Throughout the week, Climate Connections will post short videos of participants in Rio+20 and the Peoples’ Summit talking about the meaning of the “green economy.”
Category Archives: Green Economy
Video: What’s wrong with the green economy?: Dr. Mohammed Taghi Farvar of ICCA Consortium
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Filed under False Solutions to Climate Change, Green Economy, Rio+20
Rio+20: Opening statement of the Farmers Major Group by La Via Campesina
Cross-posted from La Via Campesina
Read by Henry Saragih, international coordinator of La Via Campesina at the opening of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development Rio+20
June 20, 2012, Rio de Janeiro
Mr. Chair, Heads of States, Your Excellencies and esteemed representatives, we have been debating the future of the planet and humanity for the past two years. It is clear that sustainable agriculture is essential to the discussion on sustainable development.
Our constituencies include: farmers, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, agricultural workers, youth and indigenous peoples. They are often among the most affected by multiple crises, in particular women and young people. They also hold the solutions for sustainable development in their hands.
In order to be able to implement systems that nourish our people and sustain our planet, institutional change is necessary, particularly in the area of participation and empowerment of the most vulnerable, the majority of whom reside in rural areas. The new path of development entails the empowerment of these constituencies to produce and harvest, this requires the rights to equitable access to land tenure – regardless of gender, marital status, religious or ethnic origins – and to productive resources, including seeds, inputs, trade and markets.
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Filed under Climate Justice, Food Sovereignty, Green Economy, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Rio+20
Earth Audio podcasts: Achim Steiner of UNEP and Pat Mooney of the ETC Group at the Rio+20 Peoples’ Summit
Achim Steiner, head of UNEP defends his model of the Green Economy while ETC Group’s Pat Mooney looks on.
At a panel session at the Peoples’ Summit, Pat Mooney of the Canadian technology watchdog organization ETC Group challenges UN Environment Program Director Achim Steiner’s concept of the green economy. Mooney says the model would hand control of the world’s biomass over to the same corporations and financial institutions responsible for the current ecological and financial chaos. June 16, 2012.
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Filed under Earth Radio, False Solutions to Climate Change, Green Economy, Rio+20
GMO trees and the green economy: Green deserts for all?
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil–In advance of the UN’s Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, the international STOP GE Trees Campaign is demanding a global ban on the release of destructive and dangerous genetically engineered trees (also called GE trees, GMO trees or GM trees) into the environment.
A major focus of the UN summit is so-called “renewable” or “sustainable” energy, and Ban Ki Moon, Executive Secretary of the UN has launched a highly controversial “Sustainable Energy for All” (SEFA) Initiative. This initiative includes use of trees to produce electricity or liquid agrofuels and there is an emphasis by industry to genetically engineer trees as feedstocks for this bioenegy production, and Brazil is one of the most active countries promoting this.
“Much of the research on GE trees in Brazil is focused on eucalyptus trees, which are being engineered for faster growth, and for modified wood qualities–such as increased cellulose and decreased lignin content. These engineered traits will facilitate the production of wood-based bioenergy,” stated Isis Alvarez of Global Forest Coalition.
“The dramatic and dangerous impacts of non-GMO industrial eucalyptus plantations are well documented and include invasiveness, desertification of soils, depletion of water, increased threat of wildfire and loss of biodiversity,” stated Anne Petermann, Executive Director of Global Justice Ecology Project and Coordinator of the STOP GE Trees Campaign. “Eucalyptus trees are not native to the Americas and they inhibit the growth of native vegetation. In Brazil, these plantations are called Green Deserts because nothing can grow in them. Now they want to engineer them, which will make them even more destructive,” she added.
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Filed under Biodiversity, Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Climate Change, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, GE Trees, Genetic Engineering, Green Economy, Rio+20
No rights of nature, no reducing emissions: REDD, el buen vivir, and the standing of forests
By Jeff Conant and Anne Petermann
NOTE: This article is excerpted from the report “Rights of Nature: Planting the Seeds of Real Change” published by Global Exchange, June, 2012
“For my people, the forest is sacred, it is life in all its essence. We can protect Pachamama only if this is respected. REDD and other market mechanisms have turned our relationship with forests into a business.” – Marlon Santi, leader of the Sarayaku Quichua community of Ecuador
Forests have always been valued by human societies for a multitude of uses and non-uses. Among them, the practical-use value of shade and shelter, thatch and timber, fuel wood, food and medicine; the ecological value of capturing, storing and filtering water, producing oxygen, and harboring biodiversity; as well as the spiritual value of their mere existence, for which Indigenous peoples and forest-dependent communities have prayed and held ceremony since the dawn of time.
Today, with the emergence of Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes, the use value and the ecological value of forests have collided to eclipse all other value they may have, and any other values that human societies may place on them. While the emerging PES schemes pretend to shift the paradigm away from extractive approaches to resource use, they have one important feature in common with other uses that industrial society has for forests: the further you are from the forest, the greater the economic value it has — and the greater the potential for forest destruction.
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Filed under Carbon Trading, False Solutions to Climate Change, Green Economy, REDD
Water Warriors reject corporate control of water at Peoples’ Summit
From IBON International
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Friday, June 16, 2012 — “Water is life! Not for profit!” was the resounding message of the water warriors gathered at the plenary discussion on Water as Commons in Countering Green Economy, Privatization and Commodification during the opening of the Cupula dos Povos in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Around 100 participants attended the plenary discussion at the Blue Pavilion. The first session was devoted to analyzing the structural causes of the lack of access to water due to privatization.
Maria Teresa Lauron of IBON International traced the history of water privatization at the international level and shared Manila’s own experience with water privatization. According to Lauron, “the World Bank’s policy shift from the promotion of public water to privatization began n the 1970s to widen the access of investments for surplus capital from highly industrialized countries which were experiencing falling rates of profit at that time.”
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Green Economy, Rio+20, Water
Action Alert: Tell the US at Rio+20: We Reject the “Greed” Economy!
Grassroots Global Justice Alliance is a national alliance of grassroots organizations building a popular movement for peace, democracy and a sustainable world. GGJ is in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil this week with a delegation of 16 leaders of grassroots organizations from impacted communities in the US to call out the false solutions to the economic and ecological crises at the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development.
We call on the US government to take a stand against the worst tendencies of “Green Capitalism” and the “Greed Economy,” and instead invest in solutions to the root causes of the ecological and economic crises that put our communities to work, cool the planet, and transition to local economies.
We have five demands:
1. Stop destructive climate projects and unsustainable energy developments including the Canadian Tar Sands, the proposed TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline, and proposed oil drilling in the off-shore Outer Continental Shelf areas of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas of Alaska.
“The Canadian Tar Sands has allowed the Indigenous peoples of Canada to become economic hostages. We have inherent Constitutionally Protected Rights that say we can always go to the land to hunt, fish, and forage; however, we are being deliberately ignored by the industry and by our Governments. The US has an obligation to ensure they participate in ethical protocols and procedures. Supporting an industry that is displacing a people and desecrating their lands is not acceptable! — Crystal Lameman, Indigenous Environmental Network, Beaver Lake Cree Nation in Northeast Alberta, Canada.
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Green Economy, Rio+20
Video: Stop the takeover of nature by financial markets
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Filed under Green Economy, Rio+20
