A few years ago, the world was on a path to ending coal, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel and the single biggest contributor to carbon dioxide emissions. Active and sustained campaigning brought coal closer to the point of death and the world to a coal-free future.

Several developments made this evident. One, the shrinking of the pipeline of new coal and the shutting down of hundreds of coal projects across the globe. Two, the commitment of 44 governments to end the construction of new coal plants and cancellation by a further 33 countries of new coal projects. Three, the shifts in the policies of several public financial institutions and private banks to either wind down or immediately end coal financing. And four, the emergence of cheaper renewables that downgraded new investments in coal as a costly mistake.

Since 2015, more than half of countries with coal power have reduced or kept their operating capacity flat. In addition, announced, pre-permit, permitted and construction coal capacity was reduced by 68% globally. From 2015 to 2021, changes in the global pipeline of proposed coal power plants showed a 76% collapse in coal construction.

Fossil fuel transition back in draft pact for UN Summit of the Future after outcry

There was broad consensus that coal power generation must be rapidly phased out to reduce emissions significantly and, consequently, the risks and impacts of climate change. Anti-coal campaigns hounded corporations on the terrible economics of coal-based energy. They successfully pressured hundreds of firms to stop financing or pull back investments in coal or issue policies to limit exposure to coal. They also made coal uninsurable.

A litany of research and analysis of the implications of coal combustion on climate targets echoed the pressure. According to a 2021 report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, coal phase-out must take place in advanced economies by 2030 and in the rest of the world by 2040. An assessment model exploring the implications of the 2C temperature limit has found that, globally, over 80% of current coal reserves should remain unused from 2010 to 2050 to meet the 2C target.

Conflict boost for coal

Despite all of this, coal is rising again today, driven by demand growth and operating capacity increases in developing and emerging economies. Global coal use and capacity rebounded in 2022 and grew to an all-time high in 2023. Total global capacity in pre-construction also increased by 6% in 2023.

The demise of coal, as it turns out, is a lot of gas, literally and figuratively.

Climate campaigners marched to Mendiola Street, near Malacanang Palace in Manila, on Sept 13, 2024, calling out the Philippines energy department and President Marcos for allowing coal expansion despite a 2020 moratorium. The protesters demanded an end to new coal and rapid phaseout of all coal by 2035. (Photo: APMDD)

The failure of governments to rapidly shift to renewable energy is key to coal’s staying power. The energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine triggered a buying frenzy for coal and gas, driving prices to record levels. Asian countries increased coal production to secure energy supply. Some European countries brought mothballed coal-burning power plants back online or removed caps on production at coal-fired plants.

No wonder fossil fuels still dominated global energy demand in 2022, with coal holding 35% of the share in the power sector. This, despite a massive renewables growth of 266 gigawatts – the highest growth ever – bolstered by solar and wind.

Asia is the hotbed of both coal resurgence and fossil gas expansion. China, India and Indonesia already account for more than 70% of the world’s coal production. India and China, both of which have adopted aggressive renewables targets, are substantially using more coal and are poised to increase their coal use significantly in the coming years.

Finance flows to fossil fuels

The world’s top commercial banks are mainly responsible for the global flow of funds for new coal in Asia. These banks are headquartered in rich countries like the US, Canada and the UK that have not built a new coal plant within their countries for years. At the same time, major Asian banks are now playing a growing role in coal expansion in the region. Having weak or non-existent exclusions on coal, these banks are creating new coal financing “havens” in the region.

The same is true for the flow of finance for the gas build-out. The major players are the world’s top commercial banks, major Asian banks and public financial institutions. Japan’s megabanks and state-bank Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) lead the world’s biggest financiers of Southeast Asia’s gas expansion.

EU “green” funds invest millions in expanding coal giants in China, India

Over 60% of global gas-fired capacity in development is based in Asia. Governments are pursuing the gas build-out to ostensibly meet growing energy demand while turning away from coal. Current gas expansion plans in Southeast Asia could lead to a doubling of gas-fired power capacity and an 80% increase in LNG import capacity. This would lock the region into an economically volatile fuel that is dangerous for people and the climate.

Alongside the planned expansion of gas power, coal’s resurgence will be massively detrimental to climate goals. It also draws investment away from the transition to renewable energy. Coal and gas will not deliver affordable, reliable, sustainable and clean energy in Asia, where millions suffer from energy poverty.

Renewables have become the cheapest and fastest-growing source of electricity worldwide, with annual capacity additions more than doubling from 2015 to 2022. We must replace coal with renewables – not with dirty, inefficient, volatile energy sources like gas.

On September 13, climate activists are holding mobilisations in over 50 countries on all continents calling for a fast, fair and funded phase-out of fossil fuels and the delivery of climate finance. These kick off a Global Week of Action for Climate Finance and a Fossil-Free Future ahead of Climate Week NYC (September 22-29) when world leaders assemble for the UN General Assembly and the first UN Summit of the Future where they will agree a Pact for the Future. For details of the actions: https://payupandphaseout.org

The post The demise of coal, as it turns out, is a lot of gas appeared first on Climate Home News.

The UNFCCC has tweaked the algorithm used to allocate badges to observer groups this year in response to requests from governments to address a long-standing imbalance in the global representation of participants from civil society, academia and indigenous communities.

Attendees from rich industrialised countries have historically formed the biggest contingent of observers at the COP climate summits. Half of all observers at COP28 in Dubai last year hailed from a bloc of Western European nations, the US, Canada and Australia, even though countries in that group represent only 12% of the world’s population.

UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell wrote this week in a foreword to a handbook for observers that “we need the COP process and participation to reflect the fact that the climate crisis is hitting communities in every part of the world”.

Campaigners in the Global South have welcomed the reforms, while some green groups in the Global North quietly expressed surprise and disappointment over hefty cuts to their allocated quotas and the way the changes have been implemented.

Mohamed Adow, director of Nairobi-based think-tank Power Shift Africa, said “finally we are getting a fairer distribution of observer badges”.

“It’s only right that people from countries that are most vulnerable to the climate crisis are able to attend the meetings that are supposed to address their needs,” he added. “For too long, the vast majority of COP badges have been held by people from a small part of the world but with disproportionately high emissions.”

Racquel Moses is the CEO of the Caribbean Climate-Smart Accelerator, which aims to modernise infrastructure through supporting projects like a solar panel assembly facility in Trinidad and Tobago.

She told Climate Home her organisation usually gets three badges but this year received six. “In past years, we had to rely on the generosity of other organisations for support with passes,” she said, “this year at COP, we finally have the ability to be adequately represented”.

Stela Herschmann said that Climate Observatory, the Brazilian think-tank she works for, has “for the first time received a number of credentials close to what we requested”.

She said that “no matter how many badges we requested” in previous years, they only got one or two. But this year, they asked for eight and received seven.

“I believe that this year we will see more Global South involved in the negotiations,” Herschmann said.

Letter of complaint

Some Global North groups, however, have been stunned by the scale of the changes and the impact on access to the climate summit for their staff. Climate Home is aware of several climate organisations with a historically large presence at COPs that have so far received just a handful of COP29 passes or, in more extreme cases, only one badge each.

Joseph Robertson is the head of the US-based Citizens’ Climate International, which trains volunteers to lobby their political representatives. He leads a joint delegation with partner organisations which usually gets about 12 badges, some of which it passes on to campaigners from the Global South. But this year, it got just two badges and so has had to rethink its plans for the summit.

A spokesperson for the UNFCCC told Climate Home that the “Western European and Others Group” was given 40% of the total number of observer badges in the initial allocation for COP29, made in August.

A US-based academic who is a coordinator for the Research and Independent Non-Governmental Organizations (RINGO) constituency – one of the largest groupings of observers – voiced their concerns in a letter sent to Stiell at the end of August and seen by Climate Home.

UN climate chief calls for “exponential changes” to boost investment in Africa

It said that while RINGO appreciates efforts towards achieving “a more diverse and balanced representation” at COPs, the “drastic reduction” in badge allocations for Global North groups “has significant unintended impacts that undermine” that goal.

The letter argued that many groups use their allocations to bring young people to COPs and that organisations headquartered in the Global North provide badges to colleagues based in developing countries.

The letter went on to say that restricting observer quotas could prompt more NGOs to seek attendance passes from government delegations, known as ‘party overflow’. That would put countries “in position of controlling NGO access” and undermine the openness and transparency of negotiations, the RINGO coordinator warned.

The letter calls on the UNFCCC to revisit the quota allocation for COP29 and provide transparency in the process.

UN appeal for “global solidarity”

The UN climate body did not comment on the specific content of the RINGO letter. But a spokesperson told Climate Home “this will continue to be a gradual, iterative and difficult process”, and the UNFCCC secretariat “values any feedback from all stakeholders and will keep looking for ways to improve this process”.

They added that, as some organisations are now applying for an increase in their initial allocation, “the final breakdown of participants by geographic grouping won’t be known for some months”.

The Baku Olympic Stadium will be the COP29 venue (Photo: Matteo Civillini)

In the handbook for observers, published after the RINGO letter had been sent, Stiell pleaded with organisations affected by the changes to support the re-balancing efforts “in a spirit of global solidarity which is so crucial to success, at all levels”.

He also pointed out that the overall number of observer badges had to be cut this year due to a reduction of space at COP29. The summit hosted by Azerbaijan at Baku’s “Olympic Stadium” is expected to be smaller than last year’s gathering in Dubai, which saw a record-breaking 84,000 people attending. A member of Azerbaijan’s COP29 organising committee told Climate Home in April they were expecting around 40,000 people.

The changes to the quota allocation followed an explicit request from countries to the UNFCCC – formulated at June’s mid-year climate negotiations in Bonn – to “continue taking administrative measures to encourage a more diverse representation of observer organizations”.

Update: This article was updated on 9/9/2024 to include Stela Herschmann’s comments and on 10/9/2024 to include Joseph Robertson’s comments and on 11/9/2024 to include Racquel Moses’s comments

(Reporting by Matteo Civillini and Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)

The post Bigger share of COP29 badges for Global South NGOs upsets rich-country groups appeared first on Climate Home News.

In question is a proposed development called the Energy Transition Zone (ETZ), which is intended to bring in more renewable energy investments as the city tries to cut its dependence on the oil and gas industry that has defined it for half a century. 

As the UK’s new Labour government promises not to issue any more oil and gas licences, the future of the sector is in doubt and the company behind the ETZ says it wants to “protect and create as many jobs as possible” in the region through investing in clean energy.

But the ETZ has received significant pushback from community groups in the part of Aberdeen it is destined for. That’s because the proposed development, as currently designed, would pave over about a third of St. Fittick’s Park in Torry, the only public green space in one of Scotland’s most neglected urban areas.

The battle over St Fittick’s Park illustrates the friction that is emerging more frequently around the world as the ramp-up of clean energy infrastructure changes communities. Climate Home has reported on these tensions provoked by Mexico’s wind farms, Namibia’s desert hydrogen zone, Indonesia’s nickel mines and Germany’s Tesla gigafactory.

Just transition?

The ETZ is backed by fossil fuel giants BP, Shell and local billionaire Ian Wood, whose Wood Group made its money providing engineering and consulting services to the oil and gas industry.

The plan is to create campuses focused on hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, offshore wind, and skills development in an area initially the size of 50 football pitches, but expanding as private investment grows. 

To this end, ETZ Ltd – the company set up to build and run the zone – will receive up to £80m ($103m) from the UK and Scottish governments. Announcing some of that funding in 2021, the Scottish government’s then net zero, energy and transport secretary Michael Matheson said “urgent, collective action is required in order to ensure a just transition to a net-zero economy”, adding “Scotland can show the rest of the world how it’s done”.

But many Scottish climate campaigners don’t see this as a just transition. About 100 of them travelled to St. Fittick’s Park last week to hold a five-day “Climate Camp” in a clearing that would become part of the ETZ.

One camper, who did not want to give her name, told Climate Home that the energy transition should not “exacerbate existing inequalities, but try to redress existing inequalities”. A just transition, she said, must protect both workers in the fossil fuel industry and community green spaces.

Another protestor who did not want to giver her full name is Torry resident Chris. She said “the consultation process was flawed”. Not many people participated to start with, and some stopped going to meetings because “they were disillusioned with the way that good ideas were co-opted and then used to justify the expansion of the industrial area into the park”, she added.

Green MSP Maggie Chapman at the Climate Camp on 13 July (Photo: Hannah Chanatry)

Local Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) Maggie Chapman, from the Scottish Green Party, agreed, adding “the best transition zone plan in the world will fail” if it is done to a community rather than with meaningful input from them.

Another protesting resident, David Parks, said wealthier parts of the city would not have been disregarded in the same way. “You wouldn’t see this in Old Aberdeen and Rosemount,” he said. “[Torry] is just kind of the dumping ground for all these projects that you wouldn’t get off with anywhere else.”

Industrial developments have encroached on the old fishing town of Torry for decades. Today, residents are hemmed in by an industrial harbour, roads and a railway and live alongside a waste-to-energy incinerator, a sewage plant, and a covered landfill. 

David Parks at the Climate Camp in St. Fittick’s Park on 13 July (Photo: Hannah Chanatry)

Some of the activists also take issue with the emphasis the ETZ places on hydrogen and carbon capture and storage, which they see as “greenwashing”. 

Hydrogen is a fuel that can be made without producing greenhouse gas emissions, and used to decarbonise industries like steel-making which are difficult to clean up.

But a Climate Camp spokesperson told Climate Home that, “given the industry’s tendencies” and the fact that 99% of hydrogen is currently made using fossil fuels, they assume it will be produced in a polluting way at the ETZ.

Backers respond

ETZ Ltd told Climate Home in a statement that the project is committed to collaborating with the local community, particularly on efforts to refurbish what would be the remainder of the park. 

While the ETZ’s opponents argue there are existing industrial brownfield sites in the area that could be used instead of the park, the company said the area in St. Fittick’s Park next to the port is essential for the development to draw in substantial investment for renewables and for Aberdeen to compete in a new energy market.

Many brownfield sites are already planned for use by the ETZ, and would not provide the kind of logistical access needed for the planned projects, they added.

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“Almost all other ports in Scotland are making similar investments, and we simply don’t want Aberdeen to miss out on the opportunity to position itself as a globally recognised hub for offshore renewables and the significant job benefits this will bring,” said the statement.

The company added that the original plans for use of the park had been considerably reduced and the new master plan includes several measures to revitalise parts of the park and boost public access. It includes several parklets, a boardwalk, enhanced wetlands and a skate and BMX bike park.

While the oil industry’s backing has raised campaigners’ eyebrows, ETZ Ltd said the industry’s involvement is key to ensuring the development of skills and jobs central to the ETZ’s goals. 

The section of St. Fittick’s Park  up for development was rezoned in 2022 by the Aberdeen City council in order to allow industrial use of the land. Campaigners have challenged that decision and Scotland’s highest civil court will issue a judicial review later this month.

“You can’t just switch it off”

The ETZ dispute is just one example of efforts across Scotland to navigate the planned shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Tools to support a transitioning workforce have stalled. An offshore skills passport is meant to streamline and unify the certification process for both the fossil fuel and renewable offshore industries, to enable workers to go more easily from one sector to the other. But it was delayed for years before a “roadmap to a prototype” was released in May this year.

“The people can see a future, but it’s not happening – and they can see the current reality, which is [fossil fuels] declining, and that makes it very challenging,” said Paul de Leeuw, director of the Energy Transition Institute at Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University. 

He said the focus needs to be on manufacturing and the supply chain, as that supports about 90% of employment in renewables such as solar and wind power. “If you don’t get investment, you don’t get activity, you don’t get the jobs,” he added.

That’s the key concern for Alec Wiseman, who spoke to Climate Home while walking his dog in St. Fittick’s Park on Saturday. He seemed mostly unbothered by the climate camp, but complained it meant he couldn’t let his dog off leash. 

Alec Wiseman walks his dog in St. Fittick’s Park on 13 July (Photo: Hannah Chanatry)

A Torry resident, Wiseman worked offshore for 25 years. He said he wants the ETZ to leave the park alone – and he also wants the overall energy transition to slow down until there is a clear plan.

“The government needs to sit down with the oil companies and figure out something proper” for both the transition and the ETZ, he said, expressing scepticism about employment in wind energy. Overall, operating wind farms, once they’re up and running, does not require as many skilled workers as operating an oil and gas field. “You can’t just switch it off [the oil and gas],” he said.

Lack of planning is what worries Jake Molloy, the recently-retired regional head of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers Union (RMT). Before leading the union, Molloy spent 17 years working offshore, and now sits on Scotland’s Just Transition Commission. He has spent years advocating for a fair deal on behalf of workers and local communities.

“We need to do that value-sharing piece, that community-sharing piece, which was lost with oil and gas,” he said, referencing the privatisation of the industry in the 1980s. Right now, he says, communities that bear the brunt of the impact of oil and gas production don’t see the majority of the benefits – those flow to corporations. “If we allow that to happen again, we’re a million miles away from a just transition,” he warned.

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Molloy also thinks the investment and jobs promised by the ETZ are not realistic, because previous changes to government policies caused too much whiplash, making investors shaky. However, he is curious about what will come from Labour’s announcement of Great British Energy, described as a “publicly-owned clean energy company” headquartered in Scotland.  He also hopes to see climate change addressed on a crisis footing, similar to the approach to the COVID pandemic.

There are indications of renewed momentum on renewable energy in the UK. The Labour government has already lifted an effective ban on onshore wind in England and brought together a net-zero task force led by the former head of the UK’s Climate Change Committee,  Chris Stark. 

“In the context of an unprecedented climate emergency,” the ETZ said in a statement, “there are widespread calls from government and industry for energy transition activities to be accelerated.”

But, for many, it is still too soon to know whether that shift will materialise, and be implemented in a just way.

“The opportunities are there,” said MSP Chapman. But, she added, “it requires political and social will to make it happen and that’s the big challenge.”

(Reporting by Hannah Chanatry; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

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Earlier this week, the factory – which employs around 12,500 people and produces 1,000 EVs per day – was reconnected to the electricity grid after a costly power outage caused by a March 5 arson attack on a nearby pylon, claimed by far-left activists. 

 Now it faces protests from around 80 climate campaigners belonging to the “Tesla Stoppen” (Stop Tesla) initiative who set up a camp in late February inside 100 hectares of state-owned forest land that Tesla wants to buy and clear for its expansion.  

Annika Fuchs, a mobility expert with German climate justice group Robin Wood, told Climate Home she and others occupying the Grünheide forest – who could face eviction from Friday onwards – support local residents’ rejection of the factory expansion in a February referendum.  

“We want to make sure that we reduce the amount of cars that we have here in Germany, and really focus on public transport as the solution for the future,” she added.  

Both Tesla Stoppen and Grünheide inhabitants issued statements condemning the sabotage of the pylon by the leftist “Volcano Group”, but the incident caught the attention of the German media and has fuelled debate around the potential for EVs to fight climate change.   

On the day of the pylon attack, Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted on X, the social media platform he owns: “Stopping production of electric vehicles, rather than fossil fuel vehicles, ist extrem dumm” [is extremely stupid]. 

This week, Musk visited the factory after operations had resumed there, wearing a black T-shirt that read “We are (Giga) the future”, and shouting “Hey, Deutschland rocks! Dig in Berlin for the win!” as he headed back to his car.  

Tesla did not respond to a request from Climate Home for comment on opposition to its factory expansion plans. 

Water and mineral wars  

Tesla’s German gigafactory has been a controversial project even before it began operations in early 2022. Key political figures, eager to bring jobs and tax revenue to the area, have supported the company but local people and climate activists are more sceptical. 

Arguments on both sides highlight the contested nature of “green capitalism”. Backers of EVs see them as the best way to cut emissions from fossil fuel-driven transport, while critics decry their energy-intensive production process and the negative environmental and social impacts of battery supply chains for minerals and metals like lithium.  

The factory is located five kilometres south of Grünheide, a small town about an hour southeast of Berlin by train. Concerned about its impacts, residents formed a citizen’s initiative that monitors Tesla’s actions in the region. 

