[AMENDED] Proposed AIW - World on Fire: Humanitarian Work and Climate Change

General Assembly 2024 GA Business
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Climate change is a huge concern that covers lots of topics. The General Assembly has endorsed at least ten major statements in recent years about climate change and the conversation must continue.

What’s unusual about this Action of Immediate Witness? Why is it needed today?

Because it recognizes that the climate crisis is a public health crisis that is here and now. It’s no long an environmental problem that is, maybe, ten or thirty years into the future.

Over one hundred million Americans are now under an extreme-heat advisory alert. Wildfires are out of control in the Western states, tornadoes and tropical storms are developing, some places are flooded, and the heat waves are beyond belief in several regions. Humanitarian action is needed today.

This AIW calls for immediate action with an emphasis on community and labor organizing. Marginalized groups receive a lot of attention in this AIW. There’s a call for partnerships with people who are being abused or abandoned. Before, during, and after community emergencies. Some of these folks are rarely mentioned in climate change conversations. These are the people who need our attention. ASAP.

Stay with love. Work for justice. Even when comfortable people want to retreat to comfortable places. Because a moral response to the climate crisis is needed. It’s needed today. Vote “yes” on the statement called World on Fire: Humanitarian Aid and Climate Change. Thank you from Florida. :flamingo:

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Question - I am for the points in this AIW, but wondering why it does not call upon UU and people around the world to minimize their CO2 emissions? Or to have a Carbon Tax? It seems like these are direct and core needs related to this issue. I appreciate the guidance and feedback

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I do support this, but I just want to hold up that it hurts as someone in poverty that UUism suddenly seems to care about us in a climate crisis situations but ignores us the rest of the time. Our congregations and the UUA include institutionalized classism, including many congregations asking for donations from impoverished members, when really the money should go the other way.

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Thanks for your concern; this is about responding to our neighbors’ needs now, knowing that this will be a record-breaking summer and that we need to prepare. The AIW does look for ongoing actions, and whereas many UUs would do well to decrease carbon emissions, others may be living in hot climates without air conditioning—energy justice means that these folks need access to affordable electricity. This is a huge, complex issue worthy of a CS/AI (congregational study/action issue), and there may be one proposed this fall—but today, what is needed is to ensure that we are ready for hurricane season, wildfires, and more.

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Please check out UUs for a Just Economic Community; we have been advocating for such issues as minimum wages, affordable housing, and other issues of economic inequality. We were instrumental in the CS/AI Escalating Economic Inequality, starting in 2014, and its statement of conscience in 2017. We are a small but energetic group; we have 2 poster sessions this year and at 6 p.m. a meet-up on Peace for Intergenerational and Climate Justice.

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I had to cut down what would have been a 3-minute statement introducing this AIW. Here is the full statement:

World on Fire—the name suggested by Buddhists who were some of the many people and groups consulted by the Floridian UUs who wrote this AIW—reminds us of last year’s Canadian wildfires, the California wildfires that threaten so many years, and for those of us who have been through one or more of the landmark hurricanes over the years, the flooding of Katrina, Sandy, Andrew.

This year’s climate AIW focusses on need for humanitarian work and community and labor organizing this summer. Unlike some statements that are more about policy or future actions, this is a here-and-now, ASAP, statement calling for action this summer—for UUs, even if they break from their usual services, giving staff needed time off—to engage with the needed humanitarian relief as climate chaos takes a special toll on those whose work in high heat is particularly risky—the farmworkers without water breaks, the firefighters, the construction workers and landscapers—and those who are houseless, who have no shelter, or substandard shelter, from the deadly heat. We include those who are especially vulnerable because of old age, health issues, and those who are too often abused or abandoned by emergency services programs.

Though this is a climate-change focussed AIW, it also recognizes the intersectionality of climate effects—we know that frontline communities are largely people of the global majority, including island nations such as Tuvalo, which we heard yesterday is safeguarding its identity digitally as its island home is being drowned by sea-level rise caused not by their own actions, but by those of wealthy Northern hemisphere peoples, such communities as those in Cancer Alley on the Gulf Coast of the United States, and so many others.

With all the issues above, this AIW calls on President Biden to declare that a national emergency exists because of climate change; that he then call on FEMA to use their Stafford Act capacity and prepare for the coming disasters—as we UUs also reach out to our neighbors, as religious groups have done for centuries, for millennia, to provide needed humanitarian aid. Join UUJEC and Radical Elders next week to watch Cooked: Survival by ZIP Code, do what you can this summer, and as hurricane season wanes, celebrate Labor Day with a renewed commitment to climate action.

If you are in New York, check out the Summer of Heat actions; connect with your local and state-based groups, whether the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, your county emergency service, or VOAD—volunteer organizations active in disaster—and be sure that when the call comes, you are there, and the resources needed are there, to answer it.

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Ballot Result from General Session IV
This Action of Immediate Witness was Affirmed. It received more than 2/3 vote of support.

Action of Immediate Witness: World on Fire: Humanitarian Work and Climate Change

Option Votes
Affirm this Action of Immediate Witness 2312 (95.6%)
Do not affirm this Action of Immediate Witness 107 (4.4%)
Total 2545
Abstain 126 (5.0%)