You might've seen a link to this petition to Parliament do the rounds in your feeds lately, urging you to call on our leaders to declare a climate emergency in Australia.

The petition, which closes this week, says that climate change "will be catastrophic for future generations, and so we must act now to minimise both human and environmental destruction."

The number one issue for young people Surprise, surprise, climate change is the issue young Aussies care about the most, according to our survey.

It's actually been the most popular online Parliamentary petition ever, reaching over 300,000 signatures and going well beyond the previous e-petition record set by a call to scrap the tampon tax, which attracted just over 100,000 signatures last year.

So with that in mind, do campaigners have this one in the bag? Will our leaders in the capital be forced to debate this idea, and compelled to do what the petitioners want, given the amount of support it's received?

Well...Nah.

It's unclear how this petition will play out, but technically this petition could amount to absolutely nothing, and a debate on the petition in the House of Representatives certainly isn't guaranteed.

Petitions with 100K+ signatures have to be debated, don't they?

No. In the UK, that's the case. Australia models a lot of our governmental processes off the Brits, but this ain't one of them. There's no magic number for petition signatures to trigger a debate in our Parliament.

In saying that, it's relatively rare for a petition to receive this many signatures - still with six more days left for more Australians to join in. So this one is likely to get a fair amount of attention - if not by the Government, it'll be a big talker for parties like the Greens and Labor.

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What happens when the petition closes?

Once the petition ends next week, it's assessed by the Petitions Committee to make sure it's legit and followed all the rules (which are here, if you're interested).

From there, either the Chair of the Petitions Committee presents it to the House (the Lower House that is, that big green room where your local member sits), or a Member can present the petition instead. If that happens, it could go down with very little fanfare or follow up - an MP can mention the petition, say they're in support of it, but that could be as far as the discussion goes.

Of course, the Government could go ahead and debate the topic and declare a climate emergency - as the petition suggests.

Will that happen though? Time will tell, but declaring a climate emergency is one of the key demands of environmental protesting group Extinction Rebellion, and if you haven't noticed... the government isn't exactly a fan of those guys.

But 300,000 signatures is a lot, right?

As we mentioned before, this petition has more signatures than any other e-petition has ever reached before.

But before e-petitions, Australians used to petition the Parliament the old fashioned way, with pen and paper.

And there's been a few petitions that make this one about a climate emergency look pretty small in comparison.

Like, for instance, the petition in 2014 about the funding of community pharmacies - which attracted the signatures of about 5 per cent of Australians at the time (over 1.2 million people).

Even the price of beer has created more of a petition-signing frenzy than climate change has so far. In 2000, almost 800,000 people signed a petition which called on the prime minister to honour his promise that the price of beer would only rise 1.9 per cent - not a cent more - as a result of the GST.

Will this petition have more impact than one on change.org?

Right now there's a similar petition about declaring a climate emergency in Australia on change.org. It's got a lot of support, too - over 130,000 signatures.

The difference between a Parliamentary petition and one on an independent third-party platform like change.org is that a Parliamentary petition has stricter rules for submission and signatories (you have to be an Australian citizen, for example, unlike on change.org), and it has the ability to be brought to the House of Reps in a formal way.

Put it this way - it's unlikely that a change.org petition would be taken seriously enough to trigger a debate in Parliament.

In saying that, it's kind of not the point - petitions themselves don't tend to create change, they - in the words of Parliament itself, "usually form part of a broader attempt by individual groups within the community to draw public attention to grievances."

In other words, a petition isn't the means to an end, it's usually part of a bigger movement. Signatures are just there to support the cause, make some noise, and gain momentum.

And if you've seen any front page news lately - full of arrests of climate change activists, and extraordinary images of ordinary climate strikers around the world - you'll know that momentum is something that these campaigners have in spades.

We'll have to wait and see how this call for action is received by the government.