A general view shows the new Tesla Gigafactory for electric cars in Gruenheide, Germany, March 20, 2022. REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

German newspaper Stern reported last month that local water authority officials warned Tesla repeatedly that phosphorus and nitrogen levels in the wastewater from its factory released into the nearby River Spree, which flows through Berlin, were found to be six times higher than permitted limits. 

Tesla has suggested that concentrations of pollutants in its wastewater are higher because the company reuses water. Tesla’s VP of public policy and business development, Rohan Patel, responded to the claims on X by pointing out that Tesla recycles “up to 100%” of its industrial water, and that the gigafactory uses 33% less water per vehicle than the industry average. 

Locals in Grünheide also fear that their drinking water sources may become contaminated if groundwater levels drop too low.   

Grünheide is surrounded by lakes and waterways, but as in large swathes of Central Europe, droughts in recent years have left groundwater levels at record lows. Tesla, meanwhile, has become one of the region’s biggest water users. According to German newspaper Tagesspiegel, Tesla used just over 450,000 cubic metres of fresh water last year – although this is less than a third of the amount it was allotted in an agreement with the local water board.   

Opponents of the proposed gigafactory expansion note that it would extend the factory into in a water protection area.   

At the entrance to the Tesla Stoppen camp, a tall banner hanging from the trees reads “Water is a human right”. Activists at the site told Climate Home that securing the region’s water resources is a key concern – one that also applies further afield. 

Photos of South American lithium salt flats hang in the Tesla Stoppen protest camp in the Grünheide forest, Germany, March 10, 2024 (Photo: Paul Krantz)

Photographs of South America’s lithium salt flats are hung around the camp, flagging how lithium mining drains water resources from arid regions in Chile, Bolivia and Argentina.  

“We see that water injustice and climate injustice are caused by the same reasons. It’s big companies exploiting resources,” said protestor Lamin Chukwugozie.  

Stephen Musarurwa, a climate justice advocate from Botswana, said in a speech delivered at a Tesla Stoppen demonstration on Sunday that conflict and environmental damage in the Democratic Republic of Congo is being exacerbated by mining for EV battery components.   

“We have communities that don’t own a single electric car, but the amount of destruction is beyond humanity,” he said.  

Climate activist Lamin Chukwugozie plays piano at in the Tesla Stoppen protest camp in the Grünheide forest, Germany, March 10, 2024 (Photo: Paul Krantz)

Climate protesters ‘repressed’  

The protest camp at Grünheide was initially given permission to remain until March 15, after which local police could move in to evict its occupants.  

A police spokesman told the German Press Agency (DPA) it was considering how to deal with the camp but did not say when a decision was expected. Tesla Stoppen is organising workshops to prepare activists on how to respond to an eviction should it happen. 

Many of the camp’s members have also been involved in other environmental direct-action movements in Germany, such as the occupation of the site of a lignite coal mine in Lützerath, which attracted Greta Thunberg and other high-profile youth activists in early 2023 and ended in clashes as the site was cleared by riot police and bulldozers. 

Here, and before that at the Hambach Forest, campaigners living in tents and treehouses spent years resisting police evictions to stall the expansion of brown coal mines in west Germany – winning a commitment in early 2020 that the Hambach Forest site would not be developed.

In both Lützerath and Hambach, activists reported widespread and brutal police violence used against them. According to a report released this week by global civil society alliance CIVICUS, climate activists face growing restrictions in Germany – as in many other industrialised nations.   

“Germany has a reputation of being a country with high protest freedoms, but what we’ve noticed is that not all protests are being treated the same,” Andrew Firmin, who leads climate activism research for CIVICUS, told Climate Home. “Climate protests in particular are being targeted and repressed with excessive force.”  

Resistance growing   

In Grünheide, as the sun set over the forest after Sunday’s demonstration, Sulti, a Kurdish refugee who did not want to give their full name, admired a wooden platform they and other activists had suspended in a tree about six metres off the ground. Sulti planned to sleep up on the platform, which would be given walls and a roof in the coming days. 

Sulti said protestors had come to Grünheide aiming to abolish companies that exploit natural resources and defend shared commons like the forest. “We are trying to build a utopia, and to show people that it’s possible to live in a collective, and to not let the capitalist system push us all into individualism,” the activist said.  

Kurdish refugee and protest camp participant Sulti poses in front of a banner at the Tesla Stoppen protest camp in the Grünheide forest, Germany, March 10, 2024 (Photo: Paul Krantz)

Sulti is not afraid of potential confrontation with the authorities, saying: “We are the seed, we are the soil, we are the land, and we will keep growing and growing.”   

Chukwugozie pointed to how the climate justice movement has shown it can learn and rebuild after struggles like Lützerath, in which he also participated. “We come back in different places and continue to fight from the ground up,” he said. 

Editor’s note: On March 19, an administrative court in Germany rejected a police application to end the camp’s right to legal assembly which had asserted the tree-houses built by protesters were dangerous. After the court decision, the activists said they plan to remain in the forest until at least May 20, DPA reported.

The post Tesla EV gigafactory drives Germany’s latest climate justice struggle  appeared first on Climate Home News.

When I attend climate policy events it’s rare to meet another humanist. Most of the experts are either scientists or at the very least studied the social sciences.

This divide between the sciences and humanities must be challenged in climate advocacy spaces. We need more humanists in climate spaces because we have so much to contribute to the pursuit of a just and sustainable world. 

The lack of humanists in climate activism is because of prevailing disciplinary silos between science and the humanities.

Climate change is woven into our educational systems around the world almost entirely via science, technology, engineering, and maths (Stem) subjects. 

This is a missed opportunity to integrate climate education through a multi-disciplinary approach that fully engages all students with various strengths.

“I hug you deep inside my heart”: In memory of Khalil Abu Yahia

As a student of history and literature, my education is often seen as frivolous in climate advocacy spaces.

However, my humanities background informs my work on social issues and the climate crisis.

As I study modern human history, it’s obvious to me that we’re experiencing the climate crisis because our societies value profit over people and the planet.

France, Kenya set to launch Cop28 coalition for global taxes to fund climate action

Systems like colonialism and capitalism, that exploit workers,  extract fossil fuel at the expense of ecosystems.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change only recently acknowledged the role of colonialism in the climate crisis, a relationship some historians and Indigenous scholars have known for years.

Without proper forethought, new green technology can easily reinforce the inequality that brought us here in the first place. And in some cases it already has.

For example, carbon credits justify the dispossession of indigenous peoples’ land and devastating mining practices destroy communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo for minerals used in green technology. 

Total is disrespecting graves in East Africa as it pursues pipeline

Humanists remind us that these recent developments are part of a greater legacy of inequity.

The amazing innovations that scientists and engineries are creating in fields like green technologies and renewable resources are just one part of the equation.

We must also transform how we collectively think, eat, value and live.

For scientists to create the technology of the future we must first decide what kind of future we want this technology to be in service of.

UK aid cuts leave Malawi vulnerable to droughts and cyclones

Humanists can contribute to expanding our collective imagination to create that future.

Humanities can link science with the multidimensional nature of social challenges and culture.

This will inform green technology implementation, international policy, and campaign strategies geared towards sustainability and equity.

Some humanists have already begun this important path through the study of environmental humanities and related fields.

Scholars like Karl Jacoby, Leah Aronowsky, Elizabeth Mary DeLoughrey, and Amanda J. Baugh are doing critical work in this field.

They investigate how the environment is understood and constructed in relation to people, and how these understandings shape our actions and ideas.

Indigenous scholars, like  Emily Johnson, Anne Spice, and Robin Wall Kimmerer have a long history of linking environmental studies and cultural studies.

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They highlight pluriversal, instead of universal, approaches to just and sustainable communities.

Unfortunately, the larger field of environmental humanities is only recently emerging and is underfunded and overwhelmingly White.  

We desperately need diverse academics and centers dedicated to making these connections and sharing that scholarship with the public.

Well-resourced climate scientists and leaders must also invite environmental humanities scholars in as experts and leverage their power to create multi-disciplinary policy approaches.

Argentine rewilding debate descends into legal threats

We all come from people who have lived on this Earth for millennia, so we all have unique ecological histories, cultures, and spirituality to rediscover.

Kwolanne Felix is a climate and gender equity advocate and works at the New York University State Energy and Environmental Impact Center. 

The post We need more humanists in climate campaigning appeared first on Climate Home News.

Non-binary campaigners told Climate Home News they would not attend Cop28, which starts on 30 November, or were wavering due to the host country’s record.

Non-binary foreigners have been detained at the UAE’s borders and deported and non-binary Emiratis have reported difficulties expressing their gender in public 

Rani is a non-binary Pakistani who works for an umbrella group of NGOs on climate issues. They are grappling with whether to attend the talks or not.  

Rani read reports from 2022 that Thai trans model Rachaya Noppakaroon was detained at Dubai airport because her passport had a male gender marker. She endured a nine-hour interrogation at the airport before being sent back to Thailand. 

Slow start for Indonesia’s much-hyped carbon market

Rani fears something similar will happen to them as their  passport identifies them as non-binary.

That’s an option in her native Pakistan as well as several other South Asian nations and developed countries like the USA and Australia.

In January, Pakistani newspaper Dawn reported that two Pakistanis with this identification stopped over for a layover at Dubai airport but were denied boarding for their onward flight just 15 minutes before takeoff.

One of them, Zehrish, told Climate Home at the time that the state-owned airline FlyDubai cited the UAE’s immigration policy when refusing them boarding.

‘I am numb’

The UAE has no explicit policy addressing the entry restrictions for gender non-conforming individuals but Zehrish said that fact was no help to them in practice

Rani, who also missed out on Cop26 in the UK because of problems getting a visa unrelated to their gender identity, told Climate Home they were disappointed.

“I just don’t know how to feel anymore,” they said, “I am numb. No matter how hard I work in life, something will be there to prevent me from going further, from helping my community, from helping myself.”  

James is a young non-binary climate activist from the Pacific island of Tuvalu who has attended many summits but will stay away from this one.

“Climate negotiations are very important to me and my whole nation,” they said, “but I will not be going for this. I am uncertain about the risks that are involved and cannot justify these risks”..

France, Kenya set to launch Cop28 coalition for global taxes to fund climate action

James said they had spoken to young people from the UAE about “intersectional aspects of activism and it is warming to know that many young UAE citizens are not like the government – though I am sure I am only interacting with a certain demographic online”.

Unwritten rules

Climate Home spoke to a non-binary person who has lived in the UAE their whole life. They empathise with the challenges faced by queer, non-binary visitors navigating unfamiliar laws just to exist in the UAE.

“We who grow up here know how to ‘fit in’—for lack of a better word… it is about knowing the nuances of how to be here, unfortunately,” they said.  

They added that the “unwritten rule” is that you can do whatever you want in private but you can’t be “too loud” in public. ” If you cannot do that or don’t know how to, it will be impossible to exist here,” they said.  

All sexual acts outside of marriage are illegal in the UAE and same-sex marriage is not allowed, effectively criminalising gay people. Breaking this law is punishable with at least one year in prison. 

The United Arab Emirates government and FlyDubai did not respond to requests for comment.

The post Fearing repression in Dubai, non-binary people stay away from Cop28 appeared first on Climate Home News.

An investigation by the fund’s independent complaint mechanism found a series of failures that could “cause or exacerbate” violent conflict between indigenous people and settlers.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) will not provide any money to the project managed by Nicaragua’s authoritarian regime until it fully complies with the fund’s rules, its board ruled at an annual meeting in July.

This marks the first time the GCF board puts on hold an approved project over human rights concerns. The decision comes at the end of a process that took more than two years since a coalition of local and international NGOs filed a complaint.

But the fund stopped short of entirely scrapping the project, as local activists requested. The Nicaraguan government now has the chance to make it compliant with the GCF rules.

A GCF spokesperson told Climate Home that the matter “has received, and continues to receive, its highest attention”. They added that the fund reserves the right to exercise its legal rights in case the issues are not addressed to its satisfaction.

Human rights abuses

The project, which was approved in 2020, aims to reduce deforestation in the Unesco-designated Bosawás and Rio San Juan biosphere reserves in the Caribbean Region of Nicaragua.

The region is gripped by an increasingly violent conflict between indigenous communities and settlers, who are grabbing land to exploit the forest’s resources and farm cattle.

Independent legal observers have documented repeated attacks against indigenous people in the area with dozens of people murdered, kidnapped or raped over the last few years.

A report by the internal redress body said the complainants’ concerns that the project may fuel further violence were justified.

It also found the project had been approved even though it did not comply with a series of GCF’s policies and procedures. Investigators highlighted the failure to carry out due diligence on conflict risks and human rights violations and to conduct free and informed consultations with indigenous communities before the project’s approval.

The EU-Mercosur trade deal will harm Brazil’s indigenous communities

These failures “may adversely impact the complainant(s) and other indigenous communities in the project areas”, the report said.

A GCF spokesperson said the fund was not aware that the development of the funding proposal was not in compliance with its policies at the time of the project’s approval. New evidence brought to light subsequently through the independent investigation showed that some of the information presented by the project proponent, as part of its due diligence, was not accurate or correct, the GCF added.

Bittersweet ruling

Nearly a year after the investigation was concluded, the board has now requested the GCF Secretariat, its administrative arm, to put the project on hold until it respects the fund’s policies and procedures.

The ruling’s summary does not specify if all of the issues raised through the complaint mechanism will need to be addressed.

Pressure grows on governments and banks to stop supporting Amazon oil and gas

The result is bittersweet for the groups behind the complaint.

Florencia Ortuzar, a lawyer at the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA), says that, even if the outcome may ultimately be positive, the decision gives no clarity as to what process the Secretariat will follow. “We do not know which specific issues of non-compliance will be looked into nor how they will aim to fix them”, she added.

Calls for cancellation

Amaru Ruiz, director of the Nicaraguan organisation Fundación del Río, says the ruling validates indigenous populations’ concerns, but he believes the programme should be axed rather than simply improved.

“A project that violates human rights, consultation processes and a series of procedures should be cancelled”, he told Climate Home News. “The problems are substantive, not just formalities”.

The GCF Secretariat will now need to work with the Nicaraguan state apparatus and the Central American Bank for Economic Integration, its funding partner on the project, to resolve the issues.

The government of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega has been accused of widespread human rights abuses. Photo: Presidencia El Salvador

The government led since 2007 by president Daniel Ortega has been responsible for “widespread and systematic human rights violations that amount to crimes against humanity”, according to the United Nations Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua.

Ruiz claims the Nicaraguan regime does not have the political goodwill to play within the rules. “It is only after the financial resources, so I believe it will try to show on paper that the project is now compliant even if that is not the case”, he added. “We will see if the Secretariat acknowledges its previous mistake and will make sure regulations are properly applied now”.

Lack of transparency

The complainants’ worries are compounded by what they described as a lack of transparency during the lengthy redress mechanism.

Investigators concluded the reviews in August 2022 but their findings have only been made public now following the completion of the complaint process. The GCF’s board members discussed the report during three separate meetings before making a final decision nearly two weeks ago.

The discussions happened behind closed doors and public updates on the case were limited. This prompted some complainants to criticise the process as “unfair, non-transparent and deficient”.

G20 divisions over key climate goals pile pressure on Cop28 hosts

Aida’s Ortuzar told Climate Home News “this is especially concerning as it is the first time a complaint reached the board and it sets a worrisome precedent”.

The report by the redress mechanism also raised concerns over the way the GCF relies heavily on information submitted by project proponents to make decisions on whether to fund them.

“This leaves the GCF extremely vulnerable to policy and safeguards non-compliance that can result in huge reputational risks to the fund”, the investigators wrote.

The article was updated on 27/07 to include comments from the Green Climate Fund received after publication

The post UN climate fund suspends project in Nicaragua over human rights concerns appeared first on Climate Home News.

The label is equivalent to a ban on the group’s activities in Russia.

On Wednesday, the prosecutor-general had accused WWF-Russia of presenting “security threats in the economic sphere”. It said WWF had waged “tendentious” campaigns against the energy, oil and natural gas industries, which it said were aimed at “shackling” Russia’s economic development.

WWF-Russia had already been labelled a “foreign agent”, a designation that carries connotations of spying. The tag has been applied widely to civil society groups, with the effect of further crushing citizen-led activism, already under broad pressure from authorities.

WWF International said its Russian branch had operated as a “non-partisan national organisation, fully governed and managed by Russian citizens working towards the preservation of the biological diversity of the planet”.

WWF began working in Russia in 1989 and has been involved in major projects to protect endangered species such as Siberian (Amur) tigers, polar bears and European bison.

The organisation said it regretted being accused of posing a security threat, and that “conservation of our natural world is vital, particularly as the climate and biodiversity crises accelerate around the world”.

WWF’s fellow environmental group Greenpeace was banned in Russia last month. WWF Russia said it would no longer use the WWF acronym or panda logo.

The post As Moscow labels WWF “undesirable”, WWF Russia cuts ties with group appeared first on Climate Home News.

The two lawsuits, heard today in Strasbourg, accuse the governments of France and Switzerland of breaching the human rights of their citizens by not doing enough to cut national emissions.

It is the first time climate change has come before the European Court of Human Rights, but is unlikely to be the last.

The lawsuits were filed by a former French mayor and a group of Swiss seniors, all of whom argue that their governments have breached their rights to life and to respect for private and family life under the European Convention on Human Rights.

The judgements could set a “pivotal” precedent for climate action, campaigners told Climate Home News, as they could make states take more ambitious climate action as part of their human rights obligations.

International Court of Justice to advise states on climate duties: ‘A turning point for climate justice’

Elders facing extreme heat

In the first case, an association of 2,038 older women called the KlimaSeniorinnen, as well as four individual applicants, argue that they are particularly vulnerable to climate change.

They presented evidence to the court that older people – particularly women – are more likely to die during heatwaves.

The group, which has an average age of 73, first petitioned the domestic courts for action but its case was dismissed.

Switzerland does not dispute that climate change is real and could affect human health. But the government’s legal team told the court its carbon emissions could not be directly linked to the health of older women and said they were not the only ones affected.

Furthermore, it maintained that its existing climate targets and policies are sufficient and said it should not be asked to do more if it was not technically and economically feasible.

Jessica Simor, a lawyer representing the KlimaSeniorinnen, said Switzerland itself had never assessed the fairness of its climate targets and policies, pointing to independent research by Climate Action Tracker that deems the country’s current efforts ‘insufficient’.

Vidéo : Audience Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz et autres c. Suisse https://t.co/fFghE94vTl | Video: Hearing Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and others v. Switzerland https://t.co/LQsm3aMC56#ECHR #CEDH #ECHRhearing pic.twitter.com/JSJASyX5em

— ECHR CEDH (@ECHR_CEDH) March 29, 2023

Switzerland currently aims to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions by 34% by 2030, which is lower than its formal international commitment of cutting “at least 50%” of all greenhouse gas emissions by the same date.

In 2021, the Swiss government held a referendum to align its domestic target with the more ambitious 50% cut, but voters rejected it.

Marc Willers, a barrister representing the KlimaSeniorinnen, told the court that blaming the referendum was “plainly a bad argument” and claimed Switzerland was responsible for its violations “irrespective of how they came about”.

The KlimaSeniorinnen want Switzerland to cut its domestic emissions by above 60% below 1990 levels by 2030, which they say is more in line with similar nations and the EU itself.

Willers said Switzerland’s approach undermined global trust and efforts to combat climate change. If a nation as rich and technologically advanced as Switzerland does not do its fair share, he argued, “what hope is there that other countries will step up?”

Climate victim?

In the second lawsuit, against the government of France, the former mayor of the commune of Grande-Synthe argues that he is personally vulnerable because his home is at risk from flooding.

Damien Carême, now a green MEP for France, had also brought a domestic case against France to the country’s top administrative court. In 2021, the court ordered the government to act immediately to meet its climate commitments, or risk potential fines.

But Carême is challenging the French court’s assertion that he is not directly affected by the country’s failure to take sufficient action on climate change.

Revealed: How Shell cashed in on dubious carbon offsets from Chinese rice paddies

The French government contends that Carême should not be considered a victim under the law and asked for the case to be struck out.

