by Andrew Miller, Environmental and Human Rights Campaigner
This past year, all environmentalist roads led to Copenhagen. The 15th annual climate summit was heralded as perhaps the world’s last, best opportunity to address the looming climate crisis. In the run-up, street marches intensified, as did targeted advocacy campaigns. Civil society and green groups around the world carried out unprecedented grassroots organizing. Would all this be enough to pressure our political leaders to create and sign an ambitious and binding treaty that many believe is essential for saving the planet?
Over 2009, Amazon Watch dove headfirst into a new climate change campaign, with a focus on the implications for the indigenous peoples we work with. Given their intimate connection with nature, indigenous communities are on the front lines of the climate change roller coaster. They have traditional knowledge that could be tapped to help deal with climate change, but by and large this is being passed over for Western technology fixes. Worse, so-called solutions to the crisis might well run counter to indigenous rights, as strengthened in the 2007 UN Declaration.
Amazon Watch campaigners Kevin and Andrew spent two weeks in Copenhagen accompanying Ecuadorean indigenous leaders Tito Puanchir and Marlon Santi, as they navigated what a colleague described as a “three thousand ring circus”. The enormous and chaotic Bella Center hosted mobs of negotiators and observers – numbering in the tens of thousands – along with scores of daily meetings, side presentations, press conferences, and different visual spectacles meant to catch the attention of 3,500 journalists present. The physical space was essentially organized into concentric rings of power, with civil society and indigenous groups stationed on the periphery.
Each day started with a meeting of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change, or Indigenous Caucus for short. The caucus was comprised of over one hundred indigenous leaders from all inhabited continents, many by now experts in the UN climate talk process. Each morning they would exchange information that had been gathered the previous day, and then devise advocacy strategies to promote indigenous rights in the ever-changing proposed treaty text.
As Ecuadoreans, part of Marlon and Tito’s strategy was to engage their country’s delegation, either in bi-lateral meetings or public spaces. Ecuador is emerging as an incubator for experimental measures the government claims could help address climate change, like the Yasuní initiative and Socio-Bosque. But government spokespeople painted a misleading picture of an indigenous population perfectly happy with how those plans are advancing so far. Tito and Marlon spoke out publicly and forcefully on behalf of the rights of the communities they represent. These actions were amplified with media coverage featuring Marlon and Tito, both in the Ecuadorean and international press.
For Amazonian indigenous groups, the discussions around forest protection were particularly salient. One climate change solution being discussed is called REDD – Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. While the notion of slowing and eventually stopping deforestation is one all environmental groups can agree on, the devil is very much in this proposal’s details. Indigenous groups’ experience with large-scale conservation measures has often been extremely problematic, as has been the case in the creation of national parks (in the U.S.?) leading to the forced eviction of indigenous communities. Without the proper rights safeguards, REDD could be like a steroids-fueled version of that. For more background, see the Democracy Now! news story titled “Environmental and Indigenous Activists Criticize Proposed Deal to Save Rainforests”, featuring a quote from Marlon Santi:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/18/environmental_and_indigenous_activists_criticize_proposed
The Bella Center was only the locus of official activities. Global civil society came out in force, organizing a parallel Clima-Forum next to the city’s central train station. Midway through the summit, on Saturday December 12th, an estimated 100,000 people participated in the climate justice march. In symbolic recognition of their leadership role, indigenous groups literally headed-up the procession. At one point, Marlon commandeered the bullhorn and led the chants in Spanish.
But the space for civil society progressively shut down during the second week. The official rationale: additional state delegations were arriving toward the end and there wasn’t enough space in the Bella Center. Entry into the Bella Center was drastically restricted, with some groups like Friends of the Earth being entirely blacklisted without a cause. At the same time, police repression of nonviolent protest groups increased. Organizers were preemptively arrested (on Orwellian grounds of “planning to commit violence” against the police), and marches suppressed with brute force on the second week.
That well over 100 world leaders would come together and agree on a plan to save us from ourselves was a tall order. However, the non-binding Copenhagen Accord, the 11th hour outcome of the meeting, fell far short of even reduced expectations. Had this been COP 1, then perhaps the Accord would indeed have signified meaningful process to resolve the major differences between countries and reduce global CO2 emissions. But COP 15 showed just how far apart the world-specifically the global north (known as “Annex 1” countries in climate-speak), “BASIC” countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) and the rest, the south-stand on major issues like setting targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions and the financing of mitigation, the costly measures for trying to avoid catastrophic climate, as well as other measures to deal with the inevitable impacts (“adaptation”).
What ‘s next? In the short term, climate policy watchers are waiting to see how strong international support will be for the Copenhagen Accord. There is tremendous concern that this Accord, written by a small handful of countries, will mortally damage the multi-lateral climate negotiations process that involved all countries. In the Amazon, we will continue working with indigenous partners to monitor the REDD pilot projects underway in Ecuador, Peru, and other countries. We will also continue to support capacity building initiatives, with the hope that Latin American indigenous voices can be even stronger at this year’s COP 16 climate summit, scheduled to be in Mexico in November.
