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'Sounding Twelve Years.' Join Us in this Symbolic Action
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ClimateKeys is inviting places of worship and individuals the week commencing 15 April (Monday of Holy Week) to sound 12 bell rings to symbolise the twelve year timeline we have left in which to limit catastrophic climate change (IPCC Report).
MIA invites the global Mercy Family to participate with us in this symbolic action.
Context:
The UN IPCC 1.5 Special Report published October 2018 says rapid change, including reducing our carbon emissions by half is needed by 2030 – in other words – by twelve years from now.
“Climate change is now reaching the end-game… The issue is the very survival of our civilisation.” - Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, for 20 years the Head of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Senior Advisor to Pope Francis, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the EU.
2019 is arguably our last chance to drive policy and culture change to achieve the ambitious targets set out in the UN’s IPCC 2018 report which describes the enormous harm that anything above a 1.5°C rise in global temperature would cause. It told us that limiting to 1.5°C may still be possible yet requires “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”. The problem though: we are not on track. Carbon emissions haven’t stopped rising and temperatures are heading towards 3°C. If we continue our current course, future changes in climate could be dramatically abrupt and irreversible, seeing mass migrations, crop failures and unprecedented disasters. This is already putting a raft of other pressures on the ecology, with 200 species going extinct every day due to habitat loss as well as change in climate. In a 2018 study of British mammals it was found that 1 in 5 could be extinct within a decade. This is our time to alert those who do not know, to reinforce the twelve-year window of opportunity, and increase ways to shift the global narrative and generate the necessary political will.
Action:
ClimateKeys is inviting places of worship and individual members of the public to join an effort to raise the profile of our twelve-year timeline. We want places of worship and individuals to mark the number ‘12’ to help disseminate information about the timeline. Sounding Twelve Years is a call to places of worship and individuals to participate in a coordinated response to the global and ecological climate emergency.
Places of Worship are asked to participate through creating repeating bursts of twelve sounds, thus filling public spaces with the repeated pealing of twelve church bells, the Blowing of the Shofar, the ringing of Buddhist bells and so on. Accompanying outreach by ClimateKeys will inform the public of our twelve-year timeline.
Places of worship will select one day for their participation on any day during the week commencing April 15th, (with the aim of having as much participation as possible on Monday April 15th, Tuesday April 16th and Wednesday April 17th).
Individuals are asked to participate by forming into groups that gather in selected public spaces. Individuals bring something to bang or ring, such as a small bell or a cooking pot and a spoon. A volunteer leads the group to chant from 1 to 12, while chanters simultaneously ring the bells and beat the pots. After number 12 is reached, there is a pause in the beating and chanting, so the group has a short rest, before the leader starts it up again.
Note: ClimateKeys is a global initiative that has to date triggered over 60 events in 13 countries in which musicians and climate change experts collaborate to lead discussion on action on climate change. Its website is http://www.climatekeys.com/soundingtwelveyears. Please email lola@climatekeys.com to register your interest and ask any questions.
You may wish to ring the Mercy International Centre bell or to share this link to the bell ringing:
Messages to: the MIRP Continuation Group