Diégo Colas, director of legal affairs at the French foreign ministry, told the court that France had recently enhanced its emission reduction measures and compliance with its objectives was already being scrutinised by the domestic courts.

New cases coming

The 17-judge panel will now consider its ruling, which is not expected until next year.

In the meantime, the court will hear a third climate case, filed by six Portuguese young people against 32 countries, including all EU member states, Norway, Switzerland, the UK, Ukraine and Turkey, which has been scheduled for the autumn.

The group, now aged between 11 and 23, claims that government inaction on climate change discriminates against young people and poses a tangible risk to life. It refers in particular to forest fires that killed more than one hundred people in Portugal in 2017 and which were worsened by climate change.

Gerry Liston, senior lawyer at Global Action Legal Network, which is supporting the Portuguese case, said the lawsuits gave the court “power to direct a major acceleration in European action on the climate crisis”.

Sébastien Duyck, human rights and climate campaign manager for the Center for International Environmental Law, described the hearings as a “pivotal moment” in the fight against climate change and said the resulting judgments would be carefully monitored by governments and civil society organisations around the world.

“They have the potential to set an influential legal precedent that would further confirm that states must take more adequate action against climate change as a matter of their human rights obligations,” said Duyck.

If the court finds human rights have been breached, it could open the floodgates to similar litigation before the European Court of Human Rights and national courts in all member states of the Council of Europe, said Annalisa Savaresi, associate professor in international environmental law at the University of Eastern Finland.

NOTE: Expenses for attending the court hearing were supported by a grant from the Foundation for International Law for the Environment

The post European court hears landmark lawsuits that could shape climate policy appeared first on Climate Home News.

Seo-kyung is now a 21-year-old adult but the court has still not made any decisions about the case. “As individuals, there is not much we can do that is different from before,” she told a press conference on Monday. “I earnestly hope that the constitutional court can play a role while there is still something that can be done.”

In the three years since the lawsuit was filed, the Korean government and the national assembly have announced a target to be carbon neutral by 2050, passed a climate change law and strengthened the country’s nationally determined contribution under the UNFCCC.

The government is currently working on its first detailed carbon neutrality strategy, as required by the legislation, which is expected to be published at the end of the month.

Vanuatu gathers support for UN climate justice statement

But campaigners are not satisfied. Climate Action Tracker deems the country’s progress “highly insufficient”, saying it lacks the necessary speed and stringency needed to be compatible with Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C temperature limit.

Most of Korea’s emissions come from the energy sector, which is highly dependent on fossil fuels for electricity generation. In 2021, the country was the third largest gas importer in the world, behind China and Japan.

Climate lawsuits

Youth4Climate’s petition in 2020 argued that the Korean government wasn’t doing enough to curb rising global temperatures and to protect their basic constitutional rights, including the right to life and pursuit of happiness, from the effects of climate change.

The group’s lawyers have sent ten further submissions to the constitutional court since, adding new information to their case. Among other things, they drew the court’s attention to landmark rulings in the Netherlands, Ireland, France, and Germany, all of which have recognised government responsibility to address climate change.

Yoon Se-jong, a lawyer for Plan 1.5 and one of the main legal representatives for the Youth4ClimateAction case, says German justices visited their Korean counterparts last November and climate litigation was one of the key topics under discussion.

A further three climate lawsuits have also been filed challenging the constitutionality of the government’s emission-cutting commitments. One, submitted last year, was fronted by a group of small children and what was then a 20-week-old foetus.

Swift ruling

Becoming increasingly frustrated at the court’s silence, Youth4ClimateAction campaigners delivered a letter earlier this week urging it to make a “swift ruling”, which was signed by more than 200 legal professionals from Korea and abroad.

Signatories included Baek Bum-seok, professor at Kyung Hee University and a UN Human Rights Council advisory member, and So Byung-cheon, president of the Korean Environmental Law Association and a professor at Ajou University Law School.

Legal professionals from France, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Nepal also voiced their support, including Roda Verheyen, a lawyer involved in Germany’s landmark climate lawsuit.

Sejong said the delay was understandable given the gravity of the issue and the implications the court’s decision could have on Korean policy and law. “But what we are really emphasising is that every month and year we lose is a lost opportunity for litigation that we really, really need. Leaving this question to the political process is not going to be enough.”

Chinese coal boom a ‘direct threat’ to 1.5C goal, analysts warn

Youth climate campaigners filing the case who had initially been buoyed up by the idea of taking legal action were despondent at the press conference.

“When I first learned about the enormous problem of climate change, I felt that I had to do something, and I participated in the climate lawsuit with the hope of making a practical change,” said Oh Min-seo, a 17-year-old from Chuncheon city.

“However, over the past three years, as I witnessed people dying in unprecedented floods and the Soyang River drying up due to the worst drought, my fears about climate change became more tangible, and the feeling of powerlessness has been accumulating in my heart because politics and law don’t seem to exist for our benefit.”

Their legal team seems more optimistic. Sejong noted that abortion was only decriminalised in Korea two years ago only after the constitutional court deemed it was infringing people’s rights.

‘Fundamental obligation’

In December, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea said the government had a “fundamental obligation” to protect human rights from the climate crisis and must actively respond to it. “It is necessary to set higher national greenhouse gas reduction targets and also to set reduction obligations for the post-2030 period to protect the basic rights of future generations,” it concluded.

Lucy Maxwell, co-representative of the Climate Litigation Network, noted that the lawsuit was the first of its kind in East Asia and said it offers “a really important opportunity to clarify the governmental obligations to protect constitutional rights in the face of the climate crisis”.

She said affected communities and even courts in other countries would be looking to the court for a judgment.

The post Lawyers and activists build pressure on Korean court to rule on climate appeared first on Climate Home News.

As Cop27 starts in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, guests Eric Njuguna, Eva-Peace Mukayiranga, Mamadou Sylla and Sam Okorie talk about why loss and damage is a hot topic.

An environmentalist and climate finance negotiator in the UNFCCC, Eva-Peace Mukayiranga works to advance the needs and priorities of vulnerable countries in terms of climate finance and loss and damage within the international/National fora. In addition, she focuses on scaling up climate action and education on the ground toward a transition to a green economy within the Local NGO_The Green Protector. Eva is the co-founder/training working group coordinator of the Loss and Damage Youth Coalition.

Mamadou Sylla is an environmental activist from Senegal and a member of ASAN, a non-government organization working on the protection of nature and the promotion of sustainable tourism. Founding member and president of Naturefriends UGB in 2019, the local branch of ASAN in Gaston Berger University, he is currently serving as an advocacy coordinator for the Loss and Damage Youth Coalition.

Eric Njuguna is an organizer for Fridays for Future Kenya, consultant at Unicef, and director of international affairs at Kenya Environmental Action Network.

Samuel Chijioke is the founder of the Youth For Today Initiative and leads the POP Nigeria Initiative (on climate education).

In this episode, the young environmental advocates share their personal experiences fighting for climate justice and why this work is important to them. They sign off the show by sharing their Cop27 strategy that begins today and their demands for loss and damage. Enjoy the Show!

The post Hali Hewa episode 7: Youth talk loss and damage appeared first on Climate Home News.

At least 67 people have been arrested in Cairo and other cities over the past few days, according to the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, in relation to a protest against economic conditions planned for 11 November.

Around Sharm el-Sheikh, the Red Sea resort hosting the conference, security officers are carrying out random ID checks, according to sources on the ground. Egyptians who cannot show formal proof of work or residence are being sent back to their birthplaces. Some have waited six or seven hours at checkpoints around the city, only to be turned away.

While the government has released more than 660 prisoners as part of a “national dialogue”, prominent Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah remains in jail.

His sisters Mona and Sana’a Seif are leading a campaign from the UK to secure the release of el-Fattah and other political prisoners, while the global spotlight is on Egypt.

“Cop27 is our first opportunity for a long time to push for whatever improvements we can get on human rights and particularly push to get as many unjustly detained people out of prison as possible,” Mona Seif told a Twitter Space organised by Human Rights Watch.

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El-Fattah and Seif played prominent roles in the 2011 revolution, when Egyptians rose up in protest against poor economic conditions and political oppression. The movement eventually overthrew president Hosni Mubarak.

Mohamed Lotfy, executive director of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF), described El-Fattah as “an iconic figure who inspired millions of Egyptians” who is now “on the verge of dying”.

El-Fattah’s health is deteriorating after 280 days of hunger strike, his allies report. Earlier this week, he said he would escalate the strike and stop drinking water from 6 November, when the Cop27 summit starts.

If the Egyptian authorities refuse to release him, “a catastrophe is about to happen,” Lotfy warned. “I fear this is going to unleash a lot of anger from the international community, from Egyptians and from everybody participating in Cop27.”

Ajit Rajagopal setting off on his march to Sharm el-Sheikh in Cairo before his arrest (Photo: Ajit Rajagopal/ Facebook)

At least one Cop27 delegate has been caught up in the crackdown.

On Sunday, Ajit Rajagopal, an Indian activist from Kerala, was arrested after setting out from Cairo on a solo climate march to Sharm el-Sheikh. He was questioned and detained without food or water for 24 hours along with his friend, human rights lawyer Makario Lohzy. The pair were released without charges and Rajagopal aborted his march.

The major international event comes as Egyptians are again suffering from a cost-of-living squeeze. Annual inflation reached 15% in September, according to Egypt’s central bank. The Egyptian pound is dropping in value and the government fixed the price of bread.

Seif said the security vetting in Sharm el-Sheikh had become “extreme” and workers had been told not to leave their homes after working hours. “The Egyptian presidency is trying to make sure that whoever is visiting and attending Cop27 does not come in contact with Egyptians,” she said.

Every year, political oppression intensifies around 25 January, the anniversary of the 2011 revolution, said Seif. “The reality every Egyptian living under [president] Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is fearing is the moment Egypt got its PR stunt from Cop27 and all the international community and world leaders left and went back to their country, enormous violence will be unleashed on Egyptians.”

The Egyptian government and the Cop27 team have been invited to comment.

The post Egypt clamps down on activism and undocumented workers ahead of Cop27 appeared first on Climate Home News.

I am only 25 years old but my people have been living in the Amazon rainforest for at least 6,000 years. I follow our ancient traditions that allow us to live in harmony with nature and protect the rainforest in which we live.

When corporations look at my home in the Amazon rainforest, they don’t see the intricacies of the trees’ roots, the way they weave their way in and out of rich soil. They don’t pay attention to the sound of raindrops as they hit leaves, small and large. They do not see a land capable of sustaining life on Earth, a land that needs protection, a land that is sacred. Instead, they see commodities. 

Today, my peoples’ mission to protect nature is becoming impossible. The climate is warming rapidly, the animals are disappearing and the flowers are not blooming like they did before. 

And when we try to protect our environment from the powers that be, we are bullied, harassed, and sometimes even murdered.

Germany, Italy moot support for gas export facility in Argentina

My childhood friend, Ari Uru-eu-wau-wau, was murdered for protecting the forests from illegal loggers, farmers and miners. His story is shared in a documentary I helped produce called The Territory. It was co-produced by the Indigenous Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau people and chronicles their struggle to defend the land on which Ari and his ancestors have lived for millennia. 

The murder of British journalist Dom Phillips and indigenous expert Bruno Pereira in the Amazon is not an isolated case. It’s a tragedy that there are so many other cases like this..

My husband is also a journalist based in the Amazon and he has received death threats for reporting on illegal activities. My father, my mother and so many of my friends also face regular intimidation and threats for defending their ancestral land. 

The justice we are calling for extends beyond those holding the guns that are killing Earth defenders. We want Brazil’s leaders whose actions or lack thereof, are allowing this violence to go rampant, to be held to account too. 

Since President Jair Bolsonaro took office in Brazil three years ago, his administration has made it a priority to weaken environmental protections. The government agency supposed to protect Indigenous Peoples’ rights, was turned against us. This has resulted in grim records for deforestation in Brazil. 

Campaigners call on António Guterres to rescue ‘imperilled’ biodiversity deal

Despite the  government’s pledges at  Cop26 to end and reverse deforestation by 2030, the Brazilian Amazon saw a 64% jump in deforestation in the first three months of 2022 compared to the previous year – which was already up from the year before that. 

Although international  pressure from companies and countries which buy agricultural products from Brazil has increased, we cannot ignore the fact that several multinational corporations are still profiting from the anti-environment and anti-indigenous legislation being pushed in Brazil.

That’s why my father, the great Chief Almir Suruí, together with Chief Raoni Metuktire of the Kayapo people, presented a formal request to the International Criminal Court in The Hague last year to investigate what is happening in Brazil. They are demanding that those responsible are held accountable for crimes against humanity. 

As we wait for a decision, we wonder: will our  evidence be taken seriously? Will the countries that promised to uphold human rights and protect the Earth keep their word? How many more will be killed in a senseless war on the environment and those who protect it before things change?

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And much like we must protect  peoples’ rights, we need to defend the ecosystems that support us. This is why I am calling on the international community to request the International Criminal Court to recognise the crime of ecocide. Courts around the world have long claimed that they want to fight environmental crime. Now they have the chance to turn their words into actions and recognise the attacks against my home in the Amazon for what they are: ecocide.

I ask world leaders, especially from the Global North: Have you given up living on Earth? Why do indigenous peoples have to protect more than 80% of the world’s biodiversity with so little support while the rich dream of  colonising other planets? 

The mistakes that have brought us to this climate crisis are a heavy burden. But you cannot run away from it. We can still fight! Join us and support indigenous land defenders. 

I have been raised with the understanding that in order to live harmoniously on this planet we must listen to the stars, the moon, the wind, the animals and the trees. We must listen to the Earth. She is speaking and her message is clear: we have no time to waste. 

Txai Suruí is an Indigenous leader and activist from the Brazilian Amazon. She leads the Rondônia Indigenous Youth Movement and the Kanindé Association and is the executive producer of the award-winning documentary The Territory.

The post My people have lived in the Amazon for 6,000 years: You need to listen to us appeared first on Climate Home News.

As the southeast Asian country is finalising its much-delayed 2030 power development plan, including a shift away from coal, Japanese and South Korean industries are pushing the government to call for new investments in gas infrastructure, according to analysis by InfluenceMap.

Operating largely through business groups, these foreign companies are lobbying Vietnamese policymakers directly and pushing the government to allow and fast-track new liquefied natural gas import infrastructure.

Yuna Chang, who led the research, told Climate Home: “These foreign players are actively taking advantage of this moment of climate transition to make a place for their own gas industry.”

The report comes days after environmental and anti-coal activist Nguy Thi Khanh was sentenced to two years in prison on Friday after being arrested and detained on tax evasion charges since. She is the fourth environmentalist to be sent to prison on similar charges in recent months.

Nithi Nesadurai, director and regional coordinator of the Climate Action Network South East Asia (Cansea), of which Nguy Thi served as chair, said she had been imprisoned “as part of an effort to silence dissent from environmental groups”.

Vietnamese environmental and anti-coal activist Nguy Thi Khanh (Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize)

Influence Map’s report published Tuesday analysed the engagement on climate policy in Vietnam of six Japanese companies, five Korean companies and eight industry groups.

It found that the industry is pitching gas as a solution to Vietnam’s energy needs – one that can support decarbonisation without compromising economic growth.

This tactic of pitching gas as a solution to the energy transition, energy security and economic development is part of a wider “playbook” to promote gas across Asia, it adds.

While the country has seen a huge uptake in solar and wind energy since 2018, Vietnam has the largest planned gas expansion in South East Asia, with 56.3GW in pre-construction, construction or in development stages.

InfluenceMap’s research found a significant increase in industry references to LNG as a “low carbon” solution to Vietnam’s energy transition goal.

In 2019, just 11% of corporate statements in favour of LNG reference the “low-carbon” argument. That rose to 85% after the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, UK, when Vietnam announced a goal to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and pledged to phase out coal-power generation by 2040.

“That’s when we see a huge explosion of messaging from the gas industry that… is trying to frame itself as the low-carbon alternative to coal,” said Chang.

Analysis by Carbon Tracker shows that solar and wind are cheaper investments than gas, with large untapped potential for offshore wind. Boosting gas investments will further cause consumer energy bills to rise and leave infrastructure stranded.

The report doesn’t focus on domestic lobbying for gas and fossil fuels in Vietnam because of  increasing sensitives and associated risks of speaking out against the government on environmental issues.

Campaigners say powerful vested interests have made activism extremely risky in the country. Several activists and analysts based in Vietnam refused to speak to Climate Home about these recent developments, even under the cover of anonymity.

International campaign group Climate Action Network called for Nguy Thi’s release, arguing that the charges were a pretext to prevent her from doing her work.

Nguy Thi was awarded the prestigious Goldman Prize for her work highlighting the costs and environmental impacts of coal power and partnering with officials to accelerate the roll out of renewable alternatives.

“Her arrest has already had a chilling effect on other environmental civil society groups advocating for environmental protection and addressing the effects of climate change, on behalf of the Vietnamese people,” said Nesadurai.

In the last six months, activist Bach Hung Duong, journalist Mai Phan Loi and campaigner Dang Dinh Bach, have all been sentenced to prison for similar tax fraud. The latter two worked for a network monitoring how the EU-Vietnam free trade agreement impacts land rights and environmental strategies.

The US State Department called on the Vietnamese government to release Nguy Thi and “other detained environmental activists working for the benefit of Vietnam and its people”.

Ibrahim Thiaw appointed interim UN Climate Change head

Born into a rural family in Bac Am, a village in northern Vietnam, Nguy Thi grew up near a coal plant and experienced first-hand the pollution from the plant.

In 2011, the Vietnamese government published its 2011-2020 Power Development Plan, which predicted a massive increase in energy demands. In response, the government called for 75,000MW of coal-fired power capacity to be built by 2030.

The same year, Nguy Thi founded the Green Innovation and Development Centre (GreenID) to promote green energy in the country and established the Vietnam Sustainable Energy Alliance, a coalition of international and local NGOs working on energy issues.

Her research showed that projected energy needs would be more modest than government projections and worked to reduce the amount of planned coal capacity.

Her advocacy led to the government’s publication of a revised plan with reduced coal capacity and a goal of 21% of renewable power in the energy mix by 2030.

The post Japanese and Korean industry push gas on Vietnam amid campaigner crackdown appeared first on Climate Home News.

Arshak Makichyan, 28, became Russia’s most visible climate activist after he embarked on solo protests in Moscow’s Pushkin Square with a sign that read “Strike for climate”, inspired by Swedish youth activist Greta Thunberg.

But the risks Makichyan was taking were far greater than youth activists in Europe.

At the end of 2019, he was arrested and sentenced to six days in prison for taking part in a demonstration without permission. Individual protests are lawful in Russia but anything bigger requires police permission.

After Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February, Makichyan turned his energy into calling out Russia’s brutal war. As the crackdown against Kremlin critics intensified, he left Russia for Berlin in Germany.

Now, prosecutors in the Moscow region are accusing him of illegally becoming a Russian citizen  and are seeking to remove his sole citizenship in a case which opened on Thursday.

“They want to cancel my citizenship because of my activism,” he said in a video posted on social media, describing the case as “impossible”. “But they can’t silence me,” he added.

My name is Arshak.
I am 28 in years old. For 27 of those years, I have lived in Russia. I graduated from school, and then from the Moscow Conservatory. My wife is Russian. 1/8 pic.twitter.com/tQQ3Lv66co

— Arshak Makichyan (@MakichyanA) June 6, 2022

Makichyan was born in Armenia, a former republic of the Soviet Union, and moved to Russia with his family in the mid-1990s when he was one year old.

At the time, people who arrived in Russia from former Soviet Union countries were granted a residency permit. He became a Russian citizen in 2004.

“I thought it was impossible to cancel my citizenship because I don’t have any other,” he told Climate Home.

The case against him could leave him stateless and make it much more difficult for him to return to Russia.

In a letter outlining the charges, seen by Climate Home News, prosecutors in the city of Shatura, east of Moscow, claim that the migration services lost some of his files and therefore cannot prove his citizenship application was done according to the law.

