I’ve declared a climate emergency, now what do I do?

This was a speech that Aaron Hawkins did by Zoom to the ICLEI (originally the “International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives’) on October 5th 2021. It was in a presentation titled (you guessed it) “I’ve declared a climate emergency, now what do I do?”.

Strangely if you search for ICLEI on the Dunedin Council’s website, you’ll find only three hits and two of them are freedom of information requests (LGOIMA in the local parlance). If you search for ICLEI on the local newspaper since 2017 you won’t get any hits other than those of the writers of comments.

Now that’s really a bit strange as Aaron Hawkins has been Dunedin City Council’s representative to this organization since at least 2016. And since 2020 he has sat on the Oceanic division’s Regional Executive Committee. He even went to the ICLEI conference in Montreal in 2018 which supposedly only cost (very roughly) about $5,000 (source is the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act Request LGOIMA pdf attached…