Over the past year, Fridays For Future (FFF) has been raising awareness on the urgency of the climate crisis. Polls suggest that the topic is now on the table for a greater audience than it has ever been. Now the time has come to create effective policies to reduce carbon emissions substantially. Politicians are not taking big enough steps and are acting too slow. The Global Shapers Community (GSC) can help transfer the momentum gained on the streets into concrete policy measures by providing contextualized expertise on the political system of respective countries and knowledge into the local chapters of Fridays For Future around the world. That’s why we, as Global Shapers Vienna, started a cross-Hub collaboration project to connect the GSC with the local FFF chapters.

Our vision is to ensure future-proof policy change on the climate crisis by enabling knowledge transfer on an eye-to-eye level between the GSC and FFF. The two youth organisations can then organize events and projects together in order to push for future-proof national policies and also engage on joint EU-wide or international policy campaigns. The involved GSC Hubs are Lisbon, Stockholm, Skopje, Barcelona, Lyon, Munich, Kazan, Ankara, Milano, and Nice. Our Proof of Concept is the Declaration of Climate Emergency at the Austrian Parliament, which was enabled through a Global Shapers Vienna and FFF collaboration.

WHAT? The federal government was requested to declare a Climate Emergency and thus to recognise the climate and environmental crisis, its serious consequences and its mitigation as a task of the highest priority. Eight major measures were agreed on, which were elaborated in cooperation with Fridays for Future Vienna.

HOW? To be able to celebrate this major policy success, it needed the collaboration, knowledge transfer and support between the Global Shapers Vienna Hub and Fridays for Future, in this case the collaboration between two Vienna Shapers former MP Stephanie Cox and Johannes Stangl, as well as the co-founder of FFF Austria.

UPDATE after finalization of the project: