People's Climate March: thousands demand action around the world - as it happened
This article is more than 9 years old
Hundreds of thousands of people across 150 countries took part in protests dubbed the People’s Climate March - flagged as the biggest ever call-to-action on climate change
Thank you for joining The Guardian’s global live blog coverage of the People’s Climate March. Demonstrations kicked off nearly 24 hours ago in Australia. Hundreds of thousands of people in at least 150 countries took to the streets to demand that world leaders take immediate action on climate change ahead of the United Nations climate summit in New York City on Tuesday.
Highlights from the day’s events:
Initial estimates pegged the amount of people at the New York City protest at more than 310,000. “It’s completely blown our expectations,” said Ricken Patel, executive director of Avaaz, one of the groups that helped organize the march.
UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon joined the demonstration in New York City, an unusual move for a high-ranking official. He was joined on the protest line by Jane Goodall and Al Gore.
US secretary of state John Kerry issued a strong warning about the threat of climate change after the New York City demonstrations. Kerry said: “There is a long list of important issues before all of us, but the grave threat that climate change poses warrants a prominent position on that list.”
Emma Thompson effectively served as the London demonstration’s spokesperson. She told The Guardian’s James Randerson: “Unless we’re carbon-free by 2030 the world is buggered.”
Australia’s labor environment spokesman Mark Butler criticized Australian prime minister Tony Abbott at a press conference ahead of the Melbourne march. Abbott has refused to join the upcoming UN conference.
The strong words from Kerry and the numbers in the streets elevated climate change to the top of the international agenda – at least for a few hours.
Organisers had called the day of protests in order to put pressure on world leaders gathering in New York for a United Nations summit on climate change on Tuesday. It will be the leaders’ first such meeting in five years.
Kerry, in remarks to foreign ministers of major economies, said climate change should rank as a top-tier agenda despite competition from more immediate challenges.
“While we are confronting [Isis], and we are confronting terrorism and we are confronting Ebola, this also has an immediacy that people have come to understand,” he said. “There is a long list of important issues before all of us, but the grave threat that climate change poses warrants a prominent position on that list.”
Campaigners crowd New York City during the mass demonstration to pressure politicians to take action on climate change ahead of Tuesday’s UN climate summit.
Demonstrators make their way down Sixth Avenue in New York during the People’s Climate March Sunday, Sept. 21, 2014. Photograph: Jason DeCrow/AP
As we have begun to see the effects of climate change more severely, more frequently and closer to home, so too have film-makers been spurred to address the consequences of an irrevocably damaged environment in new ways. In both fiction and non-fiction, climate change is no longer depicted as the eventual cause of future calamity, but a reality affecting everyday life.
On the heels of documentaries that hoped to raise awareness by laying out the facts about climate change have come new ones showing the consequences of our behavior through spectacular images of an increasingly inhospitable environment.
The New York City march is officially over and buses are rolling out of the area after a demonstration that far exceeded organizer’s, and the New York Police Department’s, expectations.
6 hours later, the #PeoplesClimate March in New York has finally wrapped up. You did an incredible thing today, friends. 310,000 strong.
Emma Thompson, Vivienne Westwood and Peter Gabriel joined campaigners and UK flood victims at the People’s Climate Change event in London. An estimated 40,000 people were there. Here is a gallery of the day’s events.
People with giraffe puppets march during The People’s Climate March, central London, a march and rally to demand urgent action on climate change. Photograph: Laura Lean/PA
The New York City march has wrapped up, though tens of thousands of people are still roaming the streets. End-of-protest notes from The Guardian’s on-the-ground observers:
Thousands of marchers are celebrating at the march's end. General consensus is that #PeopleClimateMarch was a resounding success!
Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes for The Observer,calling for boycotts of activities that support companies that burn fossil fuels, much like the protests leveraged against firms that conducted business with apartheid South Africa.
Reducing our carbon footprint is not just a technical scientific necessity; it has also emerged as the human rights challenge of our time. While global emissions have risen unchecked, real-world impacts have taken hold in earnest. The most devastating effects of climate change – deadly storms, heat waves, droughts, rising food prices and the advent of climate refugees – are being visited on the world’s poor. Those who have no involvement in creating the problem are the most affected, while those with the capacity to arrest the slide dither. Africans, who emit far less carbon than the people of any other continent, will pay the steepest price. It is a deep injustice.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion