Global (Climate) Assembly: 1000 of the world's citizens, leading millions to bring their visions to COP 26 in Glasgow

Massive ambition and expertise on display here with Global Assembly. It’s an initiative that wants to take the international enthusiasm for citizens’ assemblies - the quality of their decisions, the diversity of their input - and scale it up to a global level.

Their obvious deadline is the Cop26 intergovernmental climate conference, taking place in Glasgow, Scotland, on November 2021. Cop26’s decisions on climate regulation may be crucial to avoiding a full climate breakdown over the next ten years.

Here’s their core plan:

A global citizens’ assembly to accelerate action to address the climate and ecological emergency and influence COP26 in ways that citizens see fit.

The global assembly will involve both:

a core group of people broken down by gender, race, age, economic background (and other criteria if appropriate) chosen by lottery, to be a true representation of the world population (1,000 people); and

distributed events that mirror the core group, and will be run by anyone anywhere e.g. communities, schools, organisations (100,000+ people).

We want everyone to have a voice on addressing the climate emergency.

Most citizens’ assemblies are top-down, initiated by governments to listen to people. This is the opposite. It has been galvanised by the 2019 and 2020 global protests, proposed by the social and climate movement, then co-designed with institutions, climate scientists, citizens and social movements.

In 2020 two hundred people from countries such as Ghana, Brazil, Nigeria, West Papua, Mongolia, Philippines, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Uganda, South Africa, Kenya, India, Jamaica and Bangladesh have been involved in co-designing the global assembly to ensure it has the concerns of grassroots communities in its DNA.

The Global Assembly consists of the following five phase plan:

Now: understanding of the reality of the situation globally
Future: prioritise hopes for life in 2040
Create Future: agree actions that match the future citizens want
Take Action: generate plans for making the desired future happen
Launch Plan: a ‘moment’ when the eyes of the world are on the citizen plans.

We think a global assembly is needed not just to help address climate change, but also to address challenges like coronavirus, poverty, technology regulation, immigration and the global financial crisis. It’s clear that our aging international governance arrangements are struggling with today's challenges; and we think establishing a global assembly would be a step towards renewing these systems.

There are five key reasons why we think we need a global assembly:

1. Addressing global challenges

2. Improving global democracy

3. Strengthening justice

4. Uniting the global family

5. Truth.