In September 2019, The Club of Rome launched The Planetary Emergency Plan on the sidelines of the UN Climate Action Summit in New York. The Plan, which was drafted in partnership with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), provides a set of key policy levers addressing the cross-cutting challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and human health and well-being. It outlines a vision of transformation and regeneration, a roadmap for governments to set in motion a decade in which the development path of our planet is steered onto one which is inherently beneficial for all living species, leaving no one behind. Its framing is simple yet compelling, a catalytic intervention designed to spur emergency action at the highest levels of decision-making.
It is a novel contribution to the emergency debate, recognizing the inextricable interconnectedness of the three challenges referred to above, and providing a new approach to conventional siloed policy action. Concretely, it combines a focus on protecting and restoring our Global Commons with implementing a series of economic and social transformations, to guarantee the long-term health and well-being of people and planet.
The Plan was launched in the presence of a number of Heads of State and Government (Austria, Bhutan, Central African Republic, Costa Rica, Fiji, Monaco, Norway, Seychelles, UK) as well as First Vice-President of the European Commission for the European Green Deal, Frans Timmermans. The presentation of the Plan was part of an overall strategy to secure high-level commitments to a New Deal for People, Nature and Climate in 2020, underpinned by the adoption of a Planetary Emergency Declaration and concomitant Action Plan in the course of the “super year” of 2020.
