Only People’s Voices Can Energise Global Action for Climate Justice! - ActionAid India
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Only People’s Voices Can Energise Global Action for Climate Justice!

Author: Sandeep Chachra | Tanveer Kazi | Joseph Mathai
Posted on: Thursday, 17th October 2024

In many of its reports, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has spoken about the vital role of community-led climate action. It emphasises that such initiatives are essential for enhancing resilience, fostering adaptation, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Community involvement enhances the effectiveness of climate policies, improves local decision-making, and promotes social equity. By engaging communities, policymakers can leverage local knowledge, values, and resources to effectively implement context-specific solutions that address climate challenges. The IPCC underscores the importance of empowering communities and fostering partnerships to accelerate climate action at the grassroots level, recognising them as indispensable actors in the global effort to combat climate change.

However, the evolution of the processes around the Conference of Parties (COP), which started with COP1 in Berlin in 1995, underscores the difficulties in achieving global consensus, particularly as geopolitical tensions and economic disparities continue to shape negotiations. In recent years, the focus has shifted significantly toward issues like climate finance, transparency, and justice for vulnerable nations.

COP29, scheduled to take place in Baku, Azerbaijan, between 11 to 22 November 2024, also does not offer much hope for climate justice advocates. The stated objectives for COP29 focus on ambitious climate finance goals to support developing nations; however, there appears to be an emphasis on market-based solutions, such as carbon markets. Key justice issues seem to be overlooked, including the persistent demands of vulnerable countries for more robust mechanisms to address loss and damage caused by climate change.

Financial solutions that majorly rely on carbon markets and investments benefit wealthier nations and private sector actors rather than addressing the needs of the most affected communities. The principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR), first established in international environmental law during the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and embedded in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), seems to be further marginalised by developed countries wanting to wish away their centuries of greenhouse gas emission, and focus on the emissions from emerging economies.

What is needed at COP29 to advance the cause of climate justice?

Parties at COP29 should explore ways climate finance can be channelled towards local adaptation, ensuring that rural and urban communities, especially marginalised groups, receive direct access to resources for climate-resilient infrastructure and disaster preparedness. Countries must be encouraged to create adequate and effective loss and damage funds to ensure that vulnerable communities already impacted by climate change receive proper compensation for the impact they are facing, as well as support in mitigation and adaptation plans. Ground-level communities should be empowered to develop demand charters and design resilience measures. They should be rendered the financial support to implement in coordination with national and regional plans. COP29’s climate finance commitments must connect local needs with national, regional and global strategies.

While we need to increase the speed by which pledges for Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) can be turned into concrete actions, we also need to ensure accountability for climate inaction. Communities are pushing for legal protections and accountability, and COP29 should support this by setting global standards for climate justice legislation. We need to speed up operationalising the loss and damage fund agreed upon at COP28, aimed at compensating nations most affected by climate disasters. Initial pledges by developed countries fall short of the estimated need.

Proceedings at successive COPs seem to show the dominance of corporate interests. We can see this in minimising pressures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and shrug off corporate responsibilities towards financing the loss and damage fund while making all efforts to expand business’s role in using climate change as an opportunity to create yet another accumulative industrial revolution or a new economic development project for the benefit of a few.

There is a real danger that COP meetings will only see lip service being paid to sustainability issues, with the hard deals suiting business interests closed in the backrooms and accessed only by corporate lobbyists and business interests.

We need more pressure from vulnerable communities through their social movements, their organisations and their governments to counter both the interests of the powerful nations of the developed countries and the pressures of multinational corporate interests that depend on over-extractive, over-polluting and over-exploiting industrial processes. We need popular pressure to ensure that profits do not triumph over people and the planet.

COP29 should ensure mechanisms are in place to amplify the voices of marginalised communities in climate policy decisions, connecting grassroots movements with national and international climate governance. Community-driven initiatives are essential for long-term resilience, and integrating these efforts into COP29 decisions will ensure inclusive climate action.

The absence of a focus on grassroots climate justice concerns and reliance on market-driven approaches will not serve those most vulnerable to climate change and least responsible for it. Indeed, it will only serve climate injustice!

(Authors are with ActionAid Association. The views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of ActionAid Association.)