Climate justice and realizing human rights

• The use of human rights frameworks to ensure accountabilities on climate action from public and private stakeholders has been slowly gaining pace.  Expert legal volunteers and community advocates have long helped advance legal change through strategic litigation on a wide range of rights issues including on environment and climate change. 
• Several global, regional, and national level climate justice movements have surfaced which mainly depend on young volunteers and students to stay active. These range from global climate #FridaysForFuture school strikes to direct civil disobedience campaigns like Extinction Rebellion.
• Volunteering for climate action is not risk-free. With a global and local surge in climate action, many volunteers are being persecuted as civic space shrinks and environmental defenders are being killed in record numbers.

Knowledge and data gathering

• Many volunteers globally are involved in mapping and monitoring climate and environmental data.  These new efforts have been triggered by growing awareness and often enabled by powerful and cheap new mobile and open technologies.
• Mobilizing volunteers to map and monitor environmental data is cost-effective and provides people with opportunities to determine their own priorities for climate mitigation and adaption.
• In addition to data gathering, a number of climate hackathons have been held by public and private bodies in recent years, to address specific issues such as how to support journalists to report on climate stories, to enabling local people to address their own context-specific climate challenges across multiple cities around the world. 
• In the digital space volunteers can also help address the spread of disinformation on climate issues online and particularly on social media.

Participatory policy development

• By tackling global climate challenges, volunteers have a unique opportunity to link up with wider initiatives to give their communities access to new networks and resources. 
• New forms of civic participation around climate action create space for non-partisan dialogue, improving the use of both scientific evidence and citizen perspectives in policymaking.