On 3 July 2019 in the climate bunker, The Sustainable Hour becomes a full Climate Emergency Declaration Hour: Your hosts cover the importance and the need to immediately declare a climate emergency in our local government areas, and we listen to how it is being done around the country and around the world.

We hear how New York City Council declares a climate emergency, and how Mayor Clover Moore from Sydney City Council does it with unaminous backing from her Council.

Councillor Bill Harvey from Hobart City Council explains how – and why – he pushed for the Tasmanian capital to become the first capital city in Australia to declare a climate emergency. This interview was produced by Vivien Langford from the Beyond Zero Emissions show and is part of a longer podcast about climate emergency in Tasmania. 

We also hear statements from Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, ABC presenter Kerry O’Brien, an excerpt from a speech by Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, as he introduces his new report on climate change at the 14th Plenary Meeting of the Human Rights Council of the United Nations on 28 June 2019. “We have reached a point where the best-case outcome is widespread death and suffering by the end of this century, and the worst-case puts humanity on the brink of extinction,” he says.

Keira Knightley gives voice to a Facebook video about the climate emergency and Extinction Rebellion, and Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, gave a speech at a conference in the UK, which we play a two-minute excerpt from.

Jess Miller, a councillor from the City of Sydney, encourages protesters to keep pushing for change, even after the City of Sydney has declared a climate emergency.

  

What is your council doing about the climate emergency?

The first local government climate emergency was declared by Darebin City Council, a suburban council of Melbourne in Victoria, in December 2016. Since then, more than 700 other councils world-wide have joined them. This means that there now are more than 160 million people living in a declared climate emergency municipality. In Australia, 25 councils, including Sydney and Hobart, had joined.

“A rising tide of communities across the country from the ground up are having their views represented by local leaders,” commented Nic Seaton from Greenpeace in Australia.

We ask our local leaders to come up with more aggressive, more measurable, more action-oriented plans to make sure that we reduce our emissions drastically. If they don’t get it, they simply don’t deserve to be re-elected,