Declare Emergency is a campaign using nonviolent civil resistance techniques to disrupt the status quo and demand that our government take meaningful action to address the climate emergency.

We demand that President Biden hold a press conference, declare a formal state of climate emergency and begin make full use of his executive authority to save this country from collapse. Find out more about why Biden must Declare Emergency, and what he can do immediately after.

Well-meaning people have written letters and protested within the system for decades, but emissions keep rising. Despite the many agreements, plans, and protocols our government announces, the planet continues to warm—and every additional day of continued emissions makes the climate crisis harder to fix.

As Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Working Group II said in February 2021, “The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.”

Mass arrest is an important strategy of historical nonviolence movements that demanded system change from their governments.

First, it demonstrates the importance of our message. We do not take our actions lightly. The cause is meaningful to us to the point of jail sacrifice. Our friends and families will hear about it and consider why we took such drastic action.

Second, every time the state imprisons us for nonviolently demanding a livable future, we win a moral battle. The more the state oppresses those asking for the right to live in a sustainable world, the less tenable its moral stance becomes in the eyes of the greater public.

In an emergency, the normal patterns of our day-to-day life are disrupted. By disrupting traffic similar to the way a hurricane, flood, or wildfire might, we are viscerally demonstrating the truth of the climate emergency.

The status quo cannot continue if we hope to have a live-able future. We block roads in order to disrupt the status quo.