In a second charge, they claim his request for citizenship in 2004 was made using “false” documents, namely that he allegedly did not live at the address mentioned on his application.

The letter states that an inspection of the house carried out at the start of May deemed it to be “unsuitable for living” and that no-one had ever lived there.

“These arguments are insane,” lawyer Olga Podoplelova who is representing Makichyan in court on behalf of the Russian human rights project The First Department, told Climate Home.

Podoplelova said the accusations were “unfounded” and that all due process was followed in Makichyan’s application for citizenship.

“This is such an absurd case that in a normal jurisdiction we would not face such accusations. There are indications that this case is being politically motivated,” she told Climate Home.

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A music graduate from Moscow’s Conservatory, Makichyan has dedicated his life to his activism.

His efforts to build a climate movement in Russia despite the country’s prohibitive anti-demonstration laws have led to him being detained several times.

“We were the first climate movement in Russia and we built this climate awareness from almost nothing,” he told Climate Home.

On 24 February, the day Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Makichyan married fellow Russian activist Polina Oleinikova “for political reasons”. If one of them was arrested and sent to prison, the other would be allowed to visit, he explained. “Fuck the war” was written in red ink on the back of his white shirt.

“If you are doing activism in Russia you should be prepared to go to prison,” he said, adding: “We couldn’t even celebrate because we went straight to an anti-war protest.”

Russian activists Polina Oleinikova and Arshak Makichyan on their wedding day (Photo: Arevik Harazyan)

The next day, Oleinikova was arrested and detained for preparing an anti-war action.

In the weeks that followed, Makichyan continued to organise anti-war protests and spread information about Russian atrocities in Ukraine.

“I was trying to be useful for the country and for everyone,” he said.

He called for an embargo on all Russian fossil fuels, describing European sanctions on Russian coal and oil as “far from nearly enough” for failing to cover gas. Since the war started, the EU has paid Russia an estimated €60bn ($64bn) for fossil fuel imports.

“They are continuing to finance this terrible regime and have been doing so for years while Russia’s civil society is oppressed,” he said.

In the face of growing oppression against those daring to speak out, the couple decided to leave the country for some time and travelled to Germany.

In Berlin, Makichyan doesn’t know what the future holds. The next hearing in his case is scheduled for 27 June. His visa to Germany expires at the end of the month.

In Europe, “I don’t think I am a danger [to Putin]. I am not Navalny,” he said in reference to the Russian opposition leader who was poisoned in August 2020.

Makichyan said he believes his case is being used to “scare” and “intimidate” other non-Russian-born Russians and prevent them speaking against Putin’s war on Ukraine.

“I am very grateful to everyone who is not silent in these difficult days,” he said.

The post ‘Politically motivated’: Russian authorities seek to remove climate activist’s citizenship appeared first on Climate Home News.

Climate Home has spoken to three activists from two countries who were unable to travel to Stockholm because their visas were not processed in time. All three travelled long distances and spent lots of time and money applying. Two are now unable to return to their home country as their passports were sent to Nairobi for processing.

Issa Sesay is the secretary general of Fridays for Future Sierra Leone. His father and brother died in 2018 mudslides linked to climate change and deforestation. Sesay was invited to speak on a panel in Stockholm where he would tell world leaders about the catastrophic aftermath of that disaster.

Instead, he and his colleague Roseline Isata Mansaray have spent ten days in Nigeria’s capital city of Abuja, travelling daily between their hotel and the Swedish embassy in order to try and get a visa. They are likely to miss the conference entirely.

“We are really stressed and disappointed at the Swedish government,” he said. “We feel discriminated [against] as Africans by the European people.”

Issa Sesay campaigns against deforestation

Fridays for Future Nigeria activist Esther Oluwatoyin is in a similar position. She travelled from her home in Ogun state to the Swedish consulate in Lagos. She applied for her visa on 12 May and spent $90, despite Sweden saying conference delegates would be exempted from an application fee.

She was told that applications usually take 15 days but those for this event would be prioritised. Twenty days later, she has not received her visa and has now missed her flight. “It’s only Africans that are being denied a visa. For that, I was really furious and disappointed,” she told Climate Home.

Esther Oluwatoyin speaks to school students

All three activists’ passports were sent from Nigeria to the Swedish embassy in Kenya’s capital Nairobi. When Climate Home emailed this embassy, an automatic reply said they had a “longer handling time” because May-July is their peak season.

Sesay and Mansaray are unable to return home to Sierra Leone because they do not have their passports. Sesay said they had spent $600 on travel, Covid medicine and the visa application fee, which they can’t afford. The average annual salary in Sierra Leone is $476.

On Twitter, other African activists said they had given up trying to attend. A Gambian youth activist said they travelled to Senegal to apply for a visa and spent three weeks there. “Please cancel my visa application and give me my passport as I do not have the money and energy to stay in Senegal for another day,” they wrote in an anonymised letter shared by Extinction Rebellion Gambia.

Kenyan activist Nyombi Morris tweeted: “I gave up on Stockholm+50, its like UN as the organiser never bothered alerting the embassies to simplify the procedures…for youth delegates”.

Me i gave up on stockholm +50, its like UN as the organiser never bothered alerting the embassies to simplify the procedures…for youth delegates #ActivistsNotValued

— Nyombi Morris (@mnyomb1) May 29, 2022

Maldivian-Swedish activist Lubna Hawwa said that his organisation’s delegate from Zimbabwe had been unable to secure a visa appointment on time. “Clearly there is a gap between Foreign Ministry’s promises and practice,” he tweeted.

The Swedish foreign ministry said that youth involvement was a “priority” and they government “has done its best to facilitate visa applications”.

It said that it was “naturally very unfortunate” that “some participants will not be able to attend because they lack a visa”. They added: “Many visa applications were received at a very late date, which means that not all of them will be approved”.

The spokesperson said: “Sweden must also respect the requirements that EU legislation places on processing visas, including that applications must be complete”. When asked if they had looked into these specific cases, whether they would provide compensation and when the activists could expect their passports back, they did not immediately respond.

The Stockholm+50 summit on 2-3 June marks the anniversary of the seminal 1972 Conference on the Human Environment. Dignitaries including the US’ John Kerry, India’s Bhupender Yadav, Canada’s Steven Guilbeault are expected to attend, along with representatives of business and civil society.

Activists from developing countries, particularly in Africa, have faced similar challenges attending previous climate conferences. At Cop26 in the UK last year, a Peruvian activist was detained by border guards at the airport, who were apparently not aware that delegates had an exemption from Covid rules that applied at the time. Quarantine requirements prevented many developing country delegates from attending.

There are fears that activists and delegates from low-income countries will be excluded from Cop27 in Egypt this year too, after hotels hiked their prices for the November event.

Giza Gaspar Martins, a climate negotiator from Angola, said high accommodation prices had always restricted African participation at the climate talks but that he never heard of a minimum price-setting scheme.

This article was updated to add in the Swedish foreign ministry’s response and to correct Oluwatoyin’s home state from Oyo to Ogun.

The post ‘Furious and disappointed’: African activists excluded from Stockholm+50 summit appeared first on Climate Home News.

As Cop president, the UK made adaptation a priority, establishing a two-year Glasgow-Sharm el-Sheikh work programme on a global adaptation goal and a target to balance adaptation financing with mitigation financing by 2025. There was substantial participation on behalf of the adaptation community, albeit largely online and outside the negotiating rooms.

These conversations have carried on, for example at this week’s online Gobeshona Global Conference, creating opportunities to make progress before Cop27 in Egypt.

The rising significance of adaptation is underpinned by one key fact: the impacts of climate change are here now and set to escalate. However, despite feeling hopeful at times, the most recent climate negotiations still failed to match words about loss and damage, resilience, and adaptation with actions to actually protect the most affected people and areas.

After US fails to pay its debt, UN’s flagship climate fund warns of austerity

While negotiators have only belatedly started thinking about how best to create the conditions to build greater climate resilience, communities, including our own, have already been doing this for decades.

In Bangladesh, we have been forced to build our resilience by enduring yearly cyclones among other natural disasters and to develop survival techniques like growing vegetables on water, rainwater harvesting, water ambulances, floating schools, and procedures for early warning and evacuation.

Similarly, shack-dwellers globally have learned to build and rebuild their homes in the face of climate disasters. For many the question is not whether the roof over their heads will blow away, but rather when, and how often.

The injustice of climate impacts means the strongest resilience – ‘survival resilience’ built on compound crises – is developed by the world’s poorest communities. It is often informal and deeply local. Crucially, it is not fixed or static, due to the unpredictability of climate change impacts. International agreements require mechanisms that reflect this uncertainty.

They must also ensure that practical, local techniques and indigenous practices are coupled with external intervention. With only 10% of climate finance currently supporting locally-led adaptation, and just 2% reaching the most affected communities, we remain a long way from giving those experiencing the most significant climate-related disruption what they need.

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Yet, the voices of those with the most knowledge to contribute to the discussion on adaptation and resilience continue to be pushed to the fringes of the Cop process and often go unheard worldwide. How can negotiations about the future remain inaccessible to those with the biggest stake?

A summit cannot truly deliver positive outcomes for youth, women, and indigenous people without their meaningful participation, yet at Cop26 they were outside being pushed back by police while big corporations were in the delegations.

The current system, based on the burning of carbon, resource extraction, exploitation of people in informal work and settlements, and concentration of vast amounts of capital, operates by locking out those who need the system itself to change for their survival. If the voices of those people had been given as much importance as those of 500+ fossil fuel lobbyists, Cop26 might have had a very different result.

But the UN’s daily subsistence allowance for delegates from poorer countries is provided only until the official final day of negotiations, forcing many to leave before talks conclude. Covid-19 further compounds the inaccessibility of climate talks for people from the global south: most of our colleagues have yet to be vaccinated and none of us could afford to be stuck for weeks if we test positive at a conference.

Canadian ex-minister Catherine McKenna named to head UN greenwash watchdog

While the media may have labelled Cop26 ‘the most inclusive Cop yet’, that does not mean it was meaningfully inclusive. Recent reports of Egyptian hotels raising their prices for Cop27 suggest the same mistakes risk being repeated.

Finally, the lack of progress since Cop26 indicates still too little sense of urgency. The latest IPCC report reinforced the need for urgent, transformative adaptive action, yet Cop26 concluded with more delay, more long-term targets, and more climate finance directed towards mitigation than adaptation efforts.

We – the global south – have been forced into adapting now, not in a year or two. Delays of even one year mean more people lose their homes and livelihoods, fewer children go to school and more girls end up in child marriage.

Developed nations and the media must change how they talk about climate change and the people it affects. It is not just a scientific issue. It is about jobs, homes, health, and survival. It is about people fleeing their countries as climate refugees.

If there is one thing Covid-19 has demonstrated, it is that the world is capable of rapid and widespread change in the face of a crisis and that solutions start with the community. If we take this approach with climate change, we might just start moving forwards.

Sheela Patel is the founder and director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (Sparc) and Sohanur Rahman is a youth activist from Bangladesh.

The post The world’s poorest have the strongest resilience, yet their voices remain unheard appeared first on Climate Home News.

From Puerto Wilches, a town on the Magdalena River in Colombia’s northern Santander province, Morales grew up on the doorstep of one of the most pristine natural habitats on Earth.

“This area is possibly the most biodiverse in Colombia, where there’s the most water, most animals, and most green zones,” she said. “And it’s also the area with the most armed militias.”

Despite relatively small reserves, Colombia is heavily reliant on oil revenue. Although fracking was outlawed nationally in 2018, the ban does not cover pilot projects. 

When, in 2020, a legal bid to block those projects failed, Colombia’s National Hydrocarbon Agency (ANH) assured environmental groups that the pilots would only be allowed in two regions: the Cesar-Ranchería Basins in the country’s extreme north and the Middle Magdalena Valley, where Puerto Wilches sits.

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Local energy company Ecopetrol began its pilot in the Magdalena Valley in late 2020. “They started doing this like they were running a race,” says Morales, now 21. 

“They started approving things day after day. There wasn’t time for anyone, for the community, to do anything. Everything started happening very fast.”

Fearing the project would lead to environmental devastation, Morales founded Aguawil (Comité para la Defensa del Agua, la Vida, y el Territorio), to bring fellow local land defenders together, and joined the Alliance to Keep Colombia Free from Fracking.

“This committee is quite special and is very important in Colombia as it’s a youth committee. We are all between 18 and 25 years old,” Morales tells Climate Home. 

“Once we started organizing, they started to threaten us.”

Guatemala: Indigenous peoples demand sovereignty over oil and mining resources

Morales says that she was first threatened publicly by local officials during a debate in Puerto Wilches. But she persisted, helping in December 2020 to organise a carnival march where at least 3,000 people protested against the projects. 

“This was a milestone because normally this doesn’t happen as people are very afraid,” she says. 

“However, we did it and people went into the streets to say we don’t want fracking in our territories, that this is bad politics.”

After the march, the threats began to come more frequently.

“They would call our phones, come to our houses, threaten our parents, saying they would take away their jobs,” Morales says. “They started to persecute them, calling them ‘guerrillas’.  In Colombia, when they label you a guerrilla, this means death.”

Colombia: Fishers are fighting for their rights and protection of vital wetlands

Morales says she had a member of the army contact her with a warning: “Why are you getting involved with this fucking fracking? They are only going to kill you.”

Then, one night in January 2021, “some armed men came to my house and trapped me,” she says. “They put a gun to my head.”

Morales helped organise a carnival march against fracking in Puerto Wilches (Photo: Alianza Colombia Libre de Fracking)

Morales fled her home, first to the capital Bogota, then out of the country. 

According to Global Witness, Colombia is the world’s most dangerous country for environmental activists, with 65 killings of land defenders recorded in 2020. In April 2021, Peace Brigades International Colombia said that members of Aguawil and other environmental groups had been subject “to death threats, assassination attempts, forced displacements, and gender violence”.

Fracking company sues Slovenia over ‘unreasonable’ environmental protections

Morales stresses that she did not know which organisation the people who threatened her were acting on behalf of, but says her attempts to report the intimidation to the authorities fell on deaf ears.

“They never tell you anything,” she says. “I wanted them to investigate but they never did.” 

Once she reached safety, Morales connected with other national and international anti-fracking organisations. She says doing so made her realise that her case was far from isolated. 

“This is very serious because at the time I was 20 and there were others who were only 17,” she says.

“We learnt that there are many children from certain areas who are against fracking, who they are threatening with death and labeling as guerrillas and who, like me, are having to flee their homes and countries because with the threat of fracking comes the threat of death.

“Protesting fracking in Colombia is like putting a bullet in your head, at any moment they could kill you, just like what almost happened to me,” says Morales. “It’s really bad there.”

‘Hot air’ carbon offset scheme undermines Colombia’s climate goal, experts warn

“And this is why there are many others who have also had to flee. We have two options: flee Colombia or shut up,” says Morales. 

“We can’t say anything because it’s also not a safe place to report anything, because the more we say the faster they will kill us. They’ll accuse us, disappear us or put us in prison.”

Despite her harrowing experience, Morales says she will continue to fight fracking and keep trying to raise international awareness on the plight of her fellow land defenders. 

“I want my home to be in peace and that we can live in peace, so that the children of Colombia can raise their voices without them ever being extinguished,” she says.  

“I want there to be no more fracking in Colombia. And I want them not to kill us for being activists.”

The post ‘They put a gun to my head’: Colombian anti-fracking activist tells of ordeal appeared first on Climate Home News.

I was among them. Once again, I was urging politicians to implement these abstract and far-away goals of “emission reductions” and “carbon neutrality”.

Since I first took to the streets, plenty of climate promises have been made. But until they are followed through with concrete policies, those promises will remain empty words.

On my way home from the protest, I experienced this gap between promises and action when stopping to buy food for dinner.

In the fruit and vegetable section of my local store, I have the choice between regional produce, and fruit and vegetables that are available all year around and have been cultivated in large greenhouses in Spain, Italy, or Greece before they were wrapped in plastic and transported thousands of kilometers by truck.

While I am conscious of the carbon footprint of those tomatoes and peppers and the poor working conditions of the employees producing, picking and packaging them, one criteria matters most in my decision of what to buy: they are a lot cheaper.

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As a student, I have no choice but to opt for the cheapest option. The same reasoning applies when I decide to eat at the canteen of my university, where cheap food is served regardless of its origin, quality or the seasonality of products.

Like me, millions of EU citizens have to make this decision every day: to buy the cheapest available food or to prefer regional and organic produce that are much more expensive.

The number of people who struggle to make ends meet at the end of the month has increased during the coronavirus pandemic and the situation is compounded by rising energy prices. Most people certainly cannot afford to spend more money on food.

But a reform of the European Union’s farming subsidy programme, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), could increase support for small-scale farmers, organic agriculture, and low-emission agricultural techniques that preserve biodiversity.

The CAP was originally designed in the 1960s to increase agricultural production in Europe, where memories of food rationing and malnutrition caused by the Second World War were still very present.

In this regard, the CAP certainly did a good job, but the context has changed significantly since then. With agriculture responsible for 13% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions, the sector has to significantly cut its emissions if the block is to reach its 2050 net-zero target.

The EU’s own auditors found that the CAP is failing to cut the agriculture sector’s emissions despite billions of euros worth of subsidies under the programme being labelled as climate spending.

But change is possible: CAP funding could be shifted away from farming techniques that harm the environment to support climate-friendly farming, namely organic and small and medium-sized farms.

Subsidies for large-scale industrial farming could be capped and financial support could be made conditional on increasing sustainable production methods.

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European lawmakers will vote on new rules for the CAP on Tuesday. This vote is the chance to put the EU’s promises into action.

While Brussels says the reform to the CAP aims to make it greener, the current proposal is far from a holistic shift towards a just and climate-friendly agriculture. Instead, it continues a business-as-usual approach to farming.

Small amendments and tweaks to the CAP are no longer sufficient to respond to the scale of the climate emergency. A profound reform is needed.

As such, I call on members of the European Parliament to vote against the proposed reform and return to the negotiation table. Many promises have been made – now it is time to deliver on them with concrete policy changes.

Robin Ehl is a climate justice activist and the international secretary of the French youth movement, Jeunes Écologistes. He is studying for a master’s degree in European Studies in Paris.

The post Why I am calling on EU lawmakers to put climate at the heart of agricultural policy appeared first on Climate Home News.

Big polluters that have continuously failed to stop their business models pumping out carbon or driving deforestation are now hoping they can simply throw money at the problem to make it go away.

That ‘away’ they’re relying on – through a reliance on carbon offsetting to deliver their net zero claims – is the Global South. It’s the forests whose indigenous stewards are already fighting deadly battles to defend their rights. It’s the lands of communities who are already on the frontline of devastating climate impacts. It’s the ecosystems that need enforceable protections through laws won at home – not an accounting trick in a corporate spreadsheet.   

No matter how much Shell’s net zero scenarios count on the creation of ‘Brazil-sized forests’, the Global South is not a blank space for polluters to fill with trees that serve their interests, rather than the species, nourishment and self-determination of the local area. Offsetting has a long history of not actually reducing overall levels of carbon, while exacerbating problems over land rights, food security and biodiversity across the majority of the world – in countries that have the least responsibility for driving the climate crisis.  

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These injustices are magnified and deepened by its central flaw: offsetting allows big polluters to delay and distract from reducing their own emissions. The most significant win at the heart of the Paris Agreement – fought for by movements across the global south and developing country negotiators at the UN – was making the goal to keep global temperature rise below 1.5C a collective shared mission. But as thousands of companies announce net zero plans, far too many are failing to grasp the true transformation required to align with this crucial path.  

If major companies can’t make themselves compatible with staying below 1.5C, their business models have no future. Yet oil companies, airlines and food giants are not just hoping no one calls them out for this ruse – they’re launching schemes like the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets to force through a “consensus on legitimacy of offsetting”. They’re courting CEOs and politicians to entrench this false solution in the run-up to the Cop26 summit in Glasgow, UK, where negotiations will focus on options for trading emissions. Most cynically and shamelessly, this week the Taskforce pitched offsetting as a win for the Global South.  

