Together for a better future
Our Civic Diplomacy Program is oriented toward connecting our education and empowerment work to international decision-making spaces that affect lives, rights, livelihoods, and future climate stability, but where citizens and stakeholders are often underrepresented.
In the UN Climate Change negotiations, the meetings of the G7 and G20, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and efforts toward the Sustainable Development Goals, our Civic Diplomacy work connects people to policy processes to deliver a more rooted, more durable climate crisis response.
Through that work, we have identified a number of critical areas where high-value engagement requires a multidisciplinary approach to training, coordination, and strategic engagement with the diplomatic process, including pollution pricing, food systems transformation, finance reform, and trade.
Our UNFCCC Delegation
During the mid-year and annual UN Climate Change negotiations, our team holds hundreds of bilateral meetings, helps connect stakeholders to negotiators, minsters, and heads of state, and manages a digital platform for remote engagement.
We advocate for the PARIS Principles of constructive multilateral climate cooperation and support deep, ongoing civic engagement. To ensure engagement is ongoing, and allow for spontaneous sharing of insights, we established the People’s Pavilion digital platform, with support from VoLo Foundation. An overview of our COP28 focus areas and activities can be found here.
The Climate Value Exchange
The Climate Value Exchange is a network of networks, co-founded and coordinated by CCI, aimed at supporting leaders, institutions, and non-governmental stakeholders in establishing multidimensional multilateral climate crisis response.
The breakdown in natural background climate value is leading to a breakdown in the integrity and reliability of human systems. This is already costing lives and destabilizing nation states. Non-market climate cooperation is an opportunity to get on the right side of this unprecedented challenge.
Sharing data, resources, technology, and more cost-effective modes of resilience finance, will lead to mainstreaming of climate governance and enterprise into everyday economic experience. Climate cooperation can now support human development, wellbeing, and sustainability, across whole economies.
Interparliamentary Exchange
The 2024 Interparliamentary Exchange will provide an opportunity for climate-interested lawmakers to meet with peers, to share experiences and engage with stakeholders and institutions, highlighting opportunities to build climate value together through:
Multilateral climate cooperation, as envisioned in Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement;
Good Food Finance, to improve livelihoods, build local economies, and make food systems climate-resilient and sustainable;
application of the Capital to Communities participatory climate finance approach laid out in the 2022 Reinventing Prosperity Report; and
Climate Income as a lever for accelerating sustainable human development and creating conditions for climate-smart trade.
Earth Diplomacy Leadership
CCI co-coordinates the Earth Diplomacy Leadership Workshops with The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
The workshops prepare participants and observers to navigate the complex negotiating process, to parse coded language, read between the lines, and engage effectively toward constructive cooperative outcomes.
Action for Climate Empowerment
Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) is the civic engagement and public information agenda within the UNFCCC process.
CCI is a leading voice for non-Party stakeholders and for climate action leadership outside of government. To support stakeholders having a voice in high-level policy, we developed the Engage4Climate Toolkit to allow stakeholders anywhere to organize structured meetings and deliver policy guidance to decision-makers.
Priorities for a Livable Future
Bringing stakeholder perspectives to the 2024 UN Summit of the Future.
CCI wants people and communities to have a say in the future they will experience, and to play an active, ongoing role in shaping that future. Our Consultation on priorities for a Livable Future asks you to share your vision for a better future, along with action priorities for local, national, and global institutions. Outcomes will be reported to the September 2024 Summit of the Future, focusing on the future of human development and international cooperation.
Blue Notes
Briefing notes outlining CCI positions on climate crisis response and providing formal input to major global policy negotiations.
Our Blue Notes include insights on how trade can deliver a climate-smart future, including through Article 6.8 non-market approaches, international financial reform, stakeholder inclusion to drive ambition, and the Capital to Communities approach to climate finance design and deployment. Read about the Right to Resilience and how to mainstream climate action.
This program is intended to overlap with our other programs:
- Connecting volunteers to high-level decision-makers, and expanding the civic space through activation of the Five Levers for Building Political Will;
- Advocating for people-centered carbon pricing in multilevel engagment spaces like the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition;
- Supporting the integration of science insights into non-science data systems to provide resilience intelligence, to drive climate-smart finance and policy-making.
As we look ahead to international policy decisions on the transition away from fossil fuels, integral human development, and ensuring the integrity of ecosystems, we are working to support progress on:
- Including the voices of stakeholders in processes that will decide their future;
- Concrete work toward a universally applicable Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA);
- Non-market approaches to global decarbonization under Paris Article 6.8;
- Integrating food systems transformation into NDCs and into international cooperation for a resilient, low-carbon future;
- Mainstreaming of climate-smart finance, including new funding for Adaptation, Resilience, and Loss and Damage.
Embracing Complexity, Sharing Insight
We recognize that to ensure the most effective engagement in multilateral policy-making, in the face of climate emergency and while working toward 17 Sustainable Development Goals—which the member states of the United Nations General Assembly agreed in 2015 are the rightful expectation of all people—we must embrace complexity.
- The annual UN Climate Change negotiating process is, by its nature and due to the complexity of the intersecting areas of the agenda, an evolving landscape of emerging possibility.
- Even as rules and goals are being set, the overall process is intended to welcome new and additional insight and resources, year to year, and is always intended to be grounded in the action nation states are taking to foster climate resilience and reduce the overall global threat of dangerous climate change.
- While an annual consensus agreement may not include a global mandate for all nations to act on our own top priorities, success can be achieved by ensuring vital concepts, avenues of action, and opportunities for future leadership are anchored in the agreed language.
The future of intergovernmental policy-making must be multidisciplinary, multilevel, and inclusive. This is why we have initiated the Earth Diplomacy Leadership Initiative, together with The Fletcher School, and the Climate Value Exchange, to ensure high-level policy is based on insights rooted in human experience, aspiration, and wellbeing, and that cooperative approaches are multidimensional and build value for all of society.
