The City of Darebin in Melbourne, Australia became the first government to declare a climate emergency on the 5th of December 2016. This local council made the decision after being encouraged by campaigners behind a Climate Emergency Declaration petition launched in May 2016.
Wales became the fourth country in the world to officially declare a climate emergency when its parliament passed the motion on the 1st of May 2019. The Welsh Government declared a climate emergency on the day before this parliamentary vote.
As of September 2022, at least 15 countries have already declared a state of climate emergency seven years after the Paris Agreement. By May 2022, over 2,100 local governments in 39 countries had declared a climate emergency covering populations amounting to over 1 billion citizens.
Oxford Dictionary defined the term climate emergency as a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it. They chose climate emergency as the word of the year for 2019 after usage soared more than 10,000% between September 2018 and September 2019.
Critics argue that climate emergency declarations emphasize rhetoric without a clear policy plan or funding and fail to deliver emissions reductions at the scale required by climate science. Some scholars warn that framing climate change as an emergency may justify the concentration of power with executive institutions and bypass democratic checks and balances.