We have seen this kind of spiel before. The lie that coal is necessary to alleviate poverty. The falsehood that fossil fuels provide accessible energy. It is greenwashing at its most patronising and dangerous.  

This Taskforce talks of an offsetting market worth $100bn. That figure has a hollow echo in the broken promises made by rich nations to provide $100bn each year to support climate action across the Global South. Buying up our forests, our lands, our nature to greenwash their business as usual is no substitute for climate finance to empower and enable economic transformation.  

Offsetting is based on exploiting natural carbon sinks of the Global South to justify continued pollution. Voluntary carbon market proponents are now trying to exploit the needs of Global South governments for financial flows to protect nature and transition to 1.5C-compatible economies, by serving up these false solutions as the only thing on offer. Something that people like me should gratefully accept and collude with.

I refuse and I resist. We need justice from these polluting companies – not passing the buck because they can’t be bothered to reduce their own emissions. Just as climate justice litigation closes in to sue the polluters most responsible for the climate crisis, they’ve managed to evolve a new trick to screw us all.

Demanding any less than emissions reductions to keep global temperatures under 1.5C is non-negotiable. This murky business is not climate action. Don’t fall for it.

Yeb Saño is director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia and a former climate negotiator for the Philippines.

The post Why I refuse to collude with polluters in the carbon offsetting lie appeared first on Climate Home News.

The 2020 International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Congress, which was delayed because of the pandemic, opened on Friday in a hybrid online and in-person format.

The Congress, which is held once every four years, brings together thousands of representatives from governments, civil society, business and academia. It will set the scene for critical biodiversity talks in Kunming, China, in May, when countries are due to agree on global goals to protect nature to 2030.

For the first time, indigenous organisations representing people from Latin America, Africa and Asia will be attending the IUCN Congress as full-time members. This reflects a rapidly growing recognition of their critical role in addressing the dual biodiversity and climate crisis.

In recent years, a ballooning body of studies has shown that indigenous territories have lower or similar levels of deforestation to other protected areas.

At the same time, research has linked the rise of “fortress” conservation, which closes off land and forests to human activities, with chronic patterns of abuse and human rights violations.

This has led indigenous peoples and human rights groups to call for a different approach to conservation that puts indigenous rights to land and natural resources at the heart of solutions to halt the destruction of the planet’s biodiversity.

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A day ahead of the Congress’ opening, a group of human rights NGOs, including Survival International and Minority Rights Group, held a countersummit presenting an alternative vision for conservation.

They denounced calls for governments to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land by 2030 – up from a previous target of around 17%  – as a “false solution” which risks pushing local communities off their land and diverts attention away from the over-consumption and exploitation of natural resources, which they say is the root cause of the climate and biodiversity crisis.

Fiore Longo, of Survival International, told Climate Home News that expanding protected areas was “terrible from a human rights perspective” and could lead to one of the biggest land grabs in history.

“Indigenous people are showing that other models are working to address the biodiversity and climate crisis. There needs to be a recognition of their land rights,” she said.

Longo explained that part of the problem lies with the definition of protected areas adopted by IUCN and widely used around the world. Out of six levels of conservation measures, four exclude most human activities with exceptions for scientific research and tourism. Indigenous territories are not recognised as a category.

Longo said national parks and reserves in much of Africa and South East Asia have prevented indigenous people from carrying out their traditional hunting and fishing activities.

Baka people, pictured here in Cameroon, have been attacked by national park guards in the Republic of Congo. (Photo: Greenpeace/Kate Davison)

In Africa, protected areas have become militarised and defended by armed rangers, which at times have been accused of violence and physical abuse against local people.

Mordecai Ogada, a Kenyan conservationist, told Climate Home that expanding protected areas in Africa would lead to more violence.

“National parks are wonderful places but the product of violence and disfranchisement of non-white people,” he said.

“Our conservation thinking is based on Tarzan: a white man in the jungle with animals and no people. But it’s actually possible to protect species without kicking people off the land. There is no way we can claim to protect biodiversity if we can’t protect human diversity.”

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Among the conservation community, there is widespread and growing recognition that human rights abuses have been carried out in the name of protecting wildlife.

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, wrote that human rights abuses in the world’s protected areas was part of “the disturbing uptick of criminalisation and even extrajudicial killings”.

Writing in a policy brief this month, UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and the environment David Boyd argued that achieving environmental goals “demands a dramatic departure from ‘conservation as usual’,” and called for a rights-based approach.

But for Trevor Sandwith, director of IUCN’s Global Protected Areas Programme, Survival International is wrong to say that mainstream conservation organisations are not putting communities’ rights at the heart of their approach.

“Most of the world’s remaining biodiversity is directly the result of indigenous peoples and local communities’ custodianship of the natural world,” he told Climate Home. “The idea of conserving more of the planet isn’t to take resources away from people but to recognise their right to conserve nature.”

Frustration mounts as Cop26 delegates wait for the UK’s promised Covid vaccines

Sandwith said IUCN has embraced the concept of conserved areas, where nature is being protected even if that isn’t the prime objective, such as in indigenous territories.

Conserved areas should be counted towards the 30% target without being turned into stricter protected areas, he said, adding that this had become a key issue at the UN biodiversity talks.

Central to this idea is to protect indigenous people and communities’ decision-making power on their land.

On this basis, Coica, a Pan-Amazonian indigenous group, submitted a motion to IUCN members calling for protecting 80% of the Amazon basin by 2025.

The group urged governments to ensure that indigenous peoples and local communities govern and manage new protected areas that overlap with their traditional territories.

José Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, lead coordinator of Coica, which represents 511 indigenous peoples and protects 66 uncontacted and voluntarily isolated tribes, said: “Our proposal comes at a time of desperation in the quest for solutions to stop the destruction of the natural world.

“What we are proposing is a new model, and it is a model that will work,” he said.

The post Conservation summit opens amid debate over role of indigenous people appeared first on Climate Home News.

As widely reported, the decision increases litigation risks for other oil and gas companies, with Total already facing a similar case in France. Less attention has been paid to the possible implications of the ruling for governments and financial institutions.

A recent legal opinion by University of Cambridge professor Jorge Viñuales and barrister Kate Cook suggests that governments and public finance institutions that support new fossil fuel infrastructure face litigation risks similar to those of the fossil fuel industry. Like Shell, they continue to pour fuel on the fire by supporting fossil fuel production.

The G20 governments provide more than three times as much public finance for fossil fuels as for clean energy every year and their support for fossil fuels continued even after the adoption of the Paris Agreement. Like Shell, they can change course. By shifting public money out of fossil fuels, they can help avoid the worst climate crisis scenarios whilst freeing up finance to accelerate the transition to a just and green future.

The legal opinion focuses on one particular type of public finance institution – export credit agencies – which support domestic industries to do business overseas. But its conclusions, the authors say, apply to all forms of government support for fossil fuel infrastructure.

UK government opens registration for Cop26 participants to apply for vaccines

The opinion concludes that governments and the public finance institutions that they oversee need to stop financing new fossil fuel-related activities and reduce existing funding, or risk being in violation of their international legal obligations, including climate change and human rights duties.

Like the judgment in the Shell case, the opinion is rooted in the scientific evidence of the life-threatening consequences of the climate crisis and the urgent need to wind down fossil fuels to address it. This evidence has since been backed up by a report from the International Energy Agency, which says that there can be no investments in new fossil fuel supply in a scenario that maintains a 50% chance of staying below 1.5C.

Both the Shell case and the legal opinion emphasise the importance of “due diligence” – the need to fully consider the consequences of an intended decision.

By taking the risk out of investment in fossil fuels, public finance, whether in the form of export finance, (multilateral) development finance, recovery money or fiscal support, helps to leverage huge sums of private money towards it. In light of governments’ due diligence obligations, doing so is an increasingly risky approach.

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Another area in which the legal opinion coincides with the Shell judgment is in its finding that private actors, like companies, can have duties under international law. Further development of these arguments could open the door to future challenges to the private financing of fossil fuel projects, or government failure to take action to address such financing.

The recent Shell ruling, considered alongside the legal opinion, has serious implications for companies, governments, their public finance institutions and other actors that continue to support fossil fuel expansion.

At the same time, it can be welcomed as a wake-up call, presenting an opportunity to accelerate climate action by redirecting public and private money away from fossil fuels and towards building a just and green future. One thing is clear: the factors to be weighed in deciding which path to take now include the danger of ending up in court.

Harro van Asselt is a professor at University of Eastern-Finland Law School and affiliated researcher at Stockholm Environment Institute. Gita Parihar is an environmental advocate and in-house consultant for environmental NGOs and the UN, and a board member of the Climate Justice Fund.

The post Shell court ruling is a wake-up call for governments to end fossil fuel support appeared first on Climate Home News.

In an elaborate prank, campaigners from Fridays for Future spotlighted Standard Chartered’s ongoing support for coal, oil and gas, and accused the UK bank of “greenwashing”.

The day before Standard Chartered’s annual general meeting, the activists issued a fake press release announcing the bank would end all funding for coal-fired power plants by the end of the year and support for fossil fuel infrastructure by 2023. In addition, the bank would provide recovery payments to communities that had been most affected by the coal projects it had financed.

“Too good to be true?” tweeted some of the world’s most prominent climate campaigners, including Bill McKibben, Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate, who all appeared to be in on the joke.

During a staged press conference, promoted as the moment the bank would reveal its new lending policy details, young women activists, with drawn-on moustaches and beards, ironically acted out Standard Chartered’s leadership team.

“Standard Chartered is not yet taking direct step towards a legacy that we can all be proud off,” said July Gamble, playing the role of media relations officer for the bank she described as “no Standard Chartered”.

Tar sands executive named as Canadian ‘climate champion’ ahead of Cop26

As they wiped off their moustaches, the campaigners said the stunt aimed to show they would continue to put pressure on Standard Chartered until it meets their demands.

“The biggest prank of all is how Standard Chartered are ‘here for good’,” said one campaigner, referring to the bank’s slogan.  “We want them to realise what a big joke their lending policy is,” she added.

Under its current energy lending policy, which was updated earlier this year, the bank has committed to stop providing direct financial services towards the construction and expansion of coal-fired power plants.

From 2024, it will stop supporting companies with a share of thermal coal earnings exceeding 80%, tightening the threshold to exclude companies dependent on coal for more than 5% of their earnings in 2030.

According to NGO Urgewald, the effect of the policy on the bank’s portfolio will only become visible from 2027, when the threshold will be lowered to 40%.

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In public, Standard Chartered CEO’s Bill Winters has been a vocal supporter of mobilising private finance to fund carbon-cutting projects. Winters serves as chair to the taskforce on scaling voluntary carbon markets, launched by UN special envoy on climate action and finance Mark Carney.

But Standard Chartered is Europe’s largest financier of coal plant developers, Urgewald analysis shows. Between October 2018 and October 2020, it supported the coal industry with $10 billion, of which about half went to coal plant developers. 

Power Finance Corp (PFC) in India, Top Frontier Investment Holdings in the Philippines and Adani, the multinational conglomerate behind the Carmichael mega mine in Australia, are among coal developers that have received support from the bank.

“Private financial institutions cannot hide behind the assumed political will for new coal anymore. If Standard Chartered wants to be here for good, it needs to sharpen its coal policy. Dropping coal plant developers is the most urgent step,” said Katrin Ganswindt, head of financial research at Urgewald.

Asian Development Bank plans exit from coal finance

“We are in a climate crisis. My country, the Philippines, is already experiencing the worst impacts. I am sick of being afraid of drowning in my own bedroom,” climate campaigner Mitzi Jonelle Tan told the press conference.

“We are not just us, it is the whole Fridays for Future movement” that will campaign for Standard Chartered to change its fossil fuel lending policy, she added.

A spokesperson for Standard Chartered declined to comment on the campaigners’ tactics but said the bank had made “major strides” in its coal policy over the past few years and continues to review its position.

“We intend to remain leaders in articulating a path to net zero by 2050. We are committed to detailed transparency on our transition strategy and plan to put it to a shareholder advisory vote in 2022,” they added.

The post Youth activists prank Standard Chartered in critique of coal lending policy appeared first on Climate Home News.

The UK host to the Cop26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, has repeatedly said it is planning for the UN climate talks to be held in person while continuing to monitor the Covid-19 situation. Prior to the pandemic, the event was expected to involve 30,000 delegates.

“I’m very keen to champion the voices of developing nations. It’s an important reason why we want to make sure that the event in Glasgow is a physical event so they can sit at the same table,” Cop26 president designate Alok Sharma told British lawmakers on Thursday.

For in-person talks to take place, all delegates will need to have been vaccinated and robust and repeated testing will have to be carried out before, during and after the summit, according to Linda Bauld, professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh and an adviser to the Covid-19 committee of the Scottish Parliament.

“It’s fine for politicians to be bullish about saying it’s going ahead but there is a lot to think about here,” she told Climate Home News, citing challenges to vaccines rollouts in developing nations.

“Without vaccines for delegates, we could end up creating a global superspreader event in Glasgow,” warned Mohamed Adow, director of Nairobi-based NGO Power Shift Africa.

Five ways the UK is failing to walk the talk on a green recovery ahead of Cop26

Less than eight months ahead of Cop26 – the first test for nations to increase their climate ambition under the Paris Agreement – stark inequities in accessing Covid-19 vaccines is testing the international solidarity on which the climate talks are based.

Just like the #ClimateCrisis, COVID19 is a stress test for international solidarity. Both crises can only be defeated if we work together.

I therefore whole-heartedly support the UN SG @antonioguterres‘ call for vaccine equity. As he said: “We’re only safe once everyone is safe”

— Patricia Espinosa C. (@PEspinosaC) March 6, 2021

In private, three climate diplomats from developing nations told Climate Home News they expected vaccinations to be necessary if the talks were to be held in-person, not only to protect Cop26 participants but also their families, friends and colleagues when they travel home.

“Vaccines diplomacy is in a way a reflection of the reality of the negotiations. Countries defend their own interests first and the idea of global action to face a global challenge is tested clearly in the way vaccines are provided to developing countries,” said one developing country diplomat.

While the UK Cop26 host is far ahead in delivering vaccines to its population, dozens of countries are still waiting for their first shipment to arrive.

Last month, the UN described the pace of progress as “wildly uneven and unfair” when just 10 countries had administered 75% of all Covid-19 vaccines while 130 nations hadn’t received a single dose.

LDCs need vaccines and support. There could not be a better time for empathy and solidarity.

— LDC Chair (@LDCChairUNFCCC) January 18, 2021

Holding in-person talks means “you would have to vaccinate every negotiator,” another developing country diplomat told Climate Home News.

“How do you do that when [many] developing countries haven’t started to vaccinate their most vulnerable people? How is it going to look when the only people vaccinated in half the countries in the world are UN negotiators?”

Tasneem Essop, executive director at the Climate Action Network International, said Cop26 delegates should not be given priority to vaccines.

“That is not equitable, that is queue-jumping. How do we justify delegates coming to Cop being vaccinated before health and frontline workers?” she told Climate Home News. “We need to see a global effort to ensure equitable access to all countries. This is not what we are seeing.”

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As Cop26 host, UK government should “play a championing, and visible role in ensuring much stronger solidarity in the roll out of the vaccines,” Essop said. For Adow, that should include ensuring all Cop26 delegates and their families receive the vaccine before the summit.

Last month, civil society groups sent a letter, seen by Climate Home News, to the UN Climate Change bureau, a group of top diplomats representing all UN regions who decide on organisational matters related to the talks.

“We believe it lies within the responsibility of a Cop presidency and all bureau members to uphold and honour the principle of equal vaccine distribution,” they wrote.

They suggested countries should redistribute surplus vaccines and support a proposal by India and South Africa to waive patents for Covid-19 vaccines so production could be scaled up.

South Sudan plans to raise climate ambition amid ‘dire’ humanitarian crisis

Professor Bauld said she expected vaccination certificates to be rolled out by the time Cop26 is due to take place in November. Plans for vaccine passports are already being considered by a number of countries, including the EU.

A briefing note prepared by the University of Edinburgh said this certification alone should not determine whether someone can travel or access an event. Negative PCR tests for example could be considered as an alternative.

One African diplomat warned against making vaccination a requirement for delegates to attend Cop26. “If some countries are not in the position to access vaccine then it will be an act of excluding them.”

Neither the UK nor UN Climate Change have directly responded to questions over whether Covid-19 vaccination will be a prerequisite for delegates to attend the conference.

“Working with the UN and others we will have to see how we can mitigate the risk of people not being able to come to Glasgow,” Sharma told UK members of parliament on Thursday.

A Cop26 spokesperson said the summit team was “exploring what different scenarios might mean for Cop26 and how we plan for that, whilst putting the health of the participants and the local community first.”

UN Climate Change said discussions were ongoing “on all levels” but a source with knowledge of discussions at the bureau said they had not heard any discussions about vaccines access in relation to Cop26 preparations.

The post Unequal vaccine rollout threatens inclusivity of Cop26, climate diplomats warn appeared first on Climate Home News.

On behalf of those who already bear the biggest costs of climate breakdown right now and will do for years to come, we demand world leaders protect our environment from all forms of pollution and exploitation. 

They must ensure we breathe clean air and drink clean water and uphold our right to a healthy environment as we continue to fight for climate justice.

We refuse the presence of multinational companies that exploit our natural resources and bring no benefit to our communities in the Philippines, India, Colombia, Argentina, across the African continent and beyond. 

We refuse to silently watch as corporations prioritise temporary economic wealth over the future of the planet and the well-being of billions of people.

While our nations focus on the economic recovery to Covid-19, we must ensure that environmental and social criteria are not left behind.

UK climate champion: Oil majors can join the ‘race to zero’ – if they align with 1.5C

First, countries of the global North need to understand that they are the most responsible for the climate crisis, which is also a social crisis — a cruel one which will hit the most vulnerable people in the global South the hardest. 

It is time to change the narrative and put the focus on those most affected people and areas (Mapa). 

It is high time that the global North unconditionally pays reparations to the most affected people for the historic injustices we have suffered. Those least affected by the climate crisis are often those who have contributed to it the most and have fueled climate denialism throughout history.

To prevent the climate crisis from becoming the worst catastrophe in the history of the planet, we must make a complete transition to sustainable and egalitarian economic systems, with energy grids based on renewable sources and the preservation of nature and ecosystems at their core. This is not an option.

Public financial institutions and development banks that help finance fossil fuel projects are a double insult to people. Instead of paving the way towards the sustainable future we all need, they are exacerbating climate chaos and creating more illegitimate debt that our generations will have to pay for with our lives. 

We are fed up with having to pay for their deliberate greed. 

OECD: One-fifth of climate finance goes to adaptation as share of loans grows

Typhoon Goni, the strongest typhoon on the planet this year, affected hundreds of thousands of people in the Philippines, leaving many homeless, hungry, and cold. The flooding in Bihar, India displaced seven million people. 

While having to cope with a pandemic, 783 million people in Africa and 76 million people in India don’t have access to safe water supply. And most recently, hurricane Eta has brought devastation upon Central America. 

Our demands for social and environmental justice must be heard. 

We have been threatened by anti-democratic regimes, but we refuse to let the oppressors win. We need people-centered climate action. We need to put people over profit. We are rising to say never again to financial and ecological terrorism from governments, corporations or international finance organisations. 

And we will not stop until we win a more sustainable future for our generation and the next.

This year needs to be a turning point. We must use the response to this pandemic to transition to a just and sustainable future. This must include debt cancellation for the poorest nations, an immediate end to fossil fuel subsidies and investments and locally-adapted green recovery measures.

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Until the current exploitative and hyper-extractive system is changed, we will keep fighting for climate justice, for our lives and for those that have been taken away.

Firm commitments from public financial institutions at the Finance in Common Summit this week are critical to manage the transition risks to a low-carbon economy and to unleash private investments towards the clean energy future we all want.

To the ones controlling our money, we say: if you don’t want to do what is just, then do what is necessary. We are not fighting for the planet, we are fighting for our lives. World leaders, take us seriously: we need climate justice today, not tomorrow. 

Help us build our future. Do not destroy it. We are counting on you.

