National Societies formally invited to ‘Climate:Red’ summit in September
IFRC Secretary General Jagan Chapagain today formally invited all National Societies to join the fully virtual Climate:Red Summit on 9 and 10 September this year.
“As you know, Strategy 2030 [photo montage] that we adopted together at our General Assembly in December recognizes the climate and environmental crises as key challenges that are shaping our work now and will continue to do so in the coming decade,” Mr Chapagain wrote.
The IFRC, he added, was committed to scaling up action on climate “[i]n recognition of how climate change is already having major humanitarian consequences, and how it will continue to drive risks across all of our programmes and operations”.
The IFRC secretariat, he said, was now doing everything it could “to offer all necessary support” to societies responding to the COVID pandemic that was continuing to evolve globally, but it was “mindful that other global challenges also need our continuing attention.”
‘The summit will be an important milestone
in exploring how we can transform the way we work’
The September online summit is the International Federation’s first attempt to hold a fully virtual conference for the entire Red Cross Red Crescent network, accessible by all staff and volunteers continuously over 30 hours.
It will provide “an engaging platform to exchange, debate, motivate and inspire each other to scale up our climate action,” Mr Chapagain said, adding that through a special website “we intend to create the feel and outcome of an in-person summit through engaging and interactive sessions”.
Sessions for Climate:Red will be crowdsourced from across the network, with the IFRC secretariat and the Climate Centre providing structure, background information, and other support through Virtually Amazing.
‘Climate-driven emergencies’
Participants will also draw inspiration from the IFRC’s newly issued briefing, Ambitions to address the climate crisis, which said it was “mobilizing to meet the urgency and scale of the crisis”.
In his letter to National Societies the IFRC Secretary General added: “To curb the impacts of climate change, we not only need to look at how we design our programmes and prepare for climate-driven emergencies, but also how we can work differently and play our part in tackling the causes of climate change…this Climate:Red Summit will be an important milestone in exploring how we can transform the way we work.”
The summit will use all four IFRC official languages: English, Spanish, French and Arabic. For more information please email solferino.academy@ifrc.org or see Facebook.
The photo montage helped illustrate the IFRC’s Strategy 2030 that identified climate change as the first of five global challenges, making it a focus for the coming decade. It will play a central part in the virtual climate summit later this year, together with the new Ambitions document. (Image: IFRC)