With just one day left of proceedings in Cancun, nations’ efforts to make progress on climate change are increasing. But what kind of progress will that be? Will it be real progress—progress in climate justice and mitigation efforts—or will the new deal only have the appearance of progress? For those who will be most affected by climate change, the latter seems increasingly likely.
News from Cancun: A Bleak Picture
According to the Emissions Gap Report, released on Tuesday by the United Nations Environment Program, even if nations commit to the most stringent protocols available at Cancun, they will still substantially undershoot reductions necessary to avoid a 2 degree increase in world temperatures—the scientific standard for avoiding catastrophic effects.
At the same time, grassroots groups are being marginalized from Cancun’s official proceedings. An agreement on REDD looks likely, even though, as the Guardian’s Simon Counsell writes,
…tropical countries have successfully stripped from the summit’s draft decision any wording obliging them to protect the environment or the rights of indigenous forest people, and have similarly purged all such references from the REDD “plan of action”.”
In other discouraging news, the future of the Kyoto protocol continues to look bleak. Indigenous leaders have been denied access to meetings; and youth climate activists staged walkouts to protest the exclusion of civil society groups. Though a world climate fund to help with adaptation may still become a reality, the exclusion of the grassroots on other issues has felt like Copenhagen all over again.
An Interview with Grassroots Activist Marie Gladue
So what can we do? In an interview with Greengrants’ CEO in Cancun this week, Marie Gladue, a member of Arizona’s Black Mesa Native American community and a representative of the Black Mesa Water Coalition, talks about the common struggles of indigenous groups around the world, along with the need for funding their unique perspective. Thinking about the likenesses between the indigenous populations fighting against REDD and native Arizonans who are fighting mining interests, Gladue observes:
…what you have left today is all of those communities that have managed to save the resources of their land and now this is what the grab [of policy makers, industries, and financial institutions] is about…the way the process is going is any resource that is found on indigenous lands can be taken for free or cheaply by people who are on the outside…
Her assessment seems more and more accurate as, at the end of COP16, politicians fail again to take the voices of these indigenous groups into account. It remains to be seen what the results of the final discussions are, but what we can learn is that it is more important than ever to support the work and the voices of those at the grassroots.