Members of North Staffs Green Party will join activists from trade unions and environmental groups at a protest in Hanley this Saturday.
The protest has been organised by North Staffordshire Climate Coalition; a campaign group founded in the run up to last year’s COP26 summit held in Glasgow. The coalition brings together trade unions, environmental groups and groups campaigning on issues of social justice to call for urgent global action on climate change.
A spokesperson for North Staffs Green Party said, “climate change is the defining issue of our time, and it is important that we demand action because the government under Rishi Sunak and his two predecessors this year has not stepped up to its responsibilities”.
Adding that “the situation is rapidly approaching a point where we will not be able to turn things around and will hand on a world that has been irreparably damaged to future generations”.
Despite holding the presidency of COP26, the UK Government has been criticised for failing to meet the obligations it signed up to in Glasgow and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak initially refused to travel to Egypt, only changing his mind following pressure from environmental groups and MPs, including some from his own party.
“Since last year in Glasgow the UK government has gone in completely the wrong direction by introducing new North Sea oil and gas licences, continued to roll out airport and road expansion and will not even rule out the opening of a new coal mine in Cumbria”. – Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsey
The COP27 summit takes place in the Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt and is organised by the United Nations to build on the “outcomes of COP26 to deliver action on an array of issues critical to tackling the climate emergency – from urgently reducing greenhouse gas emissions, building resilience, and adapting to the inevitable impacts of climate change, to delivering on the commitments to finance climate action in developing countries”.
In his opening address to the summit UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the planet was “on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator”, and that the COP27 meeting was possibly the last chance to develop a workable plan to prevent climate disaster.
North Staffordshire Climate Coalition has issued statement outlining three demands, these are for governments around the world to take urgent action on climate change, for local authorities including Stoke-on-Trent City Council to honour the commitments they made when they declared a climate emergency in 2019, and for an end to attempts by the Egyptian government to use hosting the summit to cover up human rights abuses.
The protest event in Hanley will take place from midday on Saturday 12 November at the bus station located on Litchfield Street, ST1 3EA.
Further details of the event can be found here.
