, while increasingly large storm systems bring deluges that flood our catchments and trash our infrastructure like bridges and roads.
We need to mitigate and adapt faster. Bioregional scale for transformative regeneration is required and the best solution for these scary times. Our challenge is going to be to build as much local resilience and capacity to keep responding to these transformations in a way that we have a good chance to get through them.
Dr Katherine Hayhoe is one of the world's leading climate scientists and states the number one thing we can do - is talk about climate change. And it's not about spouting science. Arguing 'facts' is a pointless exercise. Instead another approach is to talk about how it will affect us as individuals. Bring the conversation down to the personal investment. Connect the dots between what is important to people and how those things are affected by changing climate.
If we start today, get it right and begin to redesign our presence on earth, make it more regenerative by bringing fertility and carbon back into the soil, reforestation, cleaning waterways, reducing carbon emitters and embracing alternatives. The solutions already exist, let’s talk about them, live the questions to get to the right answers and together make a good future for our home, Canterbury.
Christchurch City Council Climate Change Draft Strategy - Our Submission:
Our team of three pulled together submissions to both the Climate Change Commission and Christchurch City Council's Draft Strategy. We put a lot of thought in to this so please feel free to read, copy, share.
Submission to CC CCC 2021.pdf
IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) Report:
The Sixth Assessment Report addresses the most up-to-date physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, bringing together the latest advances in climate science, and combining multiple lines of evidence from paleoclimate, observations, process understanding, and global and regional climate simulations.
"Amid all the doom-laden exhortations to change our ways,
let us remember that we are striving to create a more beautiful world, and not sustain, with growing sacrifice, the current one.
We are not just seeking to survive. We are not just facing doom; we are facing glorious possibility.
Charles Eisenstein, 2013