It’s 2020, where do we go from here? How do we achieve the change we need? How do we escalate, or take our ideas to the next level? For the past year, groups have been trying to figure out answers to these questions.

We thought the 2020 spring would be the next big uprising. Many were preparing and calling for mobilizations: from the youth to XR, to targeting fossil companies online or AGMs in the real world, or even taking it to infrastructures, or spreading people’s assemblies across Europe in a push for reclaiming political sanity and real democracy. Conversations were well underway and plans were being made.

The 3rd wave aimed to target the economy, especially the fossil economy, showing this problem has roots. We aimed at disrupting those that are destroying our planet, our future.

Common objectives were agreed upon during the 5th European strategy meeting.

Corona and climate justice crises

With the Corona crisis, the context changed drastically. Most of the plans for the spring wave were cancelled, postponed or frozen because of the mandatory confinement.

As the climate justice movement needed to adapt to this new context, a space got created to support groups, debate about next steps and coordinate between one another. Corona calls got organized every two weeks and several working groups were created.

If you want to have a look at the summary of the Corona calls discussions and the Corona working groups, you can have a look here (with input on narratives, campaigns, tactics and timing).

Moreover, the 3rd wave tactics working group (which started in Brussels) adpated their work and created a toolkit for offline tactics in times of Corona.
You can read it here ( FR, DE).

Call out – coming back to the streets

As a direct response to the present context, there is a call out for coming back to the streets in June based on and boosted by mobilization initiatives for June coming from Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. This call out is also an organic result of the strategic discussions on the European Corona Calls of By2020WeRiseUp and the strategical meetings of 2020 Rebelión por el clima (the regional sister of the By2020 platform in the Iberian peninsula).
You can read it here ( FR, DE).

If your group is already planning offline actions for the end of May or June, let us know and join this call out!

If you would like to have more information, join the conversation on the regular European calls of By2020WeRiseup. If you want to receive informations about these calls, send a mail to by2020we@riseup.net to be signed up to our info-list.

Activism in Austria during Corona

System Change not Climate Change made a small overview about the legal developments and actions in Austria (mainly Vienna) during Corona.