The global climate civic space is open

The 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change requires nearly 200 nations to work to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. Article 6 of the Convention calls for citizen participation in the design and implementation of climate solutions. While annual UN climate talks are high-level discussions between governments, the Talanoa Dialogue set a new standard for open global climate civics.

The Paris Agreement recognized the need to adhere to the principle of intergenerational equity, and asked the IPCC to review whether 1.5ºC of global average warming would constitute unacceptably dangerous climate disruption. In October, the IPCC released its Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC, which found that the risk and cost of warming above that level would be unacceptably severe.

The work of raising the ambition of national climate policies, and of global cooperative action, is far from done. So, we answer the official Talanoa Call for Action by committing to keep alive the model of inclusive open stakeholder dialogues, in the spirit of Talanoa.

• The Engage4Climate Talanoa Dialogue Engagement Toolkit remains active and will be periodically updated, to align with engagement opportunities across multiple scales, sectors, and regions.
• The Toolkit will continue to recommend open, values-based discussions about the three Talanoa Dialogue questions: Where are we? Where do we want to go? How do we get there?
• It will continue to provide a series of recommended meeting formats, with guidance for shaping and managing an agenda, and producing streamlined, stakeholder-driven outcomes that can inform policy decisions.

The core purpose of the Toolkit is to support local meetings that bring stakeholders, experts, and leaders into discussions about values, affinities, and future resilience, while working together on a 20-year future visioning process:

1. 20-year vision — What kind of world do we want to live in 20 years from now?
2. 10-year vision — Where do we need to be in 10-years, given our 20-year goals?
3. 5-year vision — What specific actions are needed to achieve the 10-year vision?
4. 2-year strategy — How to leverage the climate turning point
5. 2019-2020 actions — Making the 2-year strategy real

Citizen participation is critical to accelerated development of a climate-smart economy, because climate action requires leaders actively move away from status quo interests. Public demand and support is central to creating the political opportunity for such fast-paced policy-driven innovation.

Stakeholder meetings through the Pathway to Paris, the Citizens’ Climate Engagement Network, the ACE Dialogues, and the Talanoa Dialogue, have made clear we need connections between ground-level experience and high-level decision-making.

• The Acceleration Dialogues have brought forward from leaders in diverse sectors a call for tools to make high-value climate-smart financing and investment choices.
• The work to build an integrated tool for generating and sharing such operational resilience intelligence is now underway, as outlined in the Resilience Intel Charter.
• Talanoa-style Engage4Climate meetings, going forward, will continue to work to connect stakeholders’ locally rooted future visions with XROI and climate-smart finance insights.

We will continue to track information from critical action platforms, in support of the Paris Agreement and localized climate-smart innovation, through ParisProgress.net. Our aim is that the Talanoa Toolkit not only supports local meetings, from time to time, and the sharing of insight, but the building of local and regional support structures for ongoing climate-smart innovation and investment.

This spring, we will be co-convening multistakeholder dialogues focusing on:

• Accelerating Ocean Sustainability Upstream
• Translating Science into Climate Action
• Economic and Climate Benefits of Carbon Dividends

We will also be coordinating local stakeholder engagement around the Paris Agreement implementation strategy coming out of COP24.

We invite you to organize local multistakeholder meetings, using the Engage4Climate Talanoa Toolkit, and to share your plans, challenge questions, and structured outcomes, with us, so we can share them and/or carry them forward into global processes.