Press Advisory: COP27

Press Advisory: COP27

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

November 16, 2022

Our sky, water, soil and forests are not for sale!

What

Climate justice activists and frontline community members come together to push back against false carbon market solutions and corporate techno-fixes at the COP27.

Why

We demand real solutions, not ‘net zero’ schemes. We refute climate policy pathways that financialize nature, create markets for trading pollution and place price tags on all that is sacred. We refute new greenwashing terms like ‘nature-based solutions’ and ‘carbon neutrality’.

We also reject the vast array of unproven, risky and harmful climate techno-fixes being promoted at COP27, including nuclear power, carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCS) and other geoengineering schemes, biomass energy and biofuels, mega-hydroelectric projects, waste incineration and chemical recycling, hydrogen fuels and renewable energy projects that drive mining of lithium and other rare earth minerals.

Instead of financing these schemes, the wealthiest governments and corporations need to provide climate reparations to those Indigenous and frontline communities and workers around the world who are first and most harmed. The UN needs to follow the thought leadership, political self-determination and the just transition strategies led by these communities and workers in order to effectively tackle the root causes of this crisis.

Quotes

Aderonke Ige, Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA): “It is not acceptable for Big Polluters to pollute the very air we breathe. It is not for them to sell imaginary credits in our skies. It is not for them to steal our land and soil, destroy our forests, or poison our waters. We are not for sale. Our lives are not for sale. It’s time to end the dangerous distractions of false solutions. Now is the time to end their abuses, make them pay, and finally deliver the real solutions we urgently need to justly address the climate crisis.”

Mrs Kim, Korean Women Peasants Association: “The digitalisation of agriculture that is promoted by governments and corporations under the banner of ‘climate smart agriculture’, including smart farming and satellite farming, in reality achieves nothing more than driving real farmers out of agriculture in favour of industrial agriculture. We, La Vía Campesina, farmers ourselves, do not believe the lies of big Agribusiness and captive governments who are responsible for the climate crisis, when they claim that more technology and more capital can solve the same climate change that they have caused.”

Nnimmo Bassey, Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), Nigeria: “False solutions are contrived by polluters to sustain the failed system and  keep polluters in business. They lock in fossil fuels and extreme consumption, promote land and forest grabs, displace poor communities from their territories and promote carbon slavery. We denounce them  and demand people driven real solutions working in harmony with Nature.”

Panganga Pungowiyi, Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), Alaska USA: “Geoengineering and its testing is unsafe, theoretical, diverts billions in resources from real solutions, and is in direct conflict with Indigenous values, whose land and ecosystems – on which we depend to live – will be most impacted.”

Edgar Franks, Familias Unidas por la Justicia: “Between John Kerry promoting a new pollution trading regime and Biden announcing bogus techno-fixes like carbon capture and storage, and greenwash terms like nature-based-solutions, COP27 has revealed that it remains business as usual. Back home this means more pollution and poverty for Indigenous, migrant, Black and brown communities who are already overburdened with toxic industrial pollutants.” 

Julia Bernal, Pueblo Action Alliance: “Across the U.S., federal funding packages like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act are subsidising Hydrogen production to continue the fossil fuel economy. Regardless of its colour, Hydrogen production requires an extensive amount of resources like water, natural gas, and even nuclear power. In the arid Southwest of the United States, water scarcity is becoming a climate reality. We cannot invest in energy initiatives that continue such water and natural resource extraction.”

Leona Morgan, Diné No Nukes, USA: “When the nuclear power industry and governments count the carbon footprint of nuclear energy, they do not include carbon emitted from uranium fuel production, transportation, or the storage of forever radioactive waste. By erasing the extraction, processing, and waste storage that happens on Indigenous Peoples’ lands, they erase us! This is an erasure of lives lost, and the harm that radioactive waste causes our communities and future generations. Uranium is a dangerous and dirty fuel. We must stand together to stop this new nuclear colonialism and leave uranium in the ground.”

Jose Bravo, Just Transition Alliance: “COP27 has confirmed our fears that the world’s biggest bankers and their dirty energy cronies continue to steer the negotiations here at Sharm El-Sheikh. If we were to simply leave it up to this U.N. Assembly, then the ‘highway to climate hell’ will be paved with net zero scams like bioenergy, nuclear power and carbon trading.” 

Jesus Vazquez, La Vía Campesina, Puerto Rico: “We, La Vía Campesina, are here at COP27 to reaffirm to all nations and peoples of the world that peasants, farmers, farmworkers, fisherfolk, Indigenous peoples, pastoralists, and agrarian organisers continue to sustain life, feeding the world with great effort in spite of all the damage from accelerating carbon emissions and pollution that multinational corporations and neoliberal governments have been unwilling to stop. We promote and practise Agroecology as a science, an agrifood system, a social movement, a lifestyle and a real people’s solution to keep agriculture and food in the hands of the people and not under the control of corporations. This is why the focus at the negotiations at COP27 should be on what peasants and farmers want and not on the false solutions that corporations and neoliberal governments are using to profit from the climate crisis.”

Neth Daño, ETC Group, Philippines: “Geoengineering has reared its ugly head in climate negotiations through the Art 6.4 market mechanism, in the guise of “activities for removals”. As we have flagged for years, blatantly false solutions like geoengineering are pushed as techno-fixes that do not address the root causes of climate change and as a convenient excuse to continue emitting. Marine-based geoengineering such as ocean fertilisation, for example, is banned in other UN fora based on the precautionary approach, because of adverse impacts on marine ecosystems and livelihoods of fisherfolks. No amount of safeguards will protect the people and the planet from the dangers of geoengineering.”

Soumya Duttya, Friends of the Earth India: “Almost all of the carbon market projects in its earlier avatar of the Clean Development Mechanism have resulted in further displacement and marginalisation of already-impacted communities in southern countries, where these projects were implemented, while enriching polluting corporations. Emissions of both the carbon credit buyers and sellers keep rising. We, global southern people, strongly reject these false solutions and demand real actions for real-zero emissions before 2040, to stop climate catastrophe.”

Contacts:

Madeleine Race, Friends of the Earth International, madeleine@foei.org, Signal +31 645 198 654, @foeint 

Ananda Lee Tan, Just Transition Alliance, anandaleetan@gmail.com, Signal +1 778 875 0696

La Vía Campesina, press@viacampesina.org, Signal +20 100 903 8324

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