This year started with 90% of Portugal in drought. Since then, we assisted heatwaves all around the world, catastrophic wildfires in Europe, devastating floodings in Pakistan, and a brutal increase in cost of living. An ongoing war is affecting millions and turning capitalism even more suicidal. For the first time, the global food supplies are under threat. The climate crisis is here and now.
We are horrified and anxious with the present and the future we face. Our fear and sorrow are due to our profound love and solidarity with all the people and living beings. Sometimes we are filled with a deep despair in the face of the end of the world as we know it. In those moments, we remind ourselves that that doesn’t mean the end of the world. We are realists. We know we cannot change the past and that this is just the mere beginning of the climate crisis. Yet, what will happen in the future depends on what we do today. We have collective power to choose between the best and the worst paths to follow and everything in between.
We dare to imagine new futures, to choose the best paths and to fight for them. We are aware that alternative futures exist, that each fraction of a degree matters for billions of lives. We know that it’s not too late. We also know that the time to act is now.
We march together, in solidarity and rage, setting new commitments for the next months in the state of climate emergency within Climáximo.
1) We renew our struggle by diversifying our tactics. We will be moved by creativity and imagination to attain an unavoidable visibility for climate crisis and a sustained disruption for fossil capitalism.
2) We reinvent our collective: We put care and the sense of collective at the center, and we re-center our campaigns with coherent action plans, amplifying the spaces of involvement for the climate justice movement in Portugal. We dare to change everything together. We will create self-sufficient and courageous teams that integrate the lessons of the past and risk committing new mistakes.
3) The fight for social and climate justice is everyone’s business. We will create new structures to allow people from all around Portugal to join the movement, through our campaigns and the National Gathering for Climate Justice. We will also continue supporting and collaborating with other collectives via the Climate Justice Agenda in Portugal.
4) Today our movement is more resilient: last year we say two organizations emerging – Último Recurso for legal support and the trainers’ collective Fermento. We failed in achieving financial independence. We commit to self-financing as a political choice in everything we do.
5) We will challenge the international climate justice movement to anchor itself in climate reality. We need to create a movement that is capable of assuming and executing its social and political mission to attain social and climate justice within the climate deadlines.
6) We will continue to challenge and mitigate sexist behaviors and attitudes we are socialized into. We will redistribute reproductive work in the collective; we will give visibility to non-cis-men voices and build new trainings for communication and spokespersons; we will educate men in conflict resolution, in care work and in identifying and mitigating their own sexist behaviors. We will also expand our anti-oppression tools, participating in trainings and conferences of the anti-colonialist movement.
7) Every three months, we will look back to our commitment and report on our website.
We are terrified by the complexity of the task. We choose to look in the face of the biggest challenge humanity in the face. In front of us lie thousands of possibilities. We have a lot to do. We have a lot to fight for. The future is being built now. Together, we hold each others’ hands and we seize the responsibility and the opportunity to achieve a society with care and life at its center.
In September 2019 we declared a state of climate emergency inside Climáximo. Our main statement was to tell ourselves the truth about climate crisis and what we needed to do, and we stick to that statement. In 2020 we set new emergency measures, and in 2021 we reinvented our internal functioning as well as strategies. Today we set new commitments and new internal measures, looking at the climate reality as is.
N.B. The title and the tone of this declaration was inspired by https://www.nottoolateclimate.com/
