The Citizens’ Assembly for Climate (ACC), which concluded its work last May, has delivered to the Government its final report of recommendations on how to accelerate the fight against the climate crisis. In this way, the Council of Ministers, at the proposal of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO), takes account of the report and will set out to analyse and evaluate the recommendations in order to study the options that exist to integrate them into government action. Subsequently, it will send it to the Congress of Deputies, as established in Order TED/1086/2021.

The report, published on 6 June 2022, responds to the Assembly’s mandate to draw up proposals to make Spain safer and fairer 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 Climate Change and Energy Transition Law. It has been developed following the recommendations on good practices for deliberative processes developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), such as accountability, representativeness, inclusiveness, transparency, integrity and privacy. Likewise, it was constituted after an independent and random selection process of its members, as a representative sample of Spain on the basis of objective stratification criteria such as age, gender, educational level, geographical origin and residence in urban or rural areas, among others.

Since then, the Assembly worked for seven months, from November 2021 to May 2022, in an exercise of deliberation and learning to generate reflection and collective knowledge, with the aim of strengthening citizen participation and facilitating the adoption of policies in the face of the climate emergency. Therefore, 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.

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 Spain, 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.