Global Climate Change Action

The Global Green Plan Foundation

The Global Green Plan Foundation is a DGR status not-for-profit organisation established by Hal and Don Hewett in 2004 to implement the Global Green Plan. The Foundation’s mission is to provide an effective national and international response to climate change through whole-of-community engagement.

Website: www.globalgreenplan.org;
email dhew...@globalgreenplan.net

The Global Green Plan is based on the following principles of community engagement and its new and urgent nexus with climate change action:

1. It has to be an inclusive strategy as well as a uniting cause. It must make sense to everybody, irrespective of age, status, race, nationality, religion or political persuasion.

2. It has to be big enough to make a difference. This means it must have global application (any Australian initiative that cannot be expanded to bigger emitters, including the US, China, India, Russia, Brazil and Indonesia is futile in terms of curbing global emissions).

3. No matter how propitiously initiatives start, they will not be sustained if they are fragmented or target one or other sector. It has to involve everybody, and it has to be connected and coordinated. Fragmented initiatives fail.

4. Any enduring initiative has to be structured in such a way that people can, and feel inclined to, participate. It has to be able to gather up everybody in a collective effort. It has to have the sizzle as well as the sausage.

5. It must prepare future generations as well as persuade the current ones; it must lay foundation blocks that ensure we are educating our children for living in a carbon-constrained world.

6. It must inform and resource as well as motivate, and the message must be effectively packaged. The three commandments of climate change action are simple and summed up by the acronym ROS: Reduce, Offset, Switch – to a greener lifestyle. The devil of course is in the detail.

7. It must have a spark to ignite it and fuel to keep the flame alight: for that it must harness the energy and passion of youth.

8. Whatever else the outcome, it must lead to cultural change to lower impact lifestyles, a change in mindset from consumer to conserver, and a community of individuals policing their own actions, and imposing their own (informed) discipline, rather than waiting for regulation or resource shortage.