Mitzi Jonelle Tan — Youth Advocates for Climate Action Philippines

Disha A Ravi — Fridays For Future India

Laura Veronica Muñoz — Fridays For future Colombia

Eyal Weintraub — Jóvenes Por El Clima Argentina

Nicole Becker — Jóvenes por El Clima Argentina

Kevin Mtai — Africa Continental Coordinator Earth Uprising

The post As young people, we urge financial institutions to stop financing fossil fuels appeared first on Climate Home News.

Many activists held virtual protests, but in some of the hardest hit countries, such as the Philippines and Kenya, they took to the streets to demand climate action and justice from their governments.

The theme of this year’s global climate strike is supporting communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis.

Climate Home News spoke to three activists from the global south about their personal fears and the change they are fighting for.

Mitzi Tan, the Philippines 

Mitzi Tan says a new anti-terror law could endanger environmental defenders in the Philippines (Photo: 350org)

Two years ago, Mitzi Tan’s world view “shattered” when she first spoke to an indigenous leader from the Lumad tribe about how his people faced constant harassment, attacks and arrests in their fight to protect their land, rivers and forests from environmental destruction. 

“In the Philippines, we are already experiencing the worst impacts of the climate crisis. We have no choice but to defend the planet,” 22-year-old Tan told Climate Home News. 

Bolsonaro shifts blame for unprecedented Brazilian wetland fires

The Philippines is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, including rising sea levels, more intense typhoons and flooding.

“We would spend days in the dark with candles just listening to the battery powered radio for any updates on storms, always afraid that a tree would fall or that the flood would enter our house,” Tan said. 

On Friday, youth activists gathered in groups of ten to protest, bearing banners which read “protect climate protectors” and “there is no planet b”.

“Activists are being silenced here in the Philippines. I worry that people are starting to get desensitised to the number of deaths. We have names, we have lives, we are people, we’re not just statistics,” she said. 

The Philippines is the world’s deadliest country for environmental defenders, according to Global Witness. Last year 43 environmental defenders were killed and campaigners fear that a new anti-terror law could be used to validate their arrests and murders.

“A lot of people see this law as very dangerous. It could endanger all of us and our right to defend the planet,” said Tan.

The pandemic has fostered an even greater sense of solidarity among young people around the world, said Tan. “In a way the pandemic has brought everyone closer together.”

Kevin Mtai, Kenya

The climate crisis is constantly on 24-year-old Kevin Mtai’s mind. He is witnessing the impacts of climate change first-hand. 

“I personally have been affected mentally and physically… with floods destroying our home and crops and causing water-borne diseases like typhoid and cholera [among] my family,” Mtai told Climate Home.

He gathered with other climate activists in Nairobi on Friday to protest a controversial deal which would expand the plastics industry in Kenya.

#AfricaIsNotADumpster @KevinKevinmtai giving a talk at Uhuru Park, Nairobi about how plastic waste is a problem in Kenya.

We say no to dumping of plastics in Africa by the US @USEmbassyKenya #FightClimateInjustice #FridaysForFuture @Fridays4future @GretaThunberg @disharavii pic.twitter.com/qkdnVdgpgJ

— Oneup Action Kenya (@KenyaOneup) September 25, 2020

The oil industry is lobbying the US government to use a trade deal with Kenya as an opportunity to export more plastic to the country, a move which campaigners warn would turn Kenya into a dumping site for plastic waste. Kenya has the world’s toughest ban on plastic bags. Anyone caught producing, selling or carrying plastic bags faces up to four years imprisonment or fines of $40,000.

“We don’t want the government to sign that deal. They want to force us to take that plastic but our country is not the one using [it], the USA is. Africa is not a dump site. This is an injustice for us as Kenyans and for us as climate activists,” Mtai said. 

It is a global injustice that countries in the global south emit the least carbon dioxide in the world, but are the worst affected by climate change, Mtai said. 

“People in the global south do not have anything to protect their lives… they are facing water [shortages] and diseases,” he said. 

Marina Guia, Brazil 

Marina Guia and other Brazilian climate activists take part in a virtual strike on 25 September 2020 (Photo: Marina Guia)

16-year-old Marina Guia has become accustomed to thick smoke from wildfires enveloping her city, Volta Redonda, in Brazil.  “The city is dark because of the smoke. It is something that I see day-to-day,” Guia told Climate Home. 

“The indigenous people in the forests are the ones really suffering because of the fires. The fires attack the environmental defenders directly,” she said, adding that the pandemic has made it more difficult to protect indigenous communities. “We are trying to take care to not contaminate them.”

Together with other Brazilian activists, Guia has launched the SOS Amazonia campaign to support indigenous communities protecting the Amazon rainforest. 

“We are giving a voice to indigenous people. They are on the frontlines [of climate change] and are really in danger. They are attacked by Covid-19, deforestation and murders,” said Guia. 

In a message to the UN on Tuesday, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro denied responsibility for the worst fires on record in the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland.

The fires have led to respiratory problems for people living in the region, exacerbating coronavirus outcomes. 

“The climate crisis will affect the poorest first and those that don’t have capacity to deal with it. Climate justice is something that the whole world will need to fight for. If we don’t have the environmental defenders, we don’t have the Amazon,” Guia said.

The post Three youth activists explain why they are striking for climate justice  appeared first on Climate Home News.

This happened less than six months after a similar incident with Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate. The only difference: this time it was done by people inside the climate movement. People I’d normally call colleagues and friends.

When I became active in the climate movement, I didn’t think I would end up talking about the importance of addressing racism over and over again.

In my naïve world, I thought when people fight against one form of injustice, they naturally develop sensitivity and are quick to respond to other injustices as well. I’ve learned that the world is much more complicated than this.

Following the Black Lives Matter protests triggered by the murder of George Floyd, it took Fridays for Future Germany more than a week to show solidarity on social media. Moreover, Fridays for Future ‘liked’ a comment on Instagram, which criticized the Darmstadt local for speaking out against police violence and structural racism.

These incidents were embarrassing for me. As a climate activist I feel a deep ownership over the movement. And as a woman of color, I have a deep connection with the anti-racism movement. How can I defend my colleagues in the climate movement to fellow anti-racism activists, when they show such little empathy towards racial struggles?

But before defending my colleagues to the outside world, I need to talk about the representation of people of colour inside the climate movement.

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On 20 May, I, and seven other women activists from different organizations – including Greenpeace Germany – participated in a protest against the new coal power plant Datteln 4.

Following the action, Greenpeace Germany tweeted photos. There were plenty of pictures to choose from where I was visible. Yet, not one in the eight photos that were tweeted from Greenpeace’s account. I was only tagged in the post.

This happened less than six months after a similar incident with Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate. The only difference: this time it was done by people inside the climate movement.

My first instinct was – as most of us would do when someone treats you in a disrespectful way – to walk away. I untagged myself from the post. But then I started feeling guilty for not pointing out their selectiveness. For not being stronger.

I am used to facing racism in the streets of Germany from people who dress up in black and shave their heads. Also sometimes from regular looking strangers who don’t realise that they are being racist. I was not expecting this from people I’d consider colleagues.

Aktivist*innen von #FridaysForFuture, Greenpeace, @urgewald und aus NRW haben heute gemeinsam gegen #Datteln4 demonstriert. Wir lassen nicht zu, dass @UniperGermany unsere Zukunft verheizt! #StopDatteln4 pic.twitter.com/nfrM2zMJMU

— Greenpeace e.V. (@greenpeace_de) May 20, 2020

In der Luft. Auf dem Wasser. Auf der Straße. Kreativer Protest gegen den Klimakiller #Datteln4. #StopDatteln4 pic.twitter.com/yRGZF4aESY

— Greenpeace e.V. (@greenpeace_de) May 20, 2020

Over time, I realized, it’s not that the climate movement doesn’t know its problems or is completely uneducated. It is rather, inside the movement there is a status quo, and I am expected to fit in. I am tolerated in climate spaces as long as I don’t claim the same ownership as the white activists. Black, indigenous and people of colour (BIPoC) are welcome when we fit the role of a ‘token’ or a ‘victim voice’.

That’s also why I hesitate to share this experience. It’s not fun to share injustices happening to you. Yet, it is a burden that we, the ‘not-white’ activists, bear. Our proud and strong moments get overrun by insanely unpleasant things that others do to us.

How many of you know that Vanessa Nakate was striking alone in front of the Parliament of Uganda for months? How many of you know she founded two movements for youth in the African continent?

She is still referred in some newspapers as the “girl who was cropped out of a picture with Greta Thunberg”. How many of you refer to the Associated Press as the ‘racist’ news agency that cropped out a girl based on her looks?

US climate activists confront the movement’s whiteness problem

I am Tonny Nowshin. I am an economist, a researcher, a climate justice and degrowth activist. I have been mobilising to save the world’s largest mangrove forest, the Sundarbans, since 2016. I am a wonderful friend, a proud daughter, a kind mentor and an unyielding comrade. This is how I want you to know me.

The reason I share my unpleasant experience publicly is that what happened with Vanessa Nakate, me and many others are not isolated incidents. They happen often in our supposedly progressive movement. Why? Because it is still dominated by people who are blind to their white privilege. For some of them, the planet needs to be saved because the exploitation of it has reached a point where it disrupts their entitled bubbles. The forest fires and cyclones are now happening too close to home.

For the rest, that includes both BIPoC and white activists, we are in this fight to protect our planet and create a better future for all. We see that the only way we can get there is by acknowledging that racism and the climate crisis have the same root and our fights are interconnected. A climate movement that is racist can never deliver a just future.

I have found many inspiring and determined people in this fight. We know the movement will look much different in a year from today because we are not leaving the room and we are not going to be silent about the racist structures in our movement anymore.

Versions of this article were previously published in German in Taz and Klima Reporter. Greenpeace Germany responded to the accusation of racism, apologising for the white-only photo selection, noting that photos of Tonny Nowshin at the demonstration were available in the Greenpeace photo library and promising to learn from the incident.

The post We need to talk about racism in the climate movement appeared first on Climate Home News.

The campaign, by a communication firm working for Chevron, exploited a wave of anti-racism protests gripping America to fight plans for a Green New Deal. Chevron and communication firm CRC Advisors denied to E&E News the oil company was involved.

Whatever the motives, the message hit on an uncomfortable truth: The US climate movement’s whiteness is a weakness.

Inside the climate movement, change is starting to happen. In 2019, 15 members of the US Climate Action Network came together to discuss how they could create a large-scale movement to address the magnitude of the climate crisis, taking inspiration from past successful protest movements.

African Americans have every reason to be concerned about the environment, having long been disproportionately affected by pollution and climate impacts – including from the oil industry.

In Richmond, California, a city with large Latinx and African American populations, a Chevron oil refinery is one of the sources contributing to some of the worst air pollution hotspots in the San Francisco bay area.

That makes residents vulnerable to health problems, not least from the novel coronavirus pandemic. Researchers have established a link between long-term exposure to PM2.5 pollution and higher Covid-19 death rates.

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Miya Yoshitani, executive director at the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (Apen), told Climate Home News the intersection of poverty, racism and pollution has impacted communities of colour and particularly black communities for decades.

In California, a scheme designed to reduce emissions by making companies pay for carbon credits effectively concentrated polluting industries near communities of colour, Yoshitani said, creating “sacrifice zones”.

The money raised by the scheme funds California’s clean energy transition, while a share is redirected to provide affordable housing and clean water in the state’s most vulnerable communities. But Yoshitani said the scheme was “trading communities’ health for money” and perpetuated racial inequality.

“The need for racial and economic justice to be at the heart of our work has been obvious for communities of colour for a long time,” Keya Chatterjee, executive director of the US Climate Action Network, told CHN.

“The climate movement being mostly white has been a hindrance in making progress. We cannot win in this way.”

Jacqueline Patterson, director of the environmental and climate justice programme at the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), told CHN mainstream environmental groups had failed to fully address the economic injustices faced by fossil fuel workers and had involved black people in a tokenistic way to please funders.

“It’s never been about racial justice,” she said. And yet, the most successful climate campaigns in the US have been those supported by the broadest coalitions.

“It is critical that those pushing for clean air standards also push for re-imagining law enforcement budgets,” Patterson added in a reference to “defund the police”, a rallying cry at anti-racism demonstrations. “We have to get out of the siloed approach.”

UK aid and foreign ministry merger raises fears for politicisation of climate finance

In the middle of the pandemic, members of US Climate Action Network launched Arm in Arm, an initiative to organise communities across the US by addressing economic and racial justice. The campaign uses direct action to disrupt systems identified as “oppressive” and provide vulnerable communities with what they most need, such as food, clean air and water.

This, they say, creates an opportunity to start a conversation about climate change and its impacts.

“Those with access and resources have been focused on solar panels and polar bears for way too long,” said Lindsay Harper, national coordinator of the campaign, called Arm in Arm.

The civil disobedience tactics of climate movements like Extinction Rebellion can also be offputting to marginalised communities. Given high levels of police brutality against black people and the mass incarceration of African Americans, the stakes of a confrontation with the police are too high for some.

“I am a black woman and I don’t do protests. I don’t put my body on the line,” Harper told CHN. “But there is equity in protest and taking to the streets is not the only way to create disruption.”

Comment: Now is the time to climate-and-pandemic-proof our food systems

Speaking to CHN from Atlanta, Georgia, Harper said one idea was to create a direct food distribution supply chain between farmers in rural Georgia and a black neighbourhood in the city hit by low employment, high energy bills and few amenities. Streets in the neighbourhood would be blocked to create a food distribution point, allowing the community to come together.

In the US, an estimated 26% of African Americans live in food-insecure households – a trend exacerbated by the pandemic.

“It would allow us to start a conversation about access to food while creating a small economy and our own system,” Harper said.

In the state of Utah, campaigners planted fruit trees in places where communities lacked access to healthy food. In Washington DC, activists shut down streets to create socially distant outdoor spaces, allowing people to exercise outside.

Patterson of NAACP said such a campaign was long overdue and “had the potential to make major strides”.

“In the context of America, the strategy that Arm in Arm puts forward is timeless. What has been going on [in recent months] has always been going on in one way or another,” she said.

Chatterjee said the campaign was not designed to recruit members of existing environmental networks but rather to target millions of American adults who are involved in their communities and may have never attended a climate protest before.

By 2022, campaigners hope up to 11 million people can participate in sustained non-violent action such as marches, demonstrations, boycotts, and mass work stoppages. That’s the equivalent of 3.5% of the American population – the threshold for sustained public participation in protests that leads to serious change, according to some research.

Chatterjee said creating this “huge surge in public opinion” for climate policies could be done fast at the right moment in time.

The uprising that followed the killing of George Floyd “wasn’t spontaneous,” she said. “It happened because of years and years of successful planning, mobilising and education. The movement was prepared for that moment.”

When it comes to climate action, “we can move public opinion really fast with smart organising.”

The post US climate activists confront the movement’s whiteness problem appeared first on Climate Home News.

Observers to the climate talks said full transparency and broad stakeholder participation in the talks remained “crucial” as negotiators thrash out the last unresolved issues under the Paris Agreement rulebook.

The event which happens every year in Bonn, Germany, ahead of the annual UN climate summit, is usually attended by 2,000 to 3,000 negotiators, government officials, observers, campaigners and journalists from all over the world.

In light of the global Covid-19 pandemic, the meeting is likely to be significantly scaled down, with a cap on the number of people allowed inside the conference venue. This would allow for delegates to be seated further apart, to reduce the risk of spreading infection.

“Nobody can know at this stage what measures will be in place in October,” said Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, a climate diplomat from the Democratic Republic of Congo who presides over UN Climate Change’s scientific negotiations, during an online event.

“But we need to keep the venue for core negotiations,” he said, advising that some social distancing measures would be put in place.

Such measures are likely to impact observers who are not directly involved in the negotiations. A UN Climate Change spokesman did not respond to Climate Home News’ question about what arrangements might be made for the media.

He said the design of the October meeting “will depend on the rules and regulations that will be in place at that time” and that “participants will be informed closer to the session on the details”.

Coronavirus delays work to protect the world’s poor from climate shocks

Initially scheduled to start on Monday 1 June, the Bonn meeting has been postponed to 4-12 October, provided it is then safe to hold a physical event. Hosting a global meeting before a Covid-19 treatment or vaccine is available presents significant logistical challenges.

UN Climate Change said it would review on 4 August whether it is possible to hold the meeting in October.

Norwegian diplomat Marianne Karlsen, who is heading the strand of talks responsible for support from rich to poor countries, said the UN climate secretariat was in contact with governments about health facilities at the venue and the latest regulations.

“We want to ensure that civil society and observers are there because this process gains so much from your presence,” Mpanu-Mpanu said, but added that each accredited delegation and constituency might have to select fewer people to send.

Campaigners attending the online meeting expressed concerns about the impact of potential restrictions on their ability to access and influence negotiations. Climate Action Network, a global coalition of climate and environmental NGOs, said it was consulting its members on a response to the announcement.

Bridget Burns, from the Women and Gender Constituency, insisted on the need for the Bonn meeting to remain inclusive and transparent.  She highlighted a lack of translation during online meetings, which to date have been carried out in English – something she said could constitute a barrier for many people.

Zoom climate diplomacy: ‘Technology doesn’t help build trust’

Saleemul Huq, a veteran observer of the climate negotiations and the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh, told CHN the move to online sessions “should enable a much bigger participation from observers around the world”.

But the series of events known as the “June Momentum” held by UN Climate Change at the start of this month had been “much more restrictive than we expected,” he said.  “UN Climate Change must do better for the October session if it wishes to retain any credibility”.

UN Climate Change head Patricia Espinosa has set up a process for observers to discuss how they can participate more effectively in the talks, Bert de Wel, climate policy officer at the International Trade Union Confederation, told CHN – a move he welcomed.

“Our priority is the safety of the delegates – they are workers and need to be able to do their job in all safety,” he told CHN.

De Wel said the Bonn meeting was an “important moment” to make government accountable for their climate policies and scrutiny by a broad range of observers was “critical”.

“We have to find ways to guarantee meaningful participation and consider all options, combining physical and virtual meeting, taking specific care of balanced representation and participation,” he said.

“This is not an optimal situation,” conceded Karlsen. “We are trying to provide the level of certainty that we can and test unchartered waters to make progress and keep up momentum during this challenging time.”

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A large number of workshops and meetings usually take place on the sidelines of climate negotiations to make progress on issues such as youth participation, education, gender and agricultural work.

To limit physical contacts between participants, many of these meetings that were scheduled to take place at the Bonn session will now be taken online, ahead of the new October dates.

Negotiators could also be asked to take part in online meetings to advance their work on carbon market rules, the transparency of emissions reporting and a common timeframe for action – the last unresolved issues of the Paris Agreement rulebook which was due to be agreed in 2018.

“We have been kicking the can down the road,” said Mpanu-Mpanu, adding virtual engagement before and after the Bonn talks will help to “mature” negotiations and make them “ripe for decisions” by Cop26 next year.

This means negotiators will have less opportunities to thrash out contentious issues in corridor huddles or bridge their differences over chance encounters at the coffee stand.

“We hope that given the circumstances there will be a greater appetite for some of the negotiations to take place virtually,” said Mpanu-Mpanu, but added the decisions must ultimately be made in face-to-face meetings.

The post Participation at Bonn climate talks could be limited to prevent coronavirus outbreak appeared first on Climate Home News.

State-owned Korea Development Bank (KDB) and the Export-Import Bank of Korea, the country’s export credit agency, have agreed the package of emergency loans for Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction over the last month.

Campaigners have expressed concerns the loans would incentivise Doosan Heavy to sell more coal plants to other countries, locking in high carbon emissions. On Tuesday, four environmental groups filed a request for an audit into the bailout.

They say no social or environmental conditions have been attached to the relief, which amounts to more than double the company’s market capitalisation of less than $1 billion.

The bailout is a response to a liquidity crisis that has been exacerbated by the global fall in coal demand caused by the coronavirus pandemic. But the company’s credit rating was downgraded and its share price collapsed before the Covid-19 outbreak.

