Abstract
Near 1,500 governments worldwide, including over 1,000 local governments, have declared a climate emergency. Such declarations constitute a response to the growing visibility of social movements in international politics as well as the growing role of cities in climate governance. Framing climate change as an emergency, however, can bring difficulties in both the identification of the most appropriate measures to adopt and the effectiveness of those measures in the long run. We use textual analysis to examine the motivations and intended outcomes of 300 declarations endorsed by local governments. The analysis demonstrates that political positioning, previous experience of environmental action within local government, and pressure from civil society are the most common motivations for declaring a climate emergency at the local level. The declarations constitute symbolic gestures highlighting the urgency of the climate challenge, but they do not translate into radically different responses to the climate change challenge. The most commonly intended impacts are increasing citizens’ awareness of climate change and establishing mechanisms to influence future planning and infrastructure decisions. However, the declarations are adopted to emphasize the increasing role cities are taking on, situating local governments as crucial agents bridging global and local action agendas.
Highlights
An emergency is a serious and unexpected incident that requires immediate action
This article aims to explore the scope of the climate emergency declarations, focusing on explicitly stated motivations and intended outcomes of local governments
Emergency declarations can be read as positioning exercises without a real impact on climate change motivations and stressors
Summary
An emergency is a serious and unexpected incident that requires immediate action. In its 2014 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC; IPCC, 2014) showed with high confidence that climate change will increase the risks from heat stress, extreme precipitation, inland and coastal flooding, landslides, and water scarcity in urban areas. Based on the data on emergency events of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, 7,804 natural disasters occurred between 1980 and 1999 compared to 13,388 disasters between 2000 and 2019. Cities have been central to emergency discourses. Darebin (Australia) was the first city in the world to declare a climate emergency on December 5, 2016. More than 1,500 climate emergency declarations had been passed by governments and jurisdictions in 29 countries, covering a population of more than 820 million (Cedamia, 2020). 1,000 of these correspond to local governments, of which most are concentrated in high-income countries, except for three declarations in the Philippines and one in Brazil (Figure 1; see Supplementary File 1)
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