[E-rundbrief] Info 1909 - Social Summit for Climate in Madrid
Matthias Reichl
info at begegnungszentrum.at
Do Nov 14 17:31:56 CET 2019
E-Rundbrief Info 1909 - Social Summit for Climate 6. - 13.12.2019 in
Madrid - "Beyond COP25: People for Climate".
Bad Ischl,14.11.2019
Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
www.begegnungszentrum.at
================================================
https://cumbresocialclima.net/call/
Call to participate in the
Social Summit for Climate 6. - 13.12.2019 in Madrid
Beyond COP25: People for Climate
The unilateral decisions of, on one hand, Sebastián Piñera’s Chilean
government to cancel the hosting of COP 25 in Chile, ignoring the
months-long work already done by Chilean and Latin American social
movements, and, on the other hand, Pedro Sánchez’s government to host
the event, force Spanish social movements to take over a task they
have not been consulted about, in an almost unfeasible time frame to
guarantee adequate participation and social response.
Aware of the clear Eurocentrism that holding a COP in a European
country for the third consecutive year implies, we accept the
challenge of articulating protests and criticisms against these
policies as a huge responsibility. We do so in anger and powerlessness
in the face of the injustices and atrocities being committed against
the Chilean people, out of solidarity and support for the decision to
continue holding the Peoples’ Summit and the Social Summit for Climate
Action in Chile, and in the determination to try to create a space
where their voices can also be heard.
We strongly condemn the human rights violations in Chile and demand
their immediate stop. The Government’s war declaration against the
Chilean people is an attack on democracy and on the struggle for
social justice. We demand that those responsible for this repression
be punished. We want to put under the spotlight that the social
protests in Chile, and elsewhere in the world, are also an expression
of the environmental crisis. The paradigm of unlimited economic growth
is crashing humanity against planetary limits that the economic system
insists on making invisible.
We live in convulsive times of genunine ecological, climate and social
emergency. The scientific diagnosis is clear regarding the seriousness
and urgency of the moment. Economic growth happens at the expense of
the most vulnerable people: racialised people, indigenous people,
people living in rural areas, the poor, migrants, LGBTI and queer, the
avant-garde communities in resistance… And it also occurs at the
expense of our environment, other species and ecosystems. Women, who
are part of all these collectives, are affected differently and are
victims of the worst consequences of the cisgender patriarchal
capitalist model.
As activists based in Spain and the European Union, we want to accept
the responsibility of exposing the exploitative role of the rich
regions of the world and their key role in the creation of “sacrifice
zones” in impoverished countries, through cultural, material and
energy extractivism which destroys communities and common goods. We
are living in countries that promote the consumption and destruction
of humanity and nature, imposing our world models and visions to other
parts of the planet.
In these same countries, which own a large military capability
(especially nuclear weapons), a new concept of climate securitisation
is promoted in order to protect their interests by means of the
occupation of important power niches and leaving the control of key
technologies for energy transition in the hands of large security
companies, while the militarisation of borders increases and land is
grabbed in a large scale all over the planet. Climate change will
continue to fuel armed conflicts and large-scale wars and violence
between communities.
From this privileged position, we pledge to take responsibility for
our common past, present and future. We rebel to change this lethal
system.
It is necessary to expose the hypocrisy of governments that have
failed in climate negotiations for decades, while at the same time
shielding trade and investment treaties as tools of capital
domination, aimed at perpetuating the imbalance of power that allows
the luxury of a few people at the expense of the suffering of the
majority, hoarding, privatising and financing ever-greater spheres of
life. Those same governments feed the fossil fuels industry with
millionaire subsidies and protect and bail out fossil banks that
profit from the climate crisis and the environmental and social
devastation.
The role of Spanish and European transnational corporations in regions
like Latin America has led to a lengthening of the long night of the
500 years of colonialism, deepening the environmental crisis and
undermining the possibilities of peoples’ sovereignty. Chile, today,
is the expression of the exhaustion of neoliberal and extractivist
policies throughout the continent. Latin America is Chile and Chile is
Latin America.
