How to Think Globally and Stay Committed to Local Work

As I sat in my Comparative Labor Movements class last Thursday, I felt that we could not have had a better and more relevant discussion in relation to my travels to Durban for COP17. The topic was focused around United Nations framework of Human Rights, the struggles of indigenous populations and peasants, within this context, and some historical reference to La Via Campesina, an international worker organization that advocates for the rights of agricultural workers. We discussed various U.N. processes and meetings, and really tried to get a deeper understanding of why it is even relevant to embark on the creation “Declaration of Human Rights” documents and to continue to hold conferences and conventions as a method of establishing this documents.

There were some in my class who were very cynical of such processes and believed that nothing could be achieved through United Nation negotiations. As a participant of the People’s World Conference on Climate Change, I have seen how people power can produce something great, the Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, a document that came out of these discussions is one evidence of this. Although this conference was in many ways directly tied to the UN process, that wasn’t what necessarily made it important or pivotal. The collective action, the sincere display of democratic participation and the declaration of rights and justice in such a bold way is what made the moment historical. The United Nations process was simply a context in which all of these actions would take place.

I just traveled from New York to D.C, to Amsterdam and then to Cape Town. Yesterday morning I arrived in Durban, for the COP17 Conference. When I came into the airport, there was a large poster welcoming the participants who are coming to South Africa for the COP17 Meeting. There seems to be a lot of excitement locally for this event. I picked up a local paper and there was an article that was dedicated to explaining a brief history of the event and what some of the work has been locally to prepare for the discussions.

In “The Times”, which looks very familiar to a smaller version of the New York Times (www.timeslive.co.za) there was an entire page spread that reviewed some of the local initiatives related to climate change. The Gauteng Province(where Johannesburg is located), particularly the Agriculture and Rural Development sector of government has created a “Gauteng Climate Change Response Strategy (GCCRS) and Action Plan”. As you can imagine it is made of all the great things that you could possibly ask for in a Climate Action Plan. I was impressed by its attention to both the environmental and social needs of people. Several of the recommendations were specific to low income populations. Some of the progressive policies included “Gauteng government and municipalities require that all new subsidized housing incorporate basic passive energy features, such as north-facing house orientation and ceiling insulation. Support and develop waste collection cooperatives so that informal waste collectors can integrate, improve and regularize their operations. GDARD and GDLG &H to promote research in design, thermal efficiency and emission performance of domestic stoves in terms of improving indoor air quality, especially in low income housing. Promulgate building regulations to require all new buildings over a certain value to install solar (or equivalent green technologies) for the supply of water heating”. (The Times, December 5th 2011)

In addition to these particular recommendations that caught my eye, the action plan listed a series of other measures that are critical to any climate action plan, including an aggressive attempt to integrate energy efficiency principles into green building design, construction, and maintenance, a complete makeover of the waste management systems, with efforts to increase reuse of materials and pump up recycling efforts.

There was an entire section devoted to water conservation and I was impressed that the Agriculture Plan included projections for job creation in this particular sector and a commitment to using land (in high and low income areas) for food production and local food security measures.

2011, is officially the year of the Cooperative for the United Nations (http://social.un.org/coopsyear/), and as a board member of a local cooperative, I am always keeping my eyes and ears open when I hear about various developments to promote cooperative business models and to educate the general public on what these models look like.

I was so glad to see this show up in a official climate change planning document, it is something that I believe should receive more promotion and support in the U.S. and is a great way to diversify economic opportunities and to go beyond the traditional “employer” and “employee” labor management structure to create a more dynamic and fluid economic environment.

I am eager to engage in dialogue around all the topics mentioned here, not to mention to understand the different roles organizations plan on planning through out the negotiations. Besides affiliations with Green for All, I am also present at the negotiations on behalf of my employer, The Center for Sustainable Energy at Bronx Community College, I am a part of the SustainUs network and I am also an Oxfam International Youth Partner and plan to connect with Oxfam representatives and other OIYP members who will be doing work in Durban. If you haven’t check out all the awesome work that Oxfam engages in around environmental and poverty related issues, I suggest you check them out (www.oxfam.org).

As an educator and activist, I find it critical to take in as much relevant and inspiring information, applicable to local projects back at home. And I feel the responsibility to be a consistent voice in the climate justice dialogue, pushing for these talks to have a greater responsibility and accountability to creating policies and initiatives to move the world along the pathway of more sustainable development, while we create concrete changes in our communities

‘A dirty deal coming down in Durban’

A dirty deal coming down in Durban

link to original article

By Patrick Bond

What, now, are the prospects for a climate deal by Friday?

