Category Archives: UNFCCC

by | March 26, 2013 · 9:00 am

Pablo Salon: How to overcome the climate crisis?

By Pablo Salon, March 15, 2013. Source: Climate Space 2013

logo_finall_ok_1There is no single answer, no single campaign nor single approach.

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a level that avoids catastrophe, we need to:

  • Leave more than two-thirds of the fossil fuel reserves under the soil;
  • Stop the exploitation of tar sands, shale gas and coal;
  • Support small, local, peasant and indigenous community farming while we dismantle big agribusiness that deforests and heats the planet;
  • Promote local production and consumption of products, reducing the free trade of goods that send millions of tons of CO2 while they travel around the world;
  • Stop extractive industries from further destroying nature and contaminating our atmosphere and our land;
  • Increase significantly public transport to reduce the unsustainable “car way of life”;
  • Reduce the emissions of warfare by promoting genuine peace and dismantling the military and war industry and infrastructure.

In other words we need to come out of the endless growth paradigm that is the basis of the capitalist system, and seek for a new kind of society that is grounded on care for each other and nature. A society that seeks happiness for all and not profit for a few. A society based on a different concept of prosperity and well-being. A bio-society for life that includes humans and nature.

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by | March 21, 2013 · 12:00 pm

Forest protection groups call on UN to take serious steps to halt deforestation on International Day of Forests

Note: Global Justice Ecology Project is a signatory to this letter, calling on the UN to take real steps toward addressing deforestation, and opposing false solutions like REDD+, biofuels, and monocultures plantations, which can lead to increased deforestation and human rights abuses against forest peoples.

-The GJEP Team

March 21, 2013. Source: World Rainforest Movement

On the occasion of March 21st, proclaimed by the UN General Assembly as International Day of the Forests (1), the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) and more than 300 signatories call on the General Assembly and UN Institutions and Initiatives related to forest issues to use the new initiative to address the underlying drivers of deforestation.

The letter is motivated by the fact that in spite of several UN initiatives aimed at calling attention for forests at the international level, the process of deforestation -affecting especially tropical forests- continues and the proposed solutions have not slowed down tropical forest loss worldwide – on the contrary.

“The proposals discussed at UN-level, by the FAO, CBD, UNFCCC and UNFF, to solve the forest crisis, for example REDD+ (2), are false solutions because they do not address the underlying drivers of deforestation and strengthen a false idea of sustainability. This is why deforestation has increased in many countries, rather than decreased”, declares Winnie Overbeek, International Coordinator of the WRM.
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by | February 4, 2013 · 4:30 pm

Strike four in climate change: A “Climate Space” to rethink analysis and strategies

Note:  While the post below is a few months old, Global Justice Ecology Project find’s former Bolivian climate negotiator Pablo Salon’s analysis on the UNFCCC incredibly relevant and important.  It is due time to rethink strategy and analysis in approaching solutions to climate change, inequality and economic domination.

-The GJEP Team

By Pablo Salon.  Source: Focus on the Global South

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In baseball, when you have 3 strikes, you are out. In the climate change negotiations we already have 4 strikes. Copenhagen, Cancun, Durban and now Doha. Four attempts and each of the results were bigger failures than the last. The emission reductions should have been at least 40 to 50% until 2020 based on 1990 levels. Four COPs later, the current numbers are down to a measly 13 to 18%. We are now well on our way to a global temperature increase of 4 to 8ºC.

“The perfect is the enemy of the good” is what some UN negotiators say. To which we can reply: “When our house is burning down, the worst thing you can do is lie to us”. It’s time to rethink what is happening and try to find new strategies to avoid a global catastrophe.

It isn’t because of the lack of evidence

Climate change is no longer a theoretical possibility. It has real impacts on the lives of people, nature and the economy.

Climate change is already contributing to the deaths of nearly 400,000 people a year[1]. This month, during the COP18 negotiations in Doha, Qatar, Typhoon Bopha hit the Philippines with all its intensity, leaving in its wake more than 700 dead. The strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines in decades devastated Mindanao, damaging more than 70,000 homes and forcing 30,000 to now live in temporary shelters.
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by | December 18, 2012 · 12:00 pm

Audio: Climate change resistance with Anne Petermann of Global Justice Ecology Project

Note: Anne Petermann is the Executive Director of Global Justice Ecology Project, and directs the international STOP Genetically Engineered Trees Campaign

-The GJEP Team

December 17, 2012.  Source: Clearing the Fog Radio

Listen to the audio here.

