The People's Climate March, a massive global rally on Sept. 21 in New York City, will lead up to a United Nations summit on the climate crisis.

To date, 1,400 organizations are supporting the mass rally, including nongovernmental organizations, labor unions, grassroots networks, churches and faith organizations. Their members and volunteers will join in the two to three mile march through Manhattan from Columbus Circle, east along 59th Street, down 6th Avenue, west along 42nd Street to 11th Avenue, starting at noon on Sunday.

The march in New York is being held in solidarity with events around the world -- 2,700 climate events are taking place in 158 countries with rallies in Berlin, Istanbul, London, Melbourne, New Delhi and Rio de Janeiro.

"Mass mobilization is one of the best ways we know of to shock the entire system into action. Mass marches don't always work: We weren't able to stop the buildup to the war in Iraq. But they sometimes succeed in historic ways. Take the 1982 anti-nuclear march, which pushed a hawkish Ronald Reagan to strike a deal with Russia and start reducing nuclear warhead arsenals. Or consider the 1963 March on Washington, which helped pass the Civil Rights Act," said Eddie Bautista, New York City Environmental Justice Alliance.

Organizers told The New York Times they are expecting 496 buses from as far away as Minnesota and Kansas to bring marchers, and "students have mobilized marchers at more than 300 college campuses."

The emphasis of the march is to show politicians they need to choose a side, either the people or the polluters.

The Climate Summit 2014 at the United Nations was requested by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon for world leaders to discuss and commit to actions to address climate change and mobilize political will for an ambitious global agreement by 2015 that limits the world to a less than 2-degree Celsius rise in global temperature. President Barack Obama is planning to attend.

The summit is different from the annual Conference of the Parties and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and is being called because of the urgency and seriousness of the climate change situation for the global community and the desire of many for change to happen more quickly.

"The summit is the right moment for us to show our politicians what real leadership looks like. If we can put hundreds of thousands of people in the streets to call for climate justice -- and lift up the voices of the frontline communities most impacted by the crisis -- it could be the shock to the system that we've all been waiting for. It will show politicians that the climate crisis isn't some abstraction, that it's a burning public priority they must address immediately. No more false-promises and fancy-rhetoric; we want real action now," Bautista said.

On Monday, Sept. 22, thousands of people are expected to converge in Battery Park for a demonstration at 9 a.m., and at noon, participants will march to the Financial District to conduct a mass sit-in civil disobedience and risk arrest.

"As so many people come to New York to express their concern about climate change, this sit-in is an opportunity to call for an end to the abusive economic systems that enable corporate polluters," said Sandy Nurse, an environmental activist based in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. "It's time to stop funding fossil fuels and to hold the institutions fueling this crisis accountable."

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