We are movements and organizations engaged in many struggles for a new world
– a world in which the needs, interests, rights and aspirations of peoples everywhere take priority over the profit of corporations and the excess of elites. Our solidarity and collective action is extremely crucial.
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The Earth’s climate is destabilizing and the planet is in crisis.
Climate change is multiplying the sufferings of people already burdened by the global injustices of hunger, dispossession, and human rights violations. Some of the impacts from the 0.8 degrees Celsius rise in the earth’s average temperature since 1900 include:
- The significant retreat of mountain glaciers, a source of water for millions of people. Changes in rain-fall patterns are causing great water stress particularly in Western Africa and South Asia.
- There is 80% less Arctic-sea ice today than in 1950, causing sea-level rise and threatening more than 600 million people living less than 10 meters above sea-level.
- The increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere causes ocean acidification, with some oceans now 30% more acidic than normal, harming ocean habitats and destroying fish stocks. Increased ocean temperature also reduces the growth of fish, affecting at least 1 billion people’s food stocks and livelihood.
- Crop-yields are diminishing, and climate-related food price hikes since 2005 have pushed an estimated 105 million people into poverty.
- Each year, thousands of peoples lose their lives and millions lose homes & livelihoods to climate change-related extreme weather events.
Even with the so-called ‘climate action’ promised by governments, we are on track to risk 5 degrees Celsius of warming. This will radically change the surface of the planet, collapsing the systems we rely on for life. It threatens to wipe out vast populations and profoundly change life on Earth.
Climate change arises principally from:
- Profit-driven and growth-oriented systems of extraction, production, distribution and consumption that sacrifice the needs of the many and the well being of the planet for the interests of a few.
- Unequal and exploitative economic and social structures that abuse the environment and breed even more inequality across countries, classes, gender, race and communities.
- Policies and practices promoted by global corporations, rich, industrialized countries, international institutions and economic and political elites that perpetuate and foster these systems and structures.
Most communities and peoples of the world bear little responsibility for the climate crisis and yet suffer its worst effects while being deprived of the means to respond. They also bear additional impacts stemming from false solutions promoted by those who are avoiding meaningful, effective and just measures to address climate change, and instead seek to profit from it.
Addressing these challenges requires profound social transformation in all countries and at all levels – local, national, and global.
It requires a rapid, just transition to energy systems, modes of production, and consumption practices that are compatible with the limits of the planet and are aimed at meeting the needs of peoples rather than the relentless pursuit of profit.
This will not happen without massive mobilization of people everywhere, south and north.
Our efforts thus far have fallen short of overcoming the persistent refusal by powerful elites, corporations and governments to meet their responsibilities and obligations, and their efforts to stand in the way of social change.
We need to step up our efforts to build and exercise the power of collective action, in different forms at various fronts and arenas, in different levels – local, national & global – at a scale never seen before.
Let us build our capacity for coordinated mobilizations during critical political moments — progressively increasing the number of people mobilized, expanding the numbers of communities, cities and countries participating, raising the scale, intensity and boldness of our actions, developing our strength and power to prevent planetary catastrophe.
1. Fight for the transformation of energy systems
- An end to dirty and harmful energy; a fulfillment of peoples’ rights to energy for their basic needs;
- A swift change to public and community renewable and clean energy;
- An end to the excessive and wasteful energy consumption by corporations and elites.
2. Fight for food sovereignty, for peoples’ rights to sufficient, healthy and appropriate food and sustainable food systems
- The promotion of sustainable climate change resilient agriculture and agro-ecology;
- Democratic access to land and land-based resources;
- The rights of small food producers;
- The recognition of women’s roles and rights in agriculture, aquaculture, fishing and pastoral systems;
- Farmers’ control of seed diversity;
- The global re-organization of food production and trade towards prioritizing consumption of locally produced food.
3. Fight for peoples’ rights to sufficient, affordable, clean, quality water
- For the sustainable, equitable and democratic us and management of water resources;
- For the protection of water sources and watersheds from extractive industries, dirty and harmful energy projects.
4. Fight for just transitions for all workers beginning with those in the dirty and harmful energy industries
- Create jobs for building climate resilience and bringing down greenhouse gas emissions;
- Defend and ensure the fulfillment of the rights of all working people including gender and reproductive rights;
- Provide sustainable, decent and climate change resilient livelihoods and jobs for all.
5. Fight for people’s safety and security of homes and livelihoods from climate disasters
- The rights of climate-displaced peoples and climate migrants;
- Community managed programs for adaptation, resilience building and renewable energy systems in disaster response and reconstruction efforts;
- The end to corporate domination and profiteering from disaster relief and reconstruction.
6. Fight for the social, political, economic, cultural and reproductive rights and empowerment of all of our people and communities
- Including indigenous peoples, workers, farmers, pastoralists, fishers, urban and rural poor, women and LGBT, children and youth, migrants, refugees, stateless, unemployed, landless, seniors, differently abled – and their equitable rights to and responsibility for the commons.
- And the delivery of climate finance as part of these reparations.
7. Fight for reparations for climate debt owed by those most responsible for climate change
8. Fight for the mobilization and delivery of climate finance
- By all states as part of their obligations to attend to the needs and welfare of their citizens; Ensure that climate finance is allocated and used equitably, democratically and appropriate to its purposes.
9. Fight for the end to deception and false solutions
- In mitigation and adaptation (“maladaptation”) such as offsets and carbon trading, marketbased approaches to forests (REDD) and agriculture (“Climate Smart”), soil and water, large-scale geo-engineering, and techno-fixes, nuclear energy, mega hydro dams, agro-fuels, “clean” coal, GMOs, the waste to energy incineration industry, large-scale “re-modeling”;
- Stop corporate and private finance capture of climate programs.
10. Fight for the end to policies, decisions and measures by governments, elites, institutions and corporations (domestic, regional and global) that increase the vulnerabilities of people and planet to impacts of climate change
- Such as logging and deforestation, destruction and corporate takeover of forests and mangroves by dirty and harmful industries, unregulated extractive industries, monocropping plantations, trade liberalization, privatization of essential services, discriminatory and harmful migration and border policies, discrimination of women, seniors, children indigenous groups, ethnic communities, poor families and communities.
11. Fight to stop the commodification and financialization of nature and nature’s functions
12. Fight for an international climate agreement that is rooted in science, equity and justice
- Based on historical responsibility; without offsets and loopholes; aimed at limiting temperature rise to well below 1.5º C;
- Ensuring delivery of finance and technology and other mechanisms to empower people and communities to build resilience and deal with loss and damage.