The countdown to Earth Day 2020 is underway with its organizers—the Earth Day Network—announcing “The Demand for Climate Action” as the overarching theme throughout this landmark 50th anniversary year. Earth Day Network has also begun planning efforts to produce a global-scale mobilization in April 2020 to mark the anniversary.
In 1970, twenty million people took to the streets to protest and demand action to change the way humanity was impacting the Earth’s environment. The movement, inspired by the 1968 ‘Earthrise’ image of the Earth from space, created a mobilization that triggered a raft of new transformational legislation in the United States, including the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts.
The movement also triggered a worldwide environmental people’s movement that now engages more than 190 countries and a billion people annually.
Every year Earth Day Network, as the organizer of the original Earth Day, selects an environmental priority to engage the global public. The enormous challenges – but also the vast opportunities – of acting on climate change have distinguished the issue as the most pressing topic for the 50th anniversary year as nations look to increase the ambition of their national climate action plans to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.
“Climate change represents the biggest challenge to the future of humanity and the life-support systems that make our world habitable. Unless every country in the world steps up – and steps up with urgency and ambition – we are consigning current and future generations to a very dangerous future of rising sea levels; glacier and ice-sheet loss; increased storms, floods, and droughts; dramatic extinction of animal and plant species; and increased poverty in many regions,” said Kathleen Rogers, Earth Day Network President.
“Much has been achieved since 1970, but much still remains unfinished, with many of the dials on our sustainability indicators pointing perilously in the wrong direction. 2020 has to be the year of enormous, ambitious change that will take the promise of the positive action underway and make it bigger and bolder worldwide,” she said.
“Together, we can unite our individual voices and individual actions around the world to build a movement that is inclusive, ambitious, and impossible to ignore.” Rogers said.
A raft of initiatives, aimed at mobilizing citizen engagement on climate action and wider environmental mobilizations will provide individuals with ways to act, including:
In 2019 and 2020, more than 125 countries will host major parliamentary, presidential, and legislative elections around the world. Thousands of state, provincial, regional, and city elections will also be held. The time has never been better to use individual power as a voting citizen to select the candidates committed to taking bold action to protect our planet.
Vote Earth calls on citizens, particularly young and first-time voters, to examine the climate and environmental platforms of their candidates; to engage these candidates and better understand their ambition; and, ultimately, to vote at the ballot box for the candidates with clear, ambitious, and convincing plans to protect our planet
Through targeted in-country strategic communications spread through large- and small-scale organizations, Vote Earth will inform, engage, and activate voters to register, get educated, and show up at the polls to vote for candidates committed to protecting the planet.
In collaboration with partners around the globe, Earth Day Network is building Earth’s largest cleanup crew.
The Great Global Cleanup is a worldwide campaign to remove billions of pieces of trash from neighborhoods, beaches, rivers, lakes, trails, and parks — reducing waste and plastic pollution, improving habitats, and preventing harm to wildlife and humans.
The Great Global Cleanup has been piloted through more than 2,000 cleanups in cities across the U.S. for Earth Day 2019. Now, the event will be scaled up for global reach to kick off the largest coordinated environmental volunteer event in history.
Through our unified campaign including mobile registration, digital mapping and social media, we will connect partners and participants around the globe to remove billions of pieces of trash from our green spaces, urban communities, and waterways. Data collected by participants will help build a better understanding of the sources, scope and solutions to our waste problem.
Citizens of the world have incredible potential to report on the natural world around them, but this potential has largely gone untapped, until now. Earth Challenge 2020 will empower everyday individuals to join the largest-ever global citizen science initiative to report on the health and wellbeing of the environment around them, from their drinking water, to their air quality, to the species around them.
A scientific panel has been assembled to support the Earth Challenge 2020 campaign, with partners including the Wilson Center, the US State Department, Esri, the World Bank’s Connect4Climate initiative, and UN Environment.
This global network of partners has identified six key questions, and with support from tech giants like Amazon, the Earth Challenge 2020 app will be launched in early 2020 for citizens to download and use to help answer these questions in their localities.
The findings of this citizen science initiative will be uploaded to large scientific networks to improve our understanding of the health of our world, with dual goals of triggering national and local government policy shifts while arming citizens with better and more convincing facts.
Artists for the Earth is a global campaign to raise awareness and understanding of climate change and the environment by seizing the power of art to inform, provoke, and inspire action and instill hope for the future. Artists for the Earth will engage thousands of museums, orchestras, theaters, performers, authors, and artists from all walks of life and from every continent to change our global culture through culture.
By raising awareness and understanding of climate change and the environment through the arts, Artists for the Earth aims to connect with people on an emotional, personal, and local level to nurture optimism, drive action, and catalyze change in communities around the world.
Billion Acts of Green
Earth Day 2020 wants to recognize every person, every group, and every action being taken to improve our world– whether it be lifestyle changes that cut emissions, action on plastics pollution, species protection, university and school teach-ins, tree plantings, local and global cleanups, switching to a more plant-based diets, or voting with your wallet and your ballot.
Earth Day Network will be reinvigorating and relaunching its flagship platform – Billion Acts of Green – to meet the challenge of logging, aggregating, and profiling these meaningful actions by inspiring individuals and organizations around the world. Billion Acts of Green will serve as the overarching umbrella or frame for all actions taken on the EDN website, whether it’s a petition signed, a cleanup hosted, a climate march registered, etc.
The previous iteration of Billion Acts of Green saw more than 2 billion actions registered, with a 2020 goal of 3.5 billion actions taken, logged, and aggregated around the world.
To learn more about Earth Day Network’s campaigns across the world: https://www.earthday.org/campaigns/