Title
Ann Arbor Climate Emergency Resolution - Resolution Endorsing the Declaration of a Climate Emergency to Restore a Safe Climate (Oct 2019)
Body
WHEREAS, human activities have warmed the Earth enough to end the 12,000-year period of climate stability that allowed agriculture and human civilization to develop;
WHEREAS, global warming has already set in motion disastrous changes to the Earth system, including accelerating ice mass loss from the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets and the thawing of the borders of the vast Arctic permafrost, which holds twice as much stored carbon as the entire atmosphere;
WHEREAS, NASA scientists have concluded that the complete collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet alone could raise sea levels 23 feet, creating several billion climate refugees and a "global-scale catastrophe";
WHEREAS, the Global Carbon Project has estimated worldwide carbon emissions increased 2.7% in 2018, in addition to the 1.6% increase in 2017;
WHEREAS, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change determined that limiting warming to 1.5? Celsius above pre-industrial levels is necessary to avoid the worse impacts, including widespread heat-related morbidity and mortality;
WHEREAS, the economy's overshoot of ecological limits and, increasingly, climate change, are driving the sixth mass extinction of species;
WHEREAS, climate-fueled droughts, famines, and diseases have already killed millions of people in the Global South, and displaced millions more;
WHEREAS, indigenous and low-income communities and communities of color in the United States and abroad have suffered the gravest consequences of the extractive economy;
WHEREAS, it is an act of unspeakable injustice and cruelty to knowingly subject our fellow humans now and into the future to societal disintegration, food and clean water shortages, economic collapse, and early death on an increasingly uninhabitable planet;
WHEREAS, justice requires that those countries and sectors that have cont...
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