Anne Petermann of the Global Justice Ecology Project discusses the recent climate conference in Doha, Qatar which is characterized more as a trade show for corporations looking to profit from climate change than a conference about solutions, and the increasing exclusion of non-corporate voices. She says solutions to the climate crisis are coming from the bottom up.

Ramsey Sprague of the Tar Sands Blockade (http://tarsandsblockade.org/) describes the growing resistance to the Keystone XL Pipeline and the upcoming direct action training camp and action Jan. 3 to 8. Co-hosts Margaret and Kevin will participate in that action and urge you to support it or participate as well. And ecology activist Diane Wilson who is on her 19th day of a hunger strike describes why she is risking her life to hold Valero Oil accountable to her community.

 

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by | December 11, 2012 · 1:44 pm

On Not Attending the UN Climate Conference in Doha

By Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project

Christina Figueres, Executive Director of the UNFCCC

Christina Figueres, Executive Director of the UNFCCC at the Durban Climate COP in 2011.  Photo: Langelle/GJEP

For the first time since 2004, Global Justice Ecology Project did not sent any representatives to the annual UN Climate Conference (COP).  There were numerous reasons for this decision, one of which was a letter sent to us by Ms. Christina Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) “suspending” three Global Justice Ecology Project activists from participating in Doha.  The list includes Lindsey Gillies, Keith Brunner and me–Global Justice Ecology Project’s “Head of Delegation.” We were officially banned from participating in any of the UNFCCC negotiating sessions in 2012 as well as any future sessions unless we sign a document agreeing to their terms to abide by their special “code of conduct” for observers.  Right.

Figueres page 1

Figueres page 2

Our crime?  Direct action.   Unpermitted, disobedient direct action in both Cancun and Durban designed to highlight the mounting repression against non-corporate observers.  (We also worked for over a year to help organize the amazing Reclaim Power action and Peoples’ Assembly at COP 15 in Copenhagen, which exposed the ineffectiveness of the UNFCCC and called for people to take their power back–though the letter did not mention that).

Over the years we have watched the UNFCCC become more and more like the World Trade Organization that we and many anti-corporate globalization organizations rose up against in the latter 1990s and early 2000s.

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Filed under Actions / Protest, Cancun/ COP-16, Carbon Trading, Climate Change, Climate Justice, Commodification of Life, Copenhagen/COP-15, Corporate Globalization, Doha/COP-18, False Solutions to Climate Change, Forests, Forests and Climate Change, GE Trees, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, Political Repression, Posts from Anne Petermann, REDD, The Greed Economy and the Future of Forests, UNFCCC, Youth

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by | December 9, 2012 · 11:17 am

Doha climate talks: failed ambition and unfulfilled promises

From the Center for International Environmental Law

DOHA, QATAR—Today, countries again recognized the need for urgent action to respond to climate change, and again failed to take that action, says the Center for International Environmental Law. The last-minute deal lacks meaningful commitments and leaves critical details to be resolved at a later date.

“This outcome represents a failure of ambition and yet another failure of political will—the latest in a long line of pledges to take real action someday, but not today.” said CIEL President Carroll Muffett. “Governments have now squandered decades that could have been spent averting climate disaster.

Nations adopted a new commitment period under the existing Kyoto Protocol. However, Canada, Japan, Russia, and New Zealand backed out of the second commitment period, and the remaining emission reduction targets are weak. Countries completed negotiations under the Bali Action Plan, but most of the work is incomplete and will be carried forward over the next two years. They also agreed on a general work plan for the Durban Platform, which is supposed to lead to a legally binding agreement by 2015 and spur more action in the short-term.

“In an effort to close the negotiations, Parties have stripped the substance from the outcome,” said Niranjali Amerasinghe, CIEL’s Climate Change Program Director. “This was the moment for developed countries, particularly the United States, to show leadership, to fulfill their obligations to lead the fight against climate change. And they have not.”

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by | December 7, 2012 · 3:00 pm

Statement on Doha Outcomes by Tom Goldtooth of Indigenous Environmental Network

Note: Indigenous Environmental Network is a close partner of Global Justice Ecology Project and one of the leading Indigenous groups organizing against both REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and the Tar Sands gigaproject in Alberta, Canada.

December 07, 2012

Doha, Qatar - Hurricane Sandy; Typhoon Bopha; the continued melting of the ice in the Arctic directly impacting the livelihood of its Arctic Indigenous peoples and; to drought conditions throughout the world. Mother Earth is speaking. Nature is speaking, but the governmental parties here at COP 18 are not listening.