The bailout stands in contradiction with Green New Deal plans outlined by South Korea’s ruling Democratic Party to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Under the plan, the party promised to phase out domestic and overseas coal financing by public institutions.

South Korea to implement Green New Deal after ruling party election win

Greenpeace, Solutions For Our Climate, Gyeongnam Korea Federation for Environmental Movements and  Machangjin KFEM filed a request for a public audit into the bailout at the Board of Audit and Inspection.

Doosan Heavy is South Korea’s flagship coal plant manufacturer. The company also makes equipment for nuclear and desalination plants and in recent years has sought to grow its gas turbine development business.

Campaigners requested the Board of Audit carry checks over whether the company’s future cash flow potential and business outlook had been sufficiently scrutinised before the bailout was agreed.

“The government has been providing a massive chunk of money to a coal-reliant company,” Joojin Kim, attorney and managing director of Solutions For Our Climate, told Climate Home News.

Kim said the bailout was “unwise” both in terms of the company’s continued impact on the climate and the financial risk of its coal assets becoming stranded as demand falls. “The company should not receive government financing as long as its business model focuses around coal,” he said.

Mari Chang, climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace, said the no-strings loans “played a role in preventing the company, which needs restructuring, from cutting off its losing businesses”.

Renewables most resilient to Covid-19 lockdown measures, says IEA

In the longer-term, Kim said the company was aspiring to grow its gas business despite the fact the market was predicted to shrink and was already saturated with well-established competition.

The approval of relief loans “has been very opaque,” Kim told CHN, insisting on the need for a third party review. The groups are also waiting on the outcome of a freedom of information request in the hope of obtaining more details about the terms of the deal. Doosan Heavy’s own plan for recovery was not made public.

South Korea remains largely dependent on coal, which represents about 40% of the country’s energy mix. While the governments has signalled its intention to move away from coal-fired power plants, there is currently no national phaseout deadline.

The Democratic party’s decisive victory in last month’s parliamentary election gave President Moon Jae-in a mandate to press ahead with the country’s decarbonisation. Campaigners are anticipating more details about the country’s short to medium-term targets.

The Board of Audit and Inspection is required to respond to the audit request within a month of the filling. Kim told CHN he expected the decision over whether the request was accepted to be, “to some extent, politically directed”.

That decision, “will show how much the government is ready to take the risk and support the company,” he said.

Jongkwon Park, of Machangjin KFEM, said in a statement: “Trillions of won [South Korea’ currency] spent on large corporations with opaque futures have been used to expand coal power. This is a complete disregard for the people and future generations who will suffer from the climate crisis.”

The post South Korean government backs $2 billion bailout to coal company, despite green finance pledge appeared first on Climate Home News.

But as campaigners move online and strikes go digital, the climate movement is fostering new tactics and deepening alliances to advocate for more resilient economies and societies with people and planet at the centre.

“The decisions that governments are making now on how they shape their recovery plans are fundamental for whether we stay below 1.5C or 2C,” Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, told Climate Home News, referring to the global warming limits in the Paris Agreement.

Covid-19 has exposed the fragility of the global economy, she said, its food supply chains, inequality between rich and poor, access to healthcare and the impacts of air pollution on the severity of the virus.

Learning from recovery efforts following the 2008 financial crash, Morgan warned “just doing some ‘green stimulus’ isn’t going to cut it”. “It is the moment to fundamentally change that underlying system,” she said.

In recent weeks, Greenpeace has been having conversations with inequality and social justice organisations, human rights and health groups and labour unions.

“We have an opportunity to create the world that we want to create now…. a much more just and healthy population and planet,” Morgan said.

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Outside the climate movement, calls for broad movement-building are being echoed.

Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, said governments’ recovery plans needed to addresses inequality, the economic participation of women and the climate crisis.

“It will take all of us, everybody in society. Our world must change,” she told CHN. “No leader to any movement wants to see a world that is not inclusive and where people are left behind.”

In recent years, the climate movement has been compelled to address social justice issues. The “yellow vest” protests against a fuel tax hike in France in 2018 and a social uprising against inequality in Chile in 2019 formed the backdrop to the last two rounds of UN climate talks.

Tasneem Essop, executive director at Climate Action Network (CAN), said those events had spurred collaboration between movements and progressive constituencies.

“This coronavirus crisis will help deepen and strengthen that linkage,” she told CHN.

Citizens’ assemblies on climate change seek to shape the post-Covid recovery

While analogies between Covid-19 and the climate crisis, and debates about how to rebuild economies are live within the climate community, campaigners are wary of being seen as insensitive to people’s immediate suffering.

Social science research based on communities that have experienced extreme weather events suggests it is unwise to rush into conversations about the climate change connection, said Robin Webster, senior climate change engagement strategist at Climate Outreach, a charity specialising in climate communication.

“It is distasteful to be talking about emissions while people are losing their jobs, it can really backfire. But there is definitely a window of engagement that tends to open up after the event, when people are able to reflect,” she told CHN.

Climate campaigners have united in saying the ongoing public health crisis must be governments’ top priority. But they also warn the pandemic has not marked a truce for climate impacts.

The past five years were the hottest on record and the trend is anticipated to continue, according to World Meteorological Organization estimates. Pacific islands took a lashing from Cyclone Harold, a category five storm, earlier this month. In the northern hemisphere, frontline climate groups are preparing for hurricane and wildfire seasons.

Coronavirus: which governments are bailing out big polluters?

Meanwhile, campaigners have been carefully tracking governments’ response to the economic slowdown and the multi-billion bailouts for hard-hit industries including airlines, oil, gas and coal.

“We are not lifting our foot from the pedal,” said Essop. “There can be a lot that happens under the veil of a crisis that is not good for the future.”

In France, a $22 billion package to support strategic industries – largely the aviation and automobile sectors – with no conditions attached, did not slip passed French activists.

As the bill was voted through the National Assembly, Greenpeace France urged people to message lawmakers backing the bill by email and social media, demanding green conditions for relief.

The chair of Emmanuel Macron’s ruling party in the assembly, Gilles Le Gendre, received around 25,000 emails in two days. His inbox under siege, he rang Greenpeace France’s executive director Jean-Francois Julliard, asking him to halt the campaign.

For Julliard, the phone call was an opportunity to discuss the bill.  This “shows how activism can work right now,” Greenpeace’s Morgan said.

The strategy may well inspire others. “Bombarding key decision makers with letters urging them to ensure the coming economic recovery plans are climate smart would be a valuable intervention,” said Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa.

Coronavirus: Four more EU nations back a green recovery

The civil disobedience group Extinction Rebellion (XR) has also been thinking of new ways for people to put pressure on their governments from home.

On April Fools Day, XR’s fake Google website announcing the tech giant will immediately stop funding organisations that deny or block climate action went viral.

The group has been keen to highlight what corporations and governments could do if similar amounts of money and energy deployed to respond to the pandemic were applied to the climate crisis.

Sarah Lunnon, political circle coordinator XR UK, told CHN the trillions pledged in economic bailout by the world’s largest economies showed that that the previously unthinkable was possible after all.

“What governments have been prepared to do has been absolutely jaw-dropping – how far they have gone and how quickly they have moved.

“Politicians said it was politically not credible to make the changes we have been calling for but the Covid crisis has shown that we can take radical political action,” she said.

Greenpeace takes Arctic oil lawsuit to Norway’s supreme court

For the 50^th anniversary of Earth Day on 22 April, a three-day online programme of webinars, discussions, story-telling and performances has been organised to discuss what resilient economies and a climate-proof world may look like.

Dillon Bernard, communication director of Future Coalition, a US-based network of youth-led organisations focused on creating social change, said the event was also geared to grow the climate movement in the US and register new voters in the run-up to the November presidential election.

“This digital infrastructure and strategy can really supercharge our movement in 2020 and once we can open our doors and step outside we are going to be even more powerful,” he said.

The post Climate activists form new tactics and alliances amid coronavirus lockdown appeared first on Climate Home News.

As we see confirmed cases grow exponentially, grocery stores run out of food, and economies falter, it is an opportunity to understand what so many Indigenous communities have understood from time immemorial: we are all connected.

Our economies, our human relationships, and our germs have very few degrees of separation. Practicing altruistic interdependence in this pandemic moment – and this ecological moment – might just be what can support life and living.

The climate crisis is increasing the prevalence and spread of disease, which disproportionately impacts the poor. Likewise, Covid-19 is kicking off an economic downturn and disproportionately impacting those without insurance or access to health care, amplifying the impact of the climate crisis on marginalised communities.

Covid-19 makes everyone more vulnerable to the accelerating effects of the climate crisis. The climate crisis is a threat multiplier, as is the coronavirus.

An economic downturn, coupled with xenophobia and layoffs, will accelerate the social impacts of what is heading towards the hottest year on record. We need to examine patterns of power and access to services—from who is suffering to who gets tested and treated to who is making the decisions.

The pandemic is and will have much greater impacts on those already bearing the greatest brunt of climate change.

Governments urged to attach green strings to long-term coronavirus recovery plans

Who are those that will bear the greatest burden of this pandemic? The same people who are most vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis: low-income, houseless, undocumented, or disabled peoples who experience systematic discrimination from healthcare systems. Migrants and refugees experiencing greater xenophobia and deportation will suffer. Incarcerated folks, already climate stressed, will suffer great risk of infection.

The pandemic brings the injustice of our economies and culture into acute relief: from increased slave labour in Hong Kong prisons due to a depressed workforce, to the woeful treatment of migrants. It highlights how the ecological crisis compromises public health, from those without clean drinking water to wash their hands to those with poor respiratory health because of pollution.

Near my hometown of Seattle, a motel converted into a quarantine site is in a low-income community that was not consulted about the decision, just like those same communities have experienced with extractive industries the world over.

For both the climate crisis and coronavirus, the same people will benefit: those at the helm of disaster capitalism. We are already seeing this with the proposed stimulus package in the US bailing out the highest emitting companies and devastating social security.

The climate crisis consolidates power, both by who can and who cannot adapt and who receives the resources to respond.

Coronavirus slows developing nations’ plans to step up climate action in 2020

Our energy system, alongside many countries’ healthy systems, are designed for profit, rather than well-being. As the tell-tale signs of disaster capitalism appear in the wake of pandemic fear (e.g., mask and sanitiser price hikes and medicine scams), we can learn from communities like those in Puerto Rico choosing community care over corporate credos.

The coronavirus pandemic shows us that we can change our ways, and quickly. Millions are learning new ways to work remotely, collaborate across sectors, or provide healthcare in ways previously touted as impossible. The coronavirus is the best case for universal healthcare worldwide and climate justice solutions that promote community cohesion.

Grassroots climate justice movements are building the political power and self-determination of communities worldwide, which makes them better equipped to handle these kinds of crises. Greater community sovereignty means fewer people are displaced and made more vulnerable to disease, and more people can sustain collective health in place.

Coronavirus and climate change are two crises that need humanity to unite

For example, in Northern California after the last few years of deadly fires, long-running climate justice community groups have built strong response networks. Mutual aid for those with disabilities, the elderly, and the houseless are now being activated in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Just like many catastrophic climate impacts, it is not a question of if pandemics will occur, but a matter of when. We are at an inflection point. How will we respond? In our fear-based state, will we hoard and exclude? Or will we embrace our interdependence and choose collective action?

Maybe this is Earth’s wake-up call. The coronavirus is exposing our dysfunctional leadership and sparking new ways of caring for each other and the planet.

Perhaps we can refocus on collective care, cooperation, and community. Whatever unfolds, the best investment we can make is in the communities already fiercely protecting the health of the Earth and her peoples.

Lindley Mease is the director of the CLIMA Fund, which resources grassroots climate justice movements across the globe.

The post Coronavirus pandemic shows we need new ways to look after the Earth and each other appeared first on Climate Home News.

You only have to glance at the popular press during hot spells to see the power of this national narrative in action. From people frolicking in fountains, to beach go-ers smiling and relaxing as the mercury rises, we don’t simply enjoy warm weather, we relish it.

But is climate change altering the story we tell ourselves about the ‘Great British summer’?

In a new survey of public opinion, a collaboration between Cardiff University and Climate Outreach, we found striking evidence that the European heatwaves of 2018 and 2019 may have shifted how such events are perceived.

Whilst the survey confirmed the longstanding trend of high concern about floods and storms amongst the UK public, we also saw a huge shift in the percentage of people expressing anxiety about heatwaves, from 23% (in previous work carried out in 2013) to 72%.

The number of people saying they are ‘worried’ or ‘very worried’ about climate change has doubled.

African countries need rich nations to take the lead on ambition at Cop26

Levels of concern about climate change are at an all time high. And perhaps most strikingly of all, climate change was named – unprompted at the start of the survey – as the second most important issue facing the country over the next 20 years, beaten only by Brexit – the shortcut to describe the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.

And while the surprise result in the survey was around perceptions of extreme heat, the first months of 2020 have been a stark reminder of the grim power of flooding. In a changing climate, we will sadly have to come to terms with more of both of these extremes.

The shift in perceptions of climate risks, and levels of concern, comes at a time when climate change is in the news more than ever: from school strikes, to major infrastructure decisions around airports, to the wave of citizens’ assemblies sweeping the country, climate change has finally got a foothold as part of the national conversation.

And campaigners need to keep it at the top of the political and public agenda in a crucial year for climate change in the UK, with Glasgow hosting the next UN conference, viewed as a critical milestone in making good on the promises made in Paris.

So have we reached a tipping point in public opinion? Can we assume that public engagement on climate change is now locked in, and the pathway to net zero emissions a matter of simply ushering in the right technologies and pulling the right policy levers?

Although there is much to be optimistic about in the survey findings, we also need to learn the lessons of recent history.

Australia’s carbon accounting plan for Paris goals criticised as ‘legally baseless’

More than 10 years ago, ahead of the Copenhagen UN climate conference, grand claims were made about ‘saving the world’, but a combination of the financial crisis, a bungled presidency of the conference, and the hack of climate scientists’ emails from the University of East Anglia knocked things off course.

It took years for the climate movement to recover its momentum.

With unsettling signals coming from the UK government at the beginning of 2020 in terms of showing clear and consistent leadership for the Glasgow conference, and the now seemingly inevitable spread of the coronavirus, there is a risk that history could repeat itself if we take public engagement for granted.

Instead, we should see public opinion as an ongoing work-in-progress, and using the seven recommendations launched alongside the survey findings, make a commitment to maintain and deepen public engagement so that there is a broad-based social mandate for ambitious climate policies.

The shift by climate campaigners to an ‘emergency footing’ has clearly moved the dial of public opinion. Combined with increasingly volatile changing climate and a step-change in media reporting, the alarm bell has, it seems, finally been heard on climate change.

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But having convinced many more people that we are facing an unprecedented crisis, we must now harness that (legitimate) fear and anxiety and translate it into a broad-based social mandate for ambitious climate policies that moves from fear and guilt (two emotions which the new survey showed had risen in recent years) and towards constructive, credible hope (the survey showed no corresponding increase in those feeling this emotion).

A majority of the UK public agrees we are living in a climate emergency. But this is an emergency like no other – as it is an emergency that will last for many years.

The current salience and status of climate change is welcome and long overdue. But to keep it at the top of the political and public agenda will require a sustained effort not only now but for decades to come.

Adam Corner is the research director at Climate Outreach, which specialises in climate change communication. 

The post Public opinion on climate change is up but let’s not forget lessons from the past appeared first on Climate Home News.

In partnership with the Climate Justice Resilience Fund (CJRF), we are supporting original reporting that focuses on communities, mainly in developing nations, who are suffering most from climate change even though they have contributed little to the problem of rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Articles will put a spotlight on CJRF’s goal of supporting “communities first hit, first to respond, and first to adapt to climate change”. We will highlight women, youth and indigenous peoples on the front lines of climate change who are creating and sharing their own solutions for resilience.

The ideal story for us will capture the attention of our international audience with a combination of on-the-ground reporting from affected communities, scientific evidence, innovative and rights-based solutions, and political tension or controversy.

The grants will cover competitive rates and reasonable travel expenses, to be negotiated in advance.

We plan to publish eight articles under the project, lasting until 30 November 2020. At least half of the stories will focus on CJRF’s priority areas – the Bay of Bengal, East Africa and the Arctic – where climate change is already affecting landscapes and livelihoods.

In the Bay of Bengal, communities in Bangladesh and the Indian states of Orissa and West Bengal are at risk from heat waves, erratic rainfall, and storms surges. Rising seas may force relocation, but how are communities working to delay any moves, or to ensure they move on their own terms?

In the drylands of Tanzania and Kenya in East Africa, more variable rainfall linked to climate change is disrupting food production. How are communities innovating to safeguard their crops, livestock and livelihoods?

In the Arctic, a thaw is threatening the hunting livelihoods of indigenous peoples in CJRF´s focus areas of Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Can they adapt?

If you are a journalist with at least three years’ experience, please send us your pitches. Local reporters will be given preference, although we would also consider pitches from travelling reporters for stories in areas where local reporting is harder to source.

Your pitch should explain the top line of the story and essential context in no more than 150 words. If we like the idea, we will ask for more detail. Briefly explain what sources you would interview and any travel required. Our focus is on written articles but we are also open to multimedia projects.

When pitching for the first time, tell us a bit about your journalism experience and background. Include links to one or two recent stories you are proud of. Editors will work closely with you to give feedback and advice.

For transparency to our readers, each piece would note that it was produced with support from CJRF along with a link to our editorial guidelines that outline how we interact with grant makers while ensuring independence.

You must have fluent spoken and written English. It helps if you have worked with international media before and have some awareness of climate change themes.

Please send your pitches to acting editor Megan Darby md@climatehomenews.com. We will review the first pitches in mid-March and subsequent ideas in coming months and will publish until November.

This article has been amended to update the contact details.

The post Climate Home News launches front line climate justice reporting programme appeared first on Climate Home News.

On a video call hosted by Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg and her “Fridays for Future” youth movement, they said African nations have a role to play even though global warming has been caused overwhelmingly by major industrialised nations.

Deforestation in Africa and local energy policies promoting fossil fuels were all adding to the crisis, said Makenna Muigai of Kenya.

“I urge African leaders and world leaders to take into consideration that all of us at the end of the day will be affected by climate change,” she said.

UN relocates biodiversity talks to Italy from China after coronavirus emergency

Ndoni Mcunu, an environmental scientist at Witwatersrand University in South Africa, said that African nations should make their economies more efficient to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“Africa only contributes 5% of the greenhouse gases yet we are the most impacted,” she said. China, the United States and the European Union are the top emitters.

Among policy advice, Vanessa Nakate, 23, of Uganda urged a halt to construction of a pipeline to export Ugandan oil via Tanzania to the Indian Ocean port of Tanga.

“We need to keep the oil in the ground,” she said. She said that activists in Africa often felt ignored, both at home and abroad.

“The biggest threat to action in my country and in Africa is the fact that those who are trying as hard as possible to speak up are … not able to tell their stories,” she said, adding that some feared arrest if they took part in local protests about climate change.

Nakate won unwanted attention last week after she was cropped from a news agency photograph at a meeting of political and business leaders in Davos, Switzerland. Her absence meant the image showed only white activists, including 17-year-old Thunberg.

Nakate said that the controversy about the photograph – subsequently reissued to include her – might end up helping. “I’m actually very optimistic about this. I believe it is going to change the stories of different climate activists in Africa,” she said.

Coronavirus side effect – Climate Weekly

Teenage activist Ayakha Melithafa of South Africa said it was difficult to galvanise local action on climate change when many people in Africa suffered crises, of poverty and unemployment.

“It’s hard to convince people in Africa to care about the climate crisis because they are facing so many socio-economic crises at the same time,” she said.

She called for better public education to show that climate change would exacerbate strains on water and food supplies.

Thunberg, named Time Magazine’s person of the year for 2019, said she wanted to focus on Africa by organising the call.

She said that everyone in power around the world needs “to start treating this crisis as a crisis.”

The post Youth activists urge African governments to do more to curb climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.

From 2020, projects such as hydropower dams and sustainable forestry and agriculture will be able to sell credits for carbon emissions reductions on a new global market.

