With this petition, we are reminding local, regional, and national governments of their obligation to protect us from further harm to the environment and biosphere and to meet their civic responsibility towards our communities and their duty of care.
Courts worldwide are defining governments’ and companies’ duty of care for climate change as well as the extraterritorial responsibility of governments for climate harm. The courts increasingly recognize climate change as a human rights issue and judges are ordering states and companies to enact ambitious climate policies.
The latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that we are falling behind in the race against global warming. To avoid the worst, we must use every tool available to reduce carbon emissions and prevent the threatened ecological and social-economic disaster.
Our communities are threatened by the continued destruction of the local environment and biosphere from real estate development. To protect us from further harm, we are now compelled to take immediate action to pressure our governments to prevent the negative environmental impacts from such projects.
The science-driven report warns that climate breakdown is happening more quickly than anticipated and that much of the planet will soon become uninhabitable. It emphasizes the urgent need for radical climate action to stay in a climate safety zone and to accelerate transformational adaptation measures.
Communities must integrate circularity in development projects, to accelerate the shift to a circular economy. By integrating circularity into build and infrastructure approvals, sustainable development and operation of the built environment will be encouraged.
There are frameworks and guidance for cities and other government bodies to develop a strategy, action plan, and policies in response to the climate emergency, such as the "City Policy Framework for Dramatically Reducing Embodied Carbon" and the "GlobalABC Roadmap for Buildings and Construction: Towards a Zero-Emission, Efficient and Resilient Buildings and Construction Sector". They suggest what cities can do, how to do it, and what the most carbon-reducing, cost-effective, easiest-to-implement, and enforceable policies are that could be adopted to initiate and accelerate the transition to low-carbon construction.