Flood Wall Street climate change protest holds ground in lower Manhattan – as it happened

There’s new pressure on leaders attending the UN climate change summit starting tomorrow to reach a global deal, the Guardian’s Fiona Harvey (@fionaharvey) reports:

Efforts to forge a new global agreement on climate change, kicking off in New York this week, will not repeat the mistakes that dogged the previous landmark climate summit in Copenhagen five years ago, the UN’s special envoy on climate change has vowed.

“This is a different environment to Copenhagen,” Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and now the UN’s climate change envoy, told the Guardian. “Pressure on leaders for an agreement is building up more than 12 months ahead. I think leaders realise they need to have transformative change.”

More than 120 heads of state and government are about to meet in New York, convened by the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, in the hope that a series of personal meetings will allow them to break the stalemate that has marked climate negotiations for most of the last two decades.

It is the first time that world leaders will meet to discuss global warming since the Copenhagen summit. Although that occasion produced the first joint commitments on emissions by major developing as well as developed economies, it was marred by scenes of chaos and recriminations in the closing hours.

Read the full piece here.

If you have an appetite for more granular information from today’s rally, you can scroll through #floodwallstreet on Twitter.

Today’s planned human flood of Wall Street is meant to evoke the flood of water with Hurricane Sandy that filled the area on 29 October 2012.

Here’s what Battery Place, a few blocks West of the protesters’ current location in Bowling Green Park, looked like on Hurricane Sandy night:

Organizers are addressing the possibility – likelihood it seems – of arrest for some protesters.

“We believe we’ll be facing fairly minor charges. And we believe if you’ve never been arrested before, this is the perfect action to join.

A representative of the Occupy Wall Street bail fund speaks next. “This used to be a huge fund,” she says.

Now it’s not so big. If you have friends or family who have resources, and there is bail leverage against you for some reason, we are going to ask that you talk to them first, so that those without resources don’t rot in jail. One more thing. You can help us make the fund bigger. We’re on Twitter @owsbail. You can share our donate link so that we can make the fund huge again to support actions like this and in the future.

Police are creating new barricades and lines of defense in the Wall Street area.

Event organizers are telling the crowd how the group will move.

“In a few minutes, we’re going to form a living river, and we’re gonna flow to Wall St and form a sea of humanity by sitting down together,” an organizer says.

Can we do one mic check? So I want to go over the brief plan. When we’re done here, we will flow out that side and this side. And we’ll form a river right out on the walkway. We’re not leaving right away. We’re getting organized. There will be three groups. The first two are the same. Everyone that’s willing to sit down and stay, and everyone that’s willing to sit down anyway, for just a little bit, and when we need to, those of us will rise up. The very last group are people we’re assuming don’t want to sit down. You still can. But that last group will help support.

We have two code words and three signals. [A discussion of codes and signals ensues.]

One line of critique from today’s march faults capitalism with promoting climate abuses. “There is no clean energy in the capitalist system,” a speaker in Battery Park concludes.

Chris Hedges, the journalist and author, speaks next:

Up that road lies the Emerald City of Wall Street. In that city the wizards of finance profit from the death of the planet. The wizards own the press, the politicians, the courts and the government. No one will stop them but the people. We are the people. This means revolution.

Much cheering and applause. The critique picks up on a theme of yesterday’s march:

Anna Merlan of the Village Voice is in Battery Park:

The @floodwallstreet Twitter account is a good one to follow for updates on today’s march. And below find links to live streams of the event.

Currently demonstrators are rallying at the World War II memorial in Battery Park. The march to the adjacent financial district is scheduled to begin at 11.30am.

Welcome to our live blog coverage of a mass rally in downtown Manhattan to “highlight the role of Wall Street in fueling the climate crisis”. A “flood” of people dressed in blue plan to march to the financial district and conduct a sit-in.

Today’s rally falls on the eve of a United Nations summit on climate change in New York. The Wall Street rally follows a historic demonstration on Sunday in which, according to figures provided by organisers, more than 300,000 marchers took to the streets of Manhattan and 2,700 climate events were held worldwide.

View a slideshow of the people’s climate march in New York here, and view pictures of associated marches around the world here.

“There is a long list of important issues before all of us, but the grave threat that climate change poses warrants a prominent position on that list,” US secretary of state John Kerry said in response to the rally, comparing the threat to terrorism and Ebola.

The Guardian’s Amanda Holpuch (@holpuch) will be reporting from the scene of the Wall Street march, where speakers are to include Naomi Klein, Chris Hedges and Rebecca Solnit. Our US environment correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg (@suzyji) is attending the various events linked to the UN climate week and will be reporting from those. We invite you to follow this blog and join us in the comments section as the day unfolds.