Hello Everyone!
#WikiForHumanRights: Right to a Healthy Environment 2022 [1]is back! From April 15 through to June 14 2022 we encourage local affiliates, individuals or organizations interested in the campaign to organize activities around the intersecting themes of human rights and the environment.
If you are interested in organizing your community for the campaign, please join us for a conversation hour on December 14 at 1500 UTC [4] (more details below) to learn how you can participate.
Why the Right to a Healthy Environment?
This October, the Right to a Healthy Environment was formally recognized [1] by the United Nations Human Rights Council. According to Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights:
"A safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is the foundation of human life. But today, because of human action – and inhuman inaction – the triple planetary crises of climate change, pollution, and nature loss is directly and severely impacting a broad range of rights, including the rights to adequate food, water, education, housing, health, development, and even life itself."[2]
The environmental crisis is getting more complex. Humanity needs to make thousands of big and small decisions to address it. As the UN Environmental Program described it, we need to make “Peace with Nature”[3] and protect the human rights of the most vulnerable.
Wikipedia and other platforms need to fill the knowledge gaps at the intersection of sustainability and human rights in every context and language. The world needs access to reliable information about the link between environmental sustainability and human rights.
What can you do? Help us organize!
We need your help! The campaign will officially launch on April 15 (one week before Earth Day), but we need your help now to begin preparing this global call to action.
Last year we had 24 community-led editathons, workshops, webinars, and writing contests, with contributions to over 2000 articles in more than 40 languages. To match (and hopefully exceed) these impacts, we need your help to organize your local communities!
Activities related to human rights and sustainability are good topics for local communities to both a) identify new partners, b) recruit enthusiastic participants and c) fill key topics for impact in their own language or context.
Join the Conversation to learn more!
Join us for 1.5 hours of conversation Tuesday the 14th December 2021 15:00 UTC on Zoom [4], to learn more about:
How you can participate in this campaign and organize local events in your community or region.
Which topics this campaign will target, and how you can connect with subject matter experts, partners, and other resources to support successful content creation activities.
How the Wikimedia Foundation Campaigns team can support you in designing your event and doing targeted outreach to potential contributors drawn to these topics.
Organizers can find more information at this (still under development): page on Meta [5]
If you want to join us as an organizer, please join our Telegram Group[6]
If you have any questions send us an email at campaigns@wikimedia.org
Looking forward to hearing you in the conversation,
Ruby Damenshie-Brown and Alex Stinson
[1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/10/1102582
[2] https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=27443
[3] https://www.unep.org/interactive/making-peace-nature/
[4] https://wikimedia.zoom.us/j/84871090509