The biggest problem is obvious: COP17 saboteurs from the US State Department joined by Canada, Russia and Japan, want to bury the legally-binding Kyoto Protocol treaty. Instead of relaxing intellectual property rules on climate technology and providing a fair flow of finance, Washington offers only a non-binding ‘pledge and review’ system.

This is unenforceable and at current pledge rates – with Washington lagging everyone – is certain to raise world temperatures to four degrees centigrade, and in Africa much higher. Estimates of the resulting deaths of Africans this century are now in excess of 150 million. As former Bolivian Ambassadar to the UN, Pablo Solon said at last week’s Wolpe Memorial Lecture, “The COP17 will be remembered as a place of premeditated genocide and ecocide.”

Within the International Convention Centre, everyone in their right mind should resist this. First, it is patently obvious, after the 1997 Kyoto negotiations where Al Gore promised US support in exchange for carbon trading, and after Hillary Clinton’s 2009 promise of a $100 billion Green Climate Fund – both reneged upon – that Washington cannot be trusted. Lead negotiators Todd Stern and Jonathan Pershing should be isolated, an international climate court should be established, and preparations made for comprehensive sanctions against US goods and services.

Second, it appears that the European Union, South Africa and the Climate Action Network – the latter representing big international NGOs mostly without any commitment to climate justice – are pushing what is called a ‘new mandate’. And not surprisingly, Pretoria’s team and the biased pro-Northern chair, SA foreign minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, appear ready to sell out the African continent.

Some countries, led by Mali and Egypt, are holding firm on demands by the African Group, the Group of Least Developed Countries and the Latin American ‘Alba’ countries for binding northern emissions cuts of 50% by 2020 and 95% by 2050. These are critical targets to get the overall climate change to below 1.5 degrees. At 2 degrees, the UN estimates, ninety percent of current African agricultural output will cease.

If African countries fold in coming hours, even the traditional leaders of science-based demands – Bolivia, Tuvalu and a few others – probably cannot block a sleazy Durban deal.

Unfortunately, the SA and EU delegations are behind-the-scenes managers devoted to bringing emissions trading markets into this new mandate, largely because of the vast investment that Europeans have made in now-failing carbon markets. Jacob Zuma’s endorsement of the World Bank’s ‘Climate Smart Agriculture’ scheme last week is a return to nakedly neoliberal management of society and nature – an approach that over the last decade proved so disastrous in water privatization and carbon trading.

Explains Anne Maina of the African Biodiversity Network, “Climate Smart Agriculture comes packaged with carbon offsets. Soil carbon markets could open the door to offsets for genetically-modified crops and large-scale biochar land grabs, which would be a disaster for Africa. Africa is already suffering from a land grab epidemic – the race to control soils for carbon trading could only make this worse.”

Zuma is not well advised by is climate team, for the carbon markets upon which the strategy rests are dying. The Union Bank of Switzerland, Europe’s largest, last month estimated the price per tonne collapsing to just 3 euros in 2013, down from a peak of over 30 euros five years ago and around eight euros at present. If forest credits are also sold into the markets, as proponents hope, it will swamp supply and crash the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme to the level of Chicago’s: around zero.

By all accounts we need prices of at least 50 euros/tonne for market incentives to begin substantively switching us out of carbon and into renewable energy and public transport. Can we trust maniac bankers to deliver the planet’s salvation?

Face it, the neoliberal strategy is failing on its own terms. As a result, Trevor Manuel’s idea that half the Green Climate Fund should be drawn from carbon markets instead of stingy Northern governments and corporations is fatally flawed.

There is a tiny remaining hope for COP17, but only if we soon see a 1999 Seattle-style move by African delegates who know their constituents will be fried if the rich countries and SA have their way. Exactly twelve years ago, the African delegates refused to let the World Trade Organisation do a deal against Africa’s interests. SA’s trade minister at the time, Alec Erwin, tried but was unable to prevent this sensible obstructionist approach.

This time it will be harder, not only because Nkoana-Mashabane presides over COP17, but also because of Ethiopia’s tyrant ruler Meles Zenawi, a top African Union negotiator who ‘sold out’ the continent in 2009-10 by halving finance demands and endorsing the Copenhagen Accord, according to Mthika Mwenda of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance.

