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Last edited 23 Mar 2023

Global action

Global action means the collective effort of individuals, organizations, and governments to address and solve issues that affect the entire planet. These issues range from climate change and environmental degradation to poverty and inequality. As the world has become increasingly interconnected, global action has become more crucial, greater digitisation has also in many ways facilitated global action, across platforms such a social media.

The United Nations UN, often plays a key role in facilitating global action, establishing various initiatives and programs addressing poverty, hunger, gender inequality and climate change. One of the best known of these initiatives is the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which is a set of 17 goals that aim to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure peace and prosperity for all, they started earlier as the Millenium goals.

In terms of professions relating to construction global action can occur on a professional level across nations supporting specific agendas such as for example climate change mitigation, for example declarations of a Climate Emergency have been made and signed between individal professionals as well as their institutions across different countries.

Governments should also play a critical role in global action, with the power to enact policies and regulations that can have a significant impact on the environment and society, or in the case of war bring sanctions against aggressors. In many cases certain goverments have grouped together over certain areas. The Paris Agreement, was a governmental agreement to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, though the agreed targets have as yet not been met in most cases.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society also play an essential role in global action. NGOs work to raise awareness about global issues and advocate for change. They often work at the grassroots level to empower communities and implement sustainable solutions, for example Greenpeace or the WWF.

Civil society groups, including youth groups and social movements, are also important drivers of global action. They use their collective power to push for systemic change and hold governments and corporations accountable for their actions, for example most recently in the Fridays for Future movement where school children held school strikes across the globe to push for government action on climate change.

Less formal organisations develping from within civil society can also develop into more extreem and sometimes illegal activities to disturb the norm, carrying out what is increasingly referred to as direct action, distrupting travel plans, or construction projects can also play a role in global action, for example Extinction Rebellion.

Marches, strikes and demonstrations are historically relatively common, with the onset of globalisation these can become global demonstrations occuring concurrently in many major cities. These events often bring a variety of the above groups together for a single cause such as climate change.

In conclusion, global action is essential for addressing the issues that affect the entire planet, either formally or informally, organised or ad hoc, and in most cases legallly but not always. Global Action requires the collective effort of individuals, organizations, and governments sometimes with differing agendas, needs, understandings and methods, but with the combined and in simple terms goal to change something for the better, globally.