Indigenous Peoples here in Doha are speaking for the rights of Mother Earth and the collective rights of indigenous peoples who continue to be vulnerable to the accelerating downward spiral of climate change. The indigenous voice has remained firm calling upon the governmental parties to reach agreement on commitments for a stringent global emission reduction regime that would stabilize greenhouse-gas emissions beyond 2013. A weak agreement here in Doha is a death warrant for Indigenous peoples throughout the world.

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by | · 10:45 am

Doha: US envoy’s cutting remark on CO2 emissions fails to add up

By Suzanne Goldenberg, December 6, 2012.  Source: The Guardian

Li Muzi/Xinhua Press/Corbis

Li Muzi/Xinhua Press/Corbis

The Obama administration has been vigorously defending its climate record at the Doha conference in Qatar. But it appears that Todd Stern, the US state department climate envoy, has been rather selective with his facts.

In his sole press conference at the meeting, Stern told reporters the US was on track to meet its commitment on cutting emissions by 2020, citing a report by the Resources for the Future thinktank.

The report said that incoming Environmental Protection Agency regulations on coal-fired power plants, along with other measures, could lead to a 16.3% cut in emissions by 2020.

“The US has done quite significant things in the president’s first four years, in his first term,” Stern said. “I saw just the other day actually a report by Resources for the Future which is a quite good kind of environmental economic thinktank in Washington that projects us to be on track for about a 16.5% reduction based on the policies that we have in place now.”

That figure is not far off Barack Obama’s admittedly modest target of 17% cut on emissions from 2005 levels, which he offered to the UN climate meeting at Copenhagen in 2009. The problem was, however, that Stern overlooked official US government reports indicating the US would be nowhere near a 16% cut by 2020. He also overlooked several different cautions included in the RFF report (pdf).
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by | December 6, 2012 · 10:40 am

Doha: Forest groups denounce false solutions to forest loss at UN climate summit

From Global Forest Coalition, Biofuelwatch and Global Justice Ecology Project

For immediate release – 6 December 2012

UK alleges it will address drivers of climate change – but aims to subsidise a massive expansion of wood-based biomass industry

Doha, Qatar - As negotiations failed to finalise an agreement on a controversial forest policy called REDD+ [1] during the ongoing UN Framework Convention on Climate Change talks in Doha, Qatar [2], forest groups published a letter challenging claims that the drivers of forest change are being addressed by countries within the REDD+ negotiations.

Negotiations on REDD+ turned sour in Doha as developing countries realised they can expect very little funding for this highly controversial forest scheme over the coming years. “The REDD honeymoon is obviously over” states Simone Lovera, executive director of the Global Forest Coalition, who followed the talks.

Furthermore, at the same time that REDD+ is being promoted within the UNFCCC to supposedly protect forest carbon, there is a massive expansion of the biomass industry underway, which will generate increased international trade in wood. This is being actively supported by governments such as that of the UK, and will dwarf any attempts made to protect forests within the UNFCCC.

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by | December 4, 2012 · 12:00 pm

COP18: MRV as a Trojan Horse for carbon markets?

Note: The following post appeared as a guest post on redd-monitor.  Simone Lovera is a long time friend and colleague of GJEP, and GJEP is the North American focal point for the Global Forest Coalition.

-The GJEP Team

By Chris Lang and Simone Lovera, December 4, 2012.  Source: redd-monitor

The REDD negotiations in Doha have stalled. After a week of discussions in the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice parts of the REDD text remain in brackets. The negotiations are now pushed back to the next SBSTA meeting, which will take place in June 2013.

Much of the disagreement in the negotiations is over the measurement and verification of avoided emissions from forests and the lack of secure funding. Simone Lovera of the Global Forest Coalition is in Doha for the UN’s climate negotiations. She questions the emphasis on measurement, reporting and verification in the negotiations. She wrote these notes about the current state of the REDD negotiations for a press conference organised by Friends of the Earth International.

MRV as a Trojan Horse for carbon markets? 

By Simone Lovera, Global Forest Coalition, December 2, 2012

While the spectacular conference centre where the current climate talks are held looks rather unworldly, it is important to look at the realities behind these negotiations. In Paraguay, for example, the main cause of greenhouse gas emissions is deforestation. The main driver of forest loss is agriculture and the main underlying cause is meat, meat and more meat, as deforestation is mainly caused by cattle ranching and by the production of soy as fodder for European and Chinese livestock. This deforestation is having devastating impacts on Indigenous Peoples, peasants, women and men.
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