Relevance of the Cochabamba People’s Summit for the UNFCCC Process

Elizabeth Peredo Beltrán

30/05/2010

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"The relevance of considering the Outcome of the Cochabamba People’s Summit on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights into the UNFCC Process".

Presentation made at the Intersessional Meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change –UNFCCC- in Bonn.

I want to begin reminding that the impacts of Climate change we are living today are not a punishment that falls from heaven. Those have their historical responsibles: those who took our resources, our rights and our richness and now have the duty to honor their Debt in order to allow humanity to live with dignity and without the permanent threat to their lives. That is a challenge that has to be faced in this Intersessional Meetings of the UNFCC in Bonn.

Today, global warming shows the unequal relations that has enriched only a small proportion of people in the world. It shows those inequalities and how rich countries have developed under the occupation of our territories, our lives and of the atmosphere, where their emissions occupy the biggest proportion, while the worst impacts fall on the poorest people of the developing countries. That is why this crisis must be faced with equity in order to give back humanity and fairness to the world.

Then, the voices that must be heard now are those that come from the people, and those that come from the Mother Earth claims.

In April this year more than 35 thousand people have gathered in Cochabamba to discuss about climate crisis, trying to find out the structural basis of climate change and give some responses that the lack of results of the Copenhagen Conference gave to the world due to the unilateral interests of some rich developed countries.

Thousands of grassroots organizations, some governments of the South, hundreds of civil society NGO activists, peasants and women organizations, people from about 140 countries have contributed to an Outcome that expresses the voices of those who are excluded from this transcendental process that matters not only to scientists, not only negotiators, but the people of this world, specially those who are suffering the most.

This Conference tried to recover the sense of multilateralism that has been lost in Copenhagen, and tried to recover also the common sense that tell us that this crisis must be faced with responsibility and honor. That tells us that we have to stop the unequal consumption of the world's goods, that we must stop inequality, that we must stop conceiving that the world as a “resource” instead of our Home we must respect and take care of.

The Bolivia submission contained many innovative proposals following the World Peoples Summit on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights, because they reflect what the real world wants and what the earth really needs, and this should not be ignored as it happened with the latest chair’s basis document for this negotiation. Proposals by many governments have been completely discarded in the preparations of Bonn negotiations.

The World Peoples Summit on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights, demand the developed countries cut their emissions by 50% in the period 2012 to 2017. It demands to stabilize the greenhouse gas concentrations at 300ppm. It also demands to begin a process under the UN to settle some principles to recover the lost balance in our relation with Mother Earth.

This outcome also asks to provide fair and transparent financial resources to face climate change impacts, without conditionalities and profit basis. To avoid market and mercantile mechanisms in the facing of this crisis, because it deepens the structural causes and impacts and makes them worse.

The Conference also recovers the people’s voices on the urgent necessity to build an International Climate Justice Tribunal to show the magnitude of the impacts, the causes and to contribute to strengthen the control mechanisms of WGEs and the binding commitments under the UNFCC and the Kyoto Protocol. But specially to give the voices to the people who are now suffering in the south and more and more in the north.

It is unacceptable that the official basis of this negotiation is not taking in considerations some of these proposals.

I am from La Paz, Bolivia, and it is really painful to see our glaciers melting, taking away our right to water, the rights of thousands and thousands of peasants to their livelihoods because their communities surround the glaciers and see our landscape, our identity and culture rights threatened. It has been very sad to see that in Brazil hundreds of people have died due to the droughts last April. And even at the same time that negotiators are gathered in Bonn, at least 200 people died in Central America due to the hurricane Agatha. Meanwhile official voices say that nothing substantive is going to be achieved in the negotiations to Cancun.

What you are waiting for? Are you waiting for this crisis to get worse, that only could be faced under emergency patterns? Are you waiting that this crisis must be faced only as a security issue? Are you waiting for many of us will disappear, to react? Technology and Money will not give us a new planet. That is very clear.

Only changing the system with solidarity, justice, equity and the payment of the historical climate debt will give us the opportunity to face this global crisis.

Bonn, May 2010

- Elizabeth Peredo Beltran: Solon Foundation - Bolivia

https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/141887