We believe in climate justice as the backbone of the social fights of
our time: sustainability is impossible without social justice, and
justice does not exist without respect for all beings living on the
planet. Climate justice is the broadest umbrella that exists to
protect all the diversity of struggles for another possible world:
environmentalism, climate activism, feminism, LGBTIQ +, trade
unionism, anti-racism, anti-fascism, anti-militarism, de-colonial
movements, indigenous movements, rural movements… We promote climate
justice as a movement of movements in which many diverse worlds can fit.
We pledge to work to give visibility to the demands that guarantee a
just transition carried out quickly enough to avoid new catastrophes,
such as warming above 1.5°C or the collapse of ecosystems and society.
It is necessary to make decisions based on science. The scientific
community has already clearly indicated the need to leave most fossil
fuels in the ground to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions
that are in line with the climate challenge.
That is why we rebel against extractivist models connected to fossil
fuels production and consumption throughout the world, as well as
rejecting with special emphasis the civil and military use of nuclear
energy.
We urge for radical change in the mobility model, leading to the
reduction of mass transportation of goods and people — responsible of,
among other problems, the excessive tourism and gentrification in
cities, generating serious social inequalities. The transport model
must at the same time mitigate the increasing isolation of rural
areas, one of the causes of their increasing depopulation.
We denounce the attempts to promote false solutions such as those
based on geo-engineering, which seek to maintain the status quo of the
current production system, moving the focus away from true solutions
and threatening us with unequal impacts on a planetary scale, that
will again sacrifice the more disadvantaged communities first.
We also denounce the imposition of a production and consumption model
that does not recognise food as a right and is responsible for the
climate and biodiversity crisis that condemns more than 800 million
people to starvation. We demand an agro-ecological transition that
promotes fair and sustainable systems that respect peoples’ food
sovereignty.
Similarly, we denounce the imposition of a production and consumption
model based on “use and disposal” that once again affects the the poor
people the most. The huge amounts of waste produced by enriched
countries are mostly transferred to countries in the South, forcing
the most vulnerable communities and groups in these places to live in
a spiral of poverty, violence and unhealthy conditions.
On the other hand, the Chilean social explosion and its brutal
repression shows that the civilisational crisis we are experiencing is
also a democratic crisis. We need to move towards the construction of
more democratic models of society that guarantee collective decision
making by putting the common good at the centre. In this regard, the
decision to move COP25 to Madrid is also a democratic loss, as it
jeopardizes the months-long work by numerous networks, groups and
organizations around the world that now cannot participate in the way
they would have wished to.
We stand in solidarity with those who suffer the most, with workers
and communities that are on the front line of resistance in all
continents. We also stand in solidarity with those who have
participated in fueling the climate crisis the least and those who
suffer its impacts the most. We support all people, regardless of
their gender, origin, language, race, ethnicity, physical abilities,
sexual orientation, experience, age or belief.
We call on people and groups to rebel against an oppressive capitalist
system that expels more and more people – many of whom are forced to
migrate from their territories – and increasingly depletes the
foundations that sustain life. We call on everyone to participate in
the social response to COP25 and to network and build communities in
the face of this climate crisis, that is just the most visible symptom
of a deeply unfair system.
We invite all people and groups who feel compelled by these demands to
participate in the construction of the Social Summit for Climate, to
rebel, to propose and to build communities. In the face of increasing
repression and strategies to divide and demobilise movements, we will
show more unity than ever in the common struggle for justice.
--
Matthias Reichl, Pressesprecher/ press speaker,
Begegnungszentrum fuer aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
Center for Encounter and active Non-Violence
Wolfgangerstr. 26, 4820 Bad Ischl, Austria,
fon: +43 6132 24590, Informationen/ informations,
Impressum in: http://www.begegnungszentrum.at
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