No, it’s not Spring Break, but next week (Nov. 29th to Dec. 10th) the United Nations Climate Change Conference comes to Cancún, Mexico, where many of the same issues that have been gnashed over at previous conferences will again be dealt with. Those issues, per an article in The Nation last week, are:

Countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany are still contributing an outsize share of carbon to the atmosphere. Countries like India and China are still rapidly increasing their own carbon output. And countries like Bangladesh, Tuvalu, and Bolivia are still bearing an unfair share of the environmental impacts brought on by climate change.

The climate change movement is also beginning to question the wisdom of appealing to politicians and leaders to help resolve climate change issues; building a popular (and populist) movement may be a better strategy. In conjunction to the conference itself, there is also a Cancún Communiqué that “sets out a definitive statement of what the business community expects from the Conference of the Parties 16 (COP16) in Cancún.” The Communiqué is

an initiative of the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change – a cross-sectoral group of major international businesses working with the University of Cambridge to call for more ambitious action to tackle climate change.

Specifically, it calls for action (in the form of financial and policy support) in five key areas:

1. Energy efficiency
2. Low carbon energy systems
3. Emissions capture and storage
4. Increased effort on tackling other GHG emissions such as methane, nitrous oxide, and F‐gases and the impact of black carbon.
5. Urban planning, land‐use management and land use change

The Communiqué has been signed by hundreds of international businesses, large and small. Closer to home, the PrintCity Alliance has announced that it is signing the Cancún Communiqué. Said Rainer Kuhn, Managing Director of PrintCity, in a press release:

PrintCity Alliance members, working in the graphic industry for print & packaging markets worldwide, are concerned about climate change and the way that industries like ours respond to minimise the impact for future generations. Our members individually and working together support the aims of the Cancun Communiqué. We put our name to the document to improve the wider understanding of the issues that face us all across the packaging, commercial and publishing sectors in the graphic industry.

You can download and read the Communiqué here and see a list of current signatories here (links open PDF files). Virtual participation in the Cancún Conference begins here, including official Webcasts, YouTube videos, tweets, and more.