The Council of Ministers, at the proposal of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO), has taken note of the report of recommendations of the Citizens’ Assembly for Climate (ACC), which concluded its work last May. The Executive undertakes to analyse and evaluate the recommendations from all ministerial departments in order to study the options that exist to integrate them into government action. It also provides for its referral to the Congress of Deputies, as established in Order TED/1086/2021.
The report, published on 6 June 2022, provides a key social vision of how to accelerate the fight against the climate crisis, which responds to the Assembly’s mandate to draw up proposals to achieve a safer and fairer Spain in the face of climate change. The text has a total of 172 recommendations, framed in 58 objectives and organized into five large blocks or “areas of life”: consumption; food and land use; work; community, health and care; and ecosystems.
ORIGIN, CONSTITUTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE ASSEMBLY
The ACC has its origin in the Declaration on the Climate and Environmental Emergency in Spain of January 2020, which included among its commitments to strengthen participation mechanisms, and which was enshrined in the Law on Climate Change and Energy Transition (art.39.1). An Assembly that has been developed following the recommendations on good practices for deliberative processes prepared by the OECD, such as responsibility, representativeness, inclusiveness, transparency, integrity and privacy.
It was constituted after an independent and random selection process of its members, as a representative sample of a “mini-Spain” based on objective stratification criteria such as age, gender, educational level, geographical origin and residence in urban or rural areas, among others.
Since then, the Assembly has worked for seven months, from November 2021 to May 2022, in a pioneering deliberation and learning exercise in Spain that has opened a new path to strengthen public participation and facilitate the adoption of policies in the face of the climate emergency. It has been an opportunity to listen to citizens and understand where their concerns are and what solutions they propose or need to move forward in a change in habits, production and consumption models, which affects us all.
The call of the scientific community to promote an economic and social transformation to achieve decarbonized and more resilient societies requires an informed society that promotes changes in production and consumption models through its daily behaviors and habits. In this sense, throughout the process, the assembly members had the support of a governance body composed of independent experts, a panel of coordinators, and facilitators to channel the different phases of learning, knowledge, reflection, deliberation and preparation of recommendations.
The participation of the assembly members was carried out under anonymity to guarantee their protection and privacy, and the exercise of their work with total freedom. On June 6, the spokespersons selected by the assembly members themselves delivered the adopted recommendations to the President of the Government.
This Assembly is a first exercise, pioneering in our country, which seeks to serve as a boost to this type of deliberative processes and that can be replicated, as suggested by the Law on Climate Change and Energy Transition, at the regional and municipal level.
All information relating to the Assembly is accessible to the public through its website and on its own networks.