Since the African Group represents 53 countries, the Group of Least Developed Countries represents 48, and there are a half-dozen more in the Alba block, it is not impossible that this shifting alliance can overcome the rich countries’ power and the tendency of the four leading middle-income countries – Brazil, China, India and SA – to represent their own national interests.

As German NGO activist Rebecca Sommer of Ecoterra sums up, “Developed nations are trying to shift their responsibilities for drastic emissions cuts onto developing countries that have done the least to cause the problem. Rich industrialized countries are busy trying to carve out new business opportunities for multinational corporations and their financial elites. It would be disastrous if the internationally binding emission reduction commitments would lapse or end altogether in Durban.”

Most likely, our city will go down in infamy as the site that the temperature was dialed up on Africa. Against that, a spirited march on Saturday passed the ICC but its impact was tempered by what climate justice activists called the ‘Green Bombers’ (named after Robert Mugabe’s paramilitaries).

Complained march organizer Des D’Sa of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, “About 300 protesters, dressed in official COP17 volunteer uniforms, tore up placards, physically threatened and attacked activists participating in the march. In spite of heavy police presence throughout the march, including mounted police, riot police, air-patrol and snipers, and requests to address this disruption, police did not take any action.”

The group had “green eThekwini tracksuits with city branding and emblems, but acknowledged themselves to be ANC Youth League supporters, displaying pro-Zuma and anti-Malema placards,” says D’Sa, with the message “100% COP17”. And that tells you all you need to know about the stakes and dirty politics in play here in central Durban.

Rural Women's Assembly of Southern Africa Statement to COP17 Leaders

Rural Women's Assembly of Southern Africa Statement to COP17 Leaders   http://www.lamosa.org.za/

Posted on December 4

We the Rural Women's Assembly of Southern Africa, meeting in Durban on the event of the 17th Conference of Parties of the UNFCCC in Durban from 30 November to 5 December 2011 demand that governments take the following immediate steps to address the clear and present danger posed to rural communities by the climate crisis

1. A climate deal that will take meaningful steps to halt the climate crisis by cutting carbon emissions. Historical emitters who are responsible for 75% of GHGs must face trade and investment sanctions if they refuse to cut emissions, particularly from African governments, as Africa has contributed least to climate change, but is the worst affected.

2. We demand proper recognition of women's critical role in fighting climate change and protecting livelihoods and the environment despite widespread violation of their equal right to land. Equal rights to land and natural resources is critical to fight climate  change. As the Rural Women's Assembly we demand that governments implement the principle of 50/50 land to women through a radical programme of land redisribution and agrarian reform.

3. Women produce 80 per cent of the food consumed by households in Africa. Seventy per cent of Africa's 600 million people are rural. Financial support for women farmers must be commensurate to their numbers and crucial role. We stress that adaptation strategies and building resilience starts at the household level. Governments must address the crisis in the care economy in order to build resilence to climate change. As women we demand that 50 per cent of funding training and other support to agriculture must go to women farmers secured by a special allocation within the Green Climate Fund and public budgets.

4. We demand that climate change solutions put indigenous knowledge systems at the centre of policies to promote biodiversity, rehabilitate our ecosystems and rebuild the livlihoods destroyed by colonialism, apartheid and economic imperialism. Rural women are the holders of indigenous knowledge--our marginalisation from economic production, scientific knowledge generation and social systems has resulted in the steady loss of such knowledge to Africa, thereby making us more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

5. We demand an end to false climate solutions which are resulting in a deterioration of our environments, the destruction of marine life as well as land and resource grabs and the take over of food systems by corporations and speculators. We reject the participation of Africa in carbon markets, GMO projects and biofuels farming. Climate change can only be addressed by a change in our current economic system which encourages unsustainable resource extraction and consumption.

We commit ourselves to continue forward with the struggle against the injustices of climate change and build our movement to end the shameful marginalisation of rural women. We will continue to strive for the recreation of equitable vibrant, prosperous and healthy rural communities.


Signed on this day of 4 November 2011
Rural Womens Assembly

Contact details
Constance Mogale, Land Access Movement of South Africa
Tel:             +27825590632      
Mercia Andrews, Trust for Community Outreach and Education
Tel:             +27823683429      

Further contact details available from www.lamosa.org.za