[E-rundbrief] Info 1909 - Social Summit for Climate in Madrid

[Matthias Reichl]

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