Indigenous and local community groups say the rules, which are being negotiated at the Cop25 meeting in Madrid this week, must include safeguards that ensure projects do not harm the people who live nearby.

But new draft rules released on Saturday removed the requirement for parties to “respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights”, replacing this language with a much weaker placeholder text. They also failed to include further processes that are considered norms in international development finance.

“This further dilutes the potential rules and could jeopardise the integrity of the Paris Agreement,” says Erika Lennon, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), who has closely followed the safeguards issue for years.

To show what is at stake, many point to carbon market system being superseded: the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), established back in 1997. From 2020, the CDM will be replaced by the Sustainable Development Mechanism (SDM) being established under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.

What is Article 6? The issue climate negotiators cannot agree

Both the CDM and SDM are market mechanisms which allow countries or companies to “reduce” their own emissions by buying offsets from projects built elsewhere.

The CDM had no language on safeguarding local communities and no complaint mechanism. It has been criticised for approving offset projects which failed to consult local communities and caused them harm.

One such project is the Alto Maipo hydropower scheme currently under construction near Santiago, Chile. This “run of the river” megaproject works by diverting river water through 70km of tunnels. It is funded by several multilateral banks but also registered to sell carbon credits via the CDM, and touted by the Chilean government – which is presiding over the Cop25 talks – as a source of clean energy.

The scheme has already led to numerous human rights violations, impacting the local water, land used for grazing and local environment, according to CIEL. It is also exacerbating the impacts of climate change in the region by disturbing the surrounding glaciers and accelerating desertification, it says.

It has also created social tensions within local communities, said NGO Carbon Market Watch, by benefiting some parts of the local population but not others, and has destroyed local industries such as livestock, beekeeping and tourism. 

These groups say the project’s impacts were not properly evaluated ahead of time.

Since construction began over a decade ago, the project has been met with popular opposition. Chilean environmental groups have filed complaints at both the World Bank Group and the Inter-American Development Bank over what they say was a faulty environmental impact assessment and a failure to adequately consult with the community.

Irresistible Greta Thunberg meets immovable UN climate talks

“There was no consultation,” said Marcela Mella of community group Chileans Coordinadora Ciudadana No Alto Maipo (CCNAM), one of the groups who filed the complaints. “There was a process of citizen participation, but this isn’t binding… The company did not have an obligation to respond to these observations.”

Mella travelled to Madrid to highlight the problems experienced with the Alto Maipo project. She was joined by Juan Pablo Orrego, president of Ecosistemas, a Chilean NGO also fighting against the hydro project.

“It’s really shady that it is designated as a Clean Development Mechanism project,” said Orrego. “It’s a huge project, very invasive, that is degrading the three principal tributaries of the Rio Maipo that distributes water to all the metropolitan area of Chile. If you had applied the precautionary principle, this project would not have been authorised.”

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Many other controversial hydro projects around the world have been part of the CDM, including the Barro Blanco dam in Panama and the Bujagali dam in Uganda. An afforestation project in Kachung forest in Uganda remains a CDM certified project despite reports of villagers being deprived of vital resources and experiencing threats and violence.

This is why NGOs, indigenous groups and many countries are pushing for more robust rules for projects registered under the new system.

“We’ve seen that the CDM has had negative impacts on communities, we’ve seen it has infringed on human rights, we’ve seen it has damaged the environment,” says Gilles Dufrasne from Carbon Market Watch. “So we need to take stock of that experience and situation, learn from it and set up systems where this is not going to happen again.”

Dos Grandes defensores de los Ríos y la Naturaleza, miembros de la RED, Marcela Mella y Juan Pablo Orrego, están ya en la COP25,en Madrid, llevando a la Cumbre del Clima, la voz ciudadana y ambiental de lo que enfrentan cada uno de nuestros territorios pic.twitter.com/s5I7eDIPKR

— Red por los Ríos Libres (@redrioslibres) December 4, 2019

These groups set out several essential elements to ensuring the new carbon market mechanism has human rights safeguards.

Firstly, projects can not just be about reducing emissions – they also need to respect human rights and protect indigenous peoples, women and other marginalised groups, says CIEL.

Second, meaningful consultations with communities should be part of the process for certifying any new project. Third, an independent grievance mechanism should be established.

“Even if you put in environmental and social safeguards that are supposed to be followed, and even if you consult with communities, harms can occur,” says Lennon. “There needs to be somewhere for communities to go that’s not just an advisory body.”

None of these elements are groundbreaking. The Green Climate Fund (GCF), for example, already incorporates all three in its approval process for projects.

“We think that to leave implementation of Article 6 to each country would be a step back to the advance of climate action,” says Levi Sucre, a member of the bri bri indigenous people of Costa Rica and executive coordinator of the Mesoamerican Alliance of People and Forests. 

Indigenous groups are pushing for a fourth element to be included in Article 6: dialogues at the national level which include indigenous people.

The latest Article 6 text does include some language on safeguards, including local stakeholder consultations, the right to appeal and a (non-independent) grievance process. But Lennon says these measures remain far too weak – and even these may not remain in the final rules, expected at the end of this week. 

“A lot is up in the air about what are red lines and what are parties strong on now but will ultimately be willing to relinquish a bid on,” she says.

Not all countries agree these safeguards are needed.

Countries such as India and Saudi Arabia, representing the like-minded developing countries and Arab negotiating blocs at the UN, argue human rights are a national issue. It shouldn’t be up to the UN to decide how projects run in their own countries, they say,

Many other countries are pushing for references to robust safeguards to appear in the final Article 6 text, which was scheduled to be agreed in Madrid but may be pushed to 2020, These include Tuvalu (on behalf of other least-developed countries), Costa Rica (on behalf of Latin American and Carribean countries), Switzerland and Mexico.

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But the most powerful players have tended to keep quiet about safeguards in negotiations, indicating it is not a priority for them. China and the US have said little on safeguards at the talks. 

The EU has been supportive of safeguards in the past, but is remaining quiet in the current negotiations. The European Commission did not respond to a request for comment.

“What we see is that it is still very difficult to actually get these safeguards,” says Dufrasne. “It’s still kind of a taboo topic to be discussed.”

Despite a slow first week of negotiations, there is a strong push in Madrid to reach agreement on Article 6. But Lennon warns against doing this at the expense of locking in weak safeguards that will last for decades to come.

“Not having an outcome here is better than having an outcome that locks in bad rules that would undermine the integrity of the Paris Agreement, and that could lead to actions that harm communities,” she says.

The post Carbon offsets have patchy human rights record. Now UN talks erode safeguards appeared first on Climate Home News.

“We don’t want more promises. It is your action that are going to save us,” Vanessa Nakate, a youth climate striker from Uganda, told negotiators at the UN’s Cop25 conference while protesters were gathering in the Spanish capital. Organisers claimed half a million people took part. Local authorities estimated the crowd was closer to 15,000.

But at the end of the first week of a fortnight of discussions on the narrow remit of finalising the rules of the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries could point to little progress.

Negotiators failed to agree a common timetable for countries to present new climate plans. Nor could they agree on when to agree. Meanwhile, entrenched political positions on global carbon markets means the talks remain in stalemate.

Comment: We really may have just 11 years to save the climate

Decisions that are not taken in Madrid will be pushed to a key summit in Glasgow next year when countries need to focus on collectively raising their targets, which currently set the world on course to be roughly 3C hotter.

But activists don’t want to wait, calling on governments to use this year’s UN talks to bring new political commitments to cut emission faster.

Speaking to reporters hours after arriving in Madrid, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg warned Cop25 was being treated as “some kind of middle-year event” ahead of the important Glasgow meeting.

“But we cannot afford middle years, we cannot afford any more days going by without any action being taken. Every chance that we get to improve the situation we must take,” she said.

Thunberg and the youth strikers have called on governments to take immediate action to bend the emissions growth curb and limit global warming to 1.5C.

HAPPENING NOW:
Madrid is crowded for the #COP25 demonstration. We won't turn our back to leaders stealing our future by ignoring the climate crisis. The climate justice movement is bigger and closer than ever! #WeAreUnstoppable pic.twitter.com/2gLKR5DVVG

— Fridays for Future Germany (@FridayForFuture) December 6, 2019

But since the 16-year-old’s first climate strike outside the Swedish parliament in August last year, emissions have continued to rise and countries are failing to reverse the trend.

“We have been striking for more than a year and nothing has happened,” Thunberg told journalists in a room so packed the spill over had to watch her on a screen.

“There is no victory because the only thing we want to see is real action and real action has not been happening,” she said. “If you look at it from a certain point of view, we have achieved nothing.”

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The call for action was heard by Sonam Phuntsho Wangdi, chair of the least developed countries group. “Our countries have been saying the same for years,” he told CHN. “But in the negotiation rooms we don’t see that urgency from others.”

There will be an opportunity for governments to respond next week at a special event on ambition.

The Chilean government, which is overseeing these talks, has asked countries to sign up to an alliance committing to increase the cuts they promised to the Paris Agreement in 2015. However CHN reported on Friday that Chile itself will no longer announce an updated pledge at the talks, in part due to domestic civil unrest.

Similarly, none of the world’s largest emitters have shown the political will to increase their existing pledges at the talks so far. While the EU strives to overcome internal tensions to ramp up its ambition, China, the US, Brazil, Australia and Japan remain unmoved.

Denmark showed another way was possible on Friday by adopting a new climate law that aims for an emissions cut far deeper than either the EU’s current target or its proposed enhancement.

Chile delays emissions goal boost at its own UN climate talks

Addressing young people on Thursday, head of UN Climate Change Patricia Espinosa admitted that 25 years after the coming into force of the UN framework convention on climate change “we have been struggling to urgently act to address climate change”.

For Benjamin Strzelecki, a 20-year-old Polish youth striker, the prospect of having to wait another lifetime to see countries taking concrete action to curb emissions is “scary”.

Amishi Agrawal, a 19-year-old Indian youth ambassador for the Centre for United National Constitutional Research said: “Young people want to save the lives of those who are being threatened by rising sea levels but negotiations discuss how best to accommodate limiting climate change within their plans for economic growth.” For her, bridging this disconnect requires giving young people a formal seat at the table.

Cop25: Attempt to align global climate plans fails

One small island diplomat expressed her frustration at the slow progress, but told CHN it was “standard” in the first week of negotiations. “The urgency will come next week when the ministers arrive,” she said. “The Paris Agreement is a good framework, I don’t doubt this process can deliver.”

Ambassador Janine Felson, deputy chair of the alliance of small island states, told CHN the UN talks should not be considered a “barometer for what governments are doing to address the interests and the needs of young people”. Leadership came from action at home, she said.

“It doesn’t matter that we are sitting in rooms talking to other governments about issues on the climate agenda, we represent the youth and we act for our young people” towards a 1.5C world, she added.

The post Irresistible Greta Thunberg meets immovable UN climate talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

Millions of people in over 100 countries, many of them too young to vote, have taken to the streets to demand governments radically increase efforts to fight climate change over the next decade.

But do we really have until just 2030 to avert climate catastrophe? While emphasising the importance of urgent action, scientists have tried to caveat this crude message. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says we need to halve global emissions by 2030 in order to have at least a one in two chance of limiting warming to 1.5C, the goal set by the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Cop25 Bulletin: A rare press conference

The world will not “end” in 2030. But if we are not on a rapidly falling emissions pathway by that point, we are likely to blow through the 1.5C limit around 2040.

By that time, the climate strikers on the streets today will be entering middle age, starting families, rising up in their careers, and outvoting their irresponsible forebears. So can they not just solve the problem then?

Geophysically speaking, perhaps. Because carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linger in the atmosphere for decades or longer, what matters most is the total stock of emissions over time. That means sluggish action today could, in theory, be compensated for by aggressive action in the future. Accordingly, some oil and gas companies have shifted from denying climate change altogether to accepting incremental steps like modest carbon prices.

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But anyone advocating an incremental approach – which most governments are now following – is making a strong assumption not just about climate models, but about the politics of climate change in the middle of the 21^st Century. In joint work with Jeff Colgan at Brown University and Jessica Green at the University of Toronto, my research is exploring how, as both climate change and decarbonisation advance over the next decades, climate politics will be increasingly existential. This change will shift governments’ focus from prevention to reaction.

To date, contestation over climate policy resembles what political scientists call ‘distributional politics’. Policies like carbon taxes or renewable energy deployment benefit some economic sectors and populations and impose costs on others. Interest groups that stand to win or lose from these changes advocate for their preferred policies.

But as we push the climate system to further extremes, the costs of climate change will become much more intense and widespread. Not just small islands, but whole coastal regions will be inundated. Droughts will cut off vital water supplies from hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers as well as those that feed global supply chains. Deadly heat will render whole regions uninhabitable. Under these conditions, climate politics will not just be a question of ‘who gets what, when, how’, as the political scientist Henry Laswell famously put it. Rather, climate politics will become a question of who gets to survive.

The UK must steer the Paris Agreement out of its ‘perilous decade’

At the same time, the advance of decarbonisation will pose a similar existential threat to companies, workers, regions and regimes whose economic survival is linked to fossil fuels. Already, hundreds of coal plants and mines have shuttered across the world, taking investments, jobs and pensions with them. For this reason, a key demand of climate protestors today is for governments to provide a ‘just transition’ for workers in carbon-dependent sectors. Oil and gas companies may follow coal, and countries and political regimes based on the exploitation of these resources may follow. Those that have managed to diversify or channel resources into sovereign wealth funds may adapt. Others – cruelly, it will be those least able to manage – may discover that the only thing worse than the ‘resource curse’ is the curse of lack of resources.

In other words, the advance of both climate change and decarbonisation efforts will not just change the distribution of resources; it will threaten the very existence of large swathes of the global economy and population. How can we expect political leaders in the middle of the century – the young people who are today demanding action in the streets – to react?

In the face of urgent survival needs, it may be substantially more difficult to invest political effort and resources in preventing further climate change by reducing emissions. Instead, governments will face increasing, and in some cases overwhelming, pressure to limit the harm climate change and decarbonisation are causing in the short term.

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Imagine you are the mayor of a Middle Eastern city in which the night time temperature has been over 50C for the last week. Will you spend the city budget on climate-saving electric cars or climate-destroying air conditioners?

Broadly, there are four strategies we can take to counter climate change. We can mitigate it by reducing emissions. We can adapt to it by taking steps like building seawalls or developing drought-resistant crops. We can compensate those who are hurt by its effects to reduce suffering. Or we can, perhaps, develop geoengineering technologies to limit temperature change or suck carbon from the atmosphere. To date we have focused mainly on mitigation. But as climate politics get existential, political incentives may shift to more defensive approaches.

Indeed, we are already seeing a growing emphasis on such strategies. When the countries of the world pledged, in the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, to “prevent dangerous changes in the Earth’s climate,” they meant reducing emissions. Since that time, vulnerable nations and ‘frontline communities’ have pushed adaptation onto the global agenda. We are already being affected by climate change, they argue, so we need to not just prevent but also treat the current harm being done.

More recently, the most affected countries and populations have pushed for compensation. Not only have we failed to prevent climate change, they argue, but its impacts are already so great they cannot be adapted to. Low-lying islands, for whom even a small degree of climate change is existential, have been strong advocates for so-called ‘loss and damage’ measures in international climate policy, demanding that those who have contributed most to climate change pay the reparations. In the future, expect these claims to grow.

In a climate emergency, there must be compensation for victims

And as climate change proceeds, what was previously unthinkable may become widely demanded. Today, many climate advocates reject geoengineering techniques (such as building machines to suck carbon from the air, or seeding clouds to reflect more sunlight back into space) as an unproven distraction from mitigation efforts. But if the impacts of climate change continue to accumulate, governments may come to see such technologies as vital components of national security.

All of these strategies will be far more costly, and far less effective, than mitigation. But by the time today’s climate strikers are watching their own children take to the streets, they might be the only options left.

The good news is that these trends are not inevitable. The more we can prevent climate change now, while also making sure that those dependent on fossil fuels are not left behind, the less existential climate politics will be in the future. In other words, the urgency of action today is demanded not only by climate science, but also by political science. We will certainly be dealing with climate change for longer than the next 11 years, but we may have only the next decade to prevent it.

Thomas Hale is associate professor in public policy (global public policy) at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. This article was published in the fourth issue of the Oxford Government Review, published in November 2019 by the Blavatnik School of Government.

The post We really may have just 11 years to save the climate appeared first on Climate Home News.

Political attention is now constant. Media coverage has broken out of the green ghetto. Climate deniers have returned to obscurity.

The huge global profile of Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is driven by the increasing frequency and impact of extreme weather events. Unusually intense wildfires, floods, storms and droughts, now occurring simultaneously throughout the world, are validating climate science experientially for people everywhere.

What climate scientists said would happen is happening, only sooner and more dramatically than they previously thought. The technologies to free the global economy from fossil fuel dependence have also become competitive faster than anyone thought possible. They will become cheaper still in future.

Madrid climate talks to split nations into vanguard and laggard

The Paris Agreement consolidated a global consensus among governments on the need to keep the rise in global average temperatures to less than 2C. The central political equation for governments is changing. The political cost of failing to act on the climate is rising just as the political cost of assertive climate policies is falling.

So, are things looking up for the next two rounds of climate negotiations in Madrid, which began on Monday, and Glasgow? Not necessarily.

Public support for forceful climate action is certainly rising but there are few signs that the political will to act is also rising. The gap between what governments are doing about climate change and what they need to do is widening.

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The Paris Agreement recognised that climate policy success would require commitments to reduce carbon emissions to become more ambitious. It built into the agreement a ratchet mechanism to require a progressive raising of effort. The next two Cop rounds will determine whether this mechanism can be made to work.

David Roberts, one of the world’s better commentators on climate policy, writing in Vox, warned that the UN climate convention – the UNFCCC – was entering a ‘perilous decade’. At the heart of the peril is an expectations trap.

Political leaders everywhere are declaring a climate emergency. It is therefore natural for people to expect more from the annual gathering of tens of thousands of ministers, officials, scientists, business leaders and climate activists than we are likely to get in Madrid or Glasgow.

Frustration is inevitable. And understandable. It is not hard to imagine either the scale or mood of the protests Extinction Rebellion might mount in Glasgow. The peril is that this frustration will nourish the idea the UNFCCC has failed to deliver and that another way must be found for the world to protect the climate.

Cop25 bulletin: Tuesday 3rd December

Not everyone running this argument will be doing so in order to get more done about climate change. And none of those already running it have come up with anything better. The UNFCCC is not, and cannot be, some surrogate global legislative assembly.

Its real world task is to keep enough alignment of the forces within and between countries that want to solve the problem for the real economy to make the transition to net zero. If we expect it to do more than it can, it will fail. If the UNFCCC fails then we lose that alignment and everyone’s climate efforts go backwards.

In a climate emergency, there must be compensation for victims

In Glasgow, the task of steering the world out of this expectations trap will fall to the UK government. It will be a crucial test of its claim to global leadership on climate change. Climate diplomacy happens in capitals not negotiating rooms. It will be conversations in capitals in the next few months that will shape the space for agreement in Glasgow. If this diplomatic effort is late, weak or poorly focussed, then the negotiations will run head on into those rising expectations.

If the UK is to have the authority to be an effective global leader  and to lift ambition then it must be seen to be walking the talk. It has rightly won global praise, sometimes by way of imitation, for its climate act. But a clear gap is emerging between its agreed carbon budgets and the policies required to meet them. Closing that gap will be essential to achieving the authority the UK will need to make a success of Glasgow.

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There are four things it could do right away that would secure this authority: spend an additional £1billion/year on leveraging private capital to make domestic buildings energy efficient; lift its moratorium on onshore wind developments; write a 2030 target for phasing out internal combustion engines into law, instruct its export credit agency and representatives on international financial institutions not to approve finance for new fossil fuel developments.

One of the keys to diplomatic success it that other governments believe you are serious. Adopting these four domestic policies would be a clear indication that the UK is serious about global success in Glasgow.

Tom Burke is chairman and founding director of E3G

The post The UK must steer the Paris Agreement out of its ‘perilous decade’ appeared first on Climate Home News.