By GREGORY N. HEIRES

DC 37 environmental activists are gearing up for a march on Thursday to protest against climate change and speak up for green jobs.

Hundreds are expected to show up to “Rise for Climate Jobs & Justice,” occurring in advance of the four-day Global Action Summit in California later this month. The summit will bring together leaders and activists from around the world to accelerate action to put the brake on dangerous climate change and fulfill the Paris Agreement on the environment.

“The Rise for Climate, Jobs & Justice will begin at 6.pm. on Thursday, Sept. 6 in Battery Park in Lower Manhattan. It will move north from the park.

One of the march’s aims is to demand that New York elected officials step up the political pressure  to avert a climate catastrophe. Its principal demands of the demonstrators will be to call for:

• a just transition to 100 percent renewable energy now
• a halt to further fossil fuel, and
• forcing corporations to pay for the demage they caused to the environment.

Several unions have endorsed the march, including District Council 37, the New York State Nurses Association, and IBEW Local 3.

The DC 37 Climate Justice committee is coordinating the participation of the district council’s members. For more  information, contact Jon Forster at 4unionnow@gmail.com or text him at 917-539-4584.

Labor groups will be gathering the snack Bar just south of Clinton (the round fort) at the base of Battery Park near the water. They will start gathering at 5:15 p.m.

The summit in California will be held Sept. 12-14. It calls upon governments to step up the fight against climate change.

More than 180 countries that account for nearly 90 percent of the world’s emissions have signed onto the 2015 Paris Agreement, a United Nations-led effort to curb emissions. The agreement will enter into force on 2020.

The Paris Agreement calls for holding the increase of global average temperature to less than 1.5 °C.

The agreement aims to contain the environmental damage caused by climate change and to lower greenhouse gas emissions without threatening food production.

On June 1, 2017, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, angering signers of the accord and grassroots environmental advocates.

Trump said the agreement would cause a “very diminished quality of life” for Americans.  “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” he said..