By Peter Kostishack, Director of Programs
At COP26, many governments and investment institutions announced commitments to phase out coal power and end direct international financing of the fossil fuel industry. Yet even with these commitments, governments’ planned oil and gas production is still double what is needed to meet the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit.
The work of frontline climate and land defenders is fundamental to moving away from this global dependence on fossil fuels.
At Global Greengrants Fund, we’ve witnessed the power of local community opposition to the fossil fuel industry. In Ecuador, the Indigenous Waorani people nullified an oil concession covering half-a-million acres of their Amazonian territory through resistance and litigation. Major investors pulled out of a 557-megawatt Thabametsi coal power plant in Limpopo, South Africa, and a court in Kenya suspended plans for a 1050-megawatt coal plant in Lamu, both after local activists raised concerns over projects’ environmental impacts. Protests have spread throughout Canada in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en First Nation as they have protested the construction of TransCanada’s 400-mile Coastal GasLink pipeline, which cuts through their territory. Risking arrest and renewed violence from the RCMP, the Gidimt’en clan has also recently set up a blockade to prevent drilling under Wedzin Kwa (Morice River) and destruction of a sacred archeology site.
These examples of hard-fought resistance are widespread and intensifying, standing in stark contrast to the watered-down pledges made at COP26.
While their struggles are supported by many allies, local communities and frontline activists shoulder the highest risk of criminalization and violence for their resistance. They also receive a disproportionally small share of philanthropic investment in the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. This is a significant missed opportunity to speed up the energy transition, hold the fossil fuel industry responsible for environmental and human rights crimes, and build a much stronger and more diverse movement around climate and energy transition. Funders must shift more resources toward this important work.
Supporting communities and grassroots movements that experience the deepest impacts of the fossil fuel economy to build their power and exercise their rights is essential to a just resistance—to becoming an industry that is motivated not only by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but by correcting the ecological, health, social, cultural, and economic impacts that so many communities, especially BIPOC communities, have experienced.
So how do frontline communities build power to take on such a powerful and entrenched industry? In reviewing the work of Global Greengrants Fund’s grantees—including more than 600 grassroots organizations in more than 80 countries challenging fossil fuel development—we have found key strategies that are repeatedly used at the grassroots level.
These strategies include:
- Increase local understanding of what is happening, our rights, who is responsible, the impacts, and what can be done about them.
- Make the abuses and the people affected more visible to the public, officials, media, and civil society. This is especially important to counter misleading industry and government claims.
- Connect impacted communities and build alliances and coalitions that center local leadership and demands, and that can mobilize resources, knowledge, strategies, and solidarity.
- Take advantage of all available avenues to prevent or delay development, exerting opposition to it at all stages through every available legal, institutional, financial, and political process.
- Seek justice and accountability from the fossil fuel industry and the enabling political and financial systems that are responsible for the myriad of damages communities have suffered.
- Develop just economic and energy alternatives for host communities that respect local rights, livelihoods, and the environment, and that don’t enable the fossil fuel industry to offset emissions from dirty energy projects to other communities.
- Build safety and resilience by creating the capacity, connections, and support infrastructure communities need to resist backlash and defend civic space and rights to freedom of expression and association.
These strategies build capacities and leadership at the local level that last beyond the campaign against the fossil fuel project and enable people to engage in additional struggles to defend their territories, demand accountability for existing contamination, and find pathways to locally owned and sustainable renewable energy. To truly support a just energy transition, we need to take holistic and long-term funding approaches. This means standing with communities not just when they are challenging pipelines and coal plants, but as they address the ongoing effects of existing contamination and the displacement and rights violations of communities from industrial-scale renewables.
In order to unravel the economic and political dominance of the fossil fuel industry around the world, we must concentrate much more attention, strategy, and resources on the frontlines of oil, gas, and coal production and development. This is where the industry is most vulnerable, because of its reliance on corruption, theft, misinformation, pollution, and human rights violations to operate. Over the next 5 years, Global Greengrants Fund plans to multiply our support to host communities and frontline groups as they build their power to evaluate, shine light on, and challenge these practices, seek accountability, and define a just transition to renewable energy systems that benefit both them and the climate.