Bolivia: THE PEOPLES AGREEMENT
Global People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, April 22, 2010, Cochabamba, Bolivia:
THE PEOPLES’ AGREEMENT
Today, our Mother Earth is wounded and the future of humanity is in danger.
Should global warming increase by more than 2 º C, which the so-called “Copenhagen Understanding” would lead to, there is a 50% chance that the damage caused to our Mother Earth would be totally irreversible. Between 20% and 30% of the world’s species would be in danger of disappearing. Large tracts of forest would be affected, droughts and floods would affect different regions of the planet, deserts would spread and the melting icecaps and glaciers in the Andes and the Himalayas would be exacerbated. Many island states would disappear and Africa would suffer a temperature increase of more than 3 º C. Likewise, food production would be reduced in the world with catastrophic effects for the survival of the inhabitants of vast regions of the planet, and number of hungry people in the world, which already exceeds the figure of 1,020 million people would dramatically increase.
Corporations and governments of so-called “more developed” countries, in complicity with a segment of the scientific community, have forced us to discuss climate change as a problem limited to a rise in temperature without questioning the cause, which is the capitalist system.
We are confronting the terminal crisis of the patriarchal model of civilization based on the subjugation and destruction of human beings and nature that began to accelerate with the industrial revolution.
The capitalist system has imposed a logic of competition, progress and unlimited growth. This mode of production and consumption seeks profit without limits, separating man from nature, establishing a logic of domination over nature, turning everything into a commodity: water, earth, the human genome, ancestral cultures, biodiversity, justice, ethics, the rights of peoples, death and life itself.
Under capitalism, Mother Earth becomes only a source of raw materials and human beings become only a means of production and consumers, people who are worth what they have and not what they are.
Capitalism requires a strong military industry for its process of accumulation and control of territories and natural resources, suppressing the peoples’ resistance. It is an imperialist system of colonization of the planet.
Humanity is facing a great dilemma: continue on the path of capitalism, predation and death, or take the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.
We must shape a new system to restore harmony with nature and among humans. There can be only balance with nature if there is equity among human beings.
We propose to the peoples of the world the recovery, reassessment, and strengthening of knowledge, wisdom and traditional practices of Indigenous Peoples, affirmed in the experience and proposal of “Living Well”, recognizing the Mother Earth as a living being, with whom we have an indivisible, interdependent, complementary and spiritual relationship.
To address climate change, we must recognize Mother Earth as the source of life and create a new system based on the principles of:
·Harmony and balance between everyone and everything
·Complementarity, solidarity, and equity
·Collective wellbeing and satisfying basic needs of everyone, in harmony with Mother Earth
·Respect for the laws of Mother Earth and Human Rights
·Recognition of the human being for what he or she is and not what he or she has
·Elimination of all forms of colonialism, imperialism and interventionism
·Peace among peoples and with Mother Earth.
The model we endorse is not destructive or unlimited development. Countries need to produce goods and services to meet the basic needs of its population, but by no means can they continue on this path of development in which richer countries have a carbon footprint five times larger than the planet can bear. Today, they have already had exceeded the planet’s capacity to regenerate by 30%. At this rate of exploitation of our Mother Earth we will need two planets by 2030.
In an interdependent system, of which humans are one part, is not possible to recognize rights only of the human part without causing an imbalance in the whole system. In order to ensure human rights and restore harmony with nature, it is necessary to recognize and effectively apply the rights of Mother Earth.
We propose the attached draft Universal Declaration of Mother Earth in which are recorded:
·The right to life and to exist;
·The right to be respected;
·The right to continue her cycles and processes free from human disturbance;
·The right to maintain identity and integrity as distinct beings, self-regulated and interrelated;
· The right to water as a source of life;
· The right to clean air;
· The right to comprehensive health care;
· The right to be free from contamination and pollution, toxic and radioactive waste;
· The right to not be genetically altered and changed in structure, threatening her vital, healthy integrity or function.
· The right to full and timely restoration for violations of the rights recognized in the Declaration caused by human activities.
Our shared vision is to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases to implement Article 2 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change which determines the “stabilization of concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a level that prevents dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. ” Our vision is, based on the principle of common but historically differentiated responsibilities, to demand that developed countries commit to quantified targets for reducing emissions that will allow the return of concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to 300 ppm, thus limiting the increase in global mean temperature to a maximum level of 1 C.
Stressing the need for urgent action to achieve this vision, and with the support of peoples, movements and countries, the developed countries should commit to ambitious emissions reduction targets that allow the achievement short-term goals, while maintaining our vision of the Earth’s climate system in balance, in accordance with the ultimate goal of the Convention.
The “shared vision” for “Long-term Cooperative Action” should not be reduced in the climate change negotiations to defining the limit on the temperature increase and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but must include a comprehensive and balanced set of financial measures, technologies, adaptation, capacity building, patterns of production, consumption and other essentials such as the recognition of the rights of Mother Earth in order to restore harmony with nature.
Developed countries, the main sources of climate change, shouldering their historical and current responsibility, must recognize and honor their climate debt in all its dimensions, as the basis for a just, effective and scientific solution to climate change. In this context we insist that developed countries:
· Restore developing countries’ atmospheric space which is occupied by their emissions of greenhouse gases. This implies the decolonization of the atmosphere through the absorption and reduction of their emissions.
· Assume the costs and technology transfer needs of developing countries for the loss of development opportunities due to living in a restricted atmospheric space.
· Take responsibility for the hundreds of millions of people that will have to migrate due to climate change which they have caused, remove restrictive policies on migration and migrants, and provide them a decent life with all of their countries’ rights.
· Assume the debt for adaptation related to the impacts of climate change on developing countries by providing the means to prevent, minimize and deal with damages arising from their excessive emissions.
· Honor these debts as part of a greater debt to Mother Earth by taking and implementing the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth at the United Nations.
The focus should be not only on financial compensation but principally on restorative justice – that is restoring integrity to the people and the members who form a community of life on Earth.
We deplore the attempt by a certain group of countries to cancel the Kyoto Protocol, the only specific binding instrument for reducing of greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries.
We warn the world that despite being legally bound [to reduce emissions], rather than reduce them, developed countries’ emissions grew by 11.2% between 1990 and 2007.
United States because of its unlimited consumption increased GHG emissions by 16.8% over the period 1990 to 2007, issuing on average between 20 and 23 tonnes of CO2 per capita, which represents more than 9 times the emissions for an average inhabitant of the Third World, and more than 20 times the emissions of an inhabitant of sub-Saharan Africa.
We absolutely reject the illegitimate ” Copenhagen Understanding “, which allows developed countries to offer insufficient reductions of greenhouse gases, based on voluntary and individual commitments that violate the environmental integrity of the Mother Earth and will lead to an increase of about 4 º C.
The forthcoming Climate Change Conference, to be held later this year in Mexico, should approve the amendment to the Kyoto Protocol, for the second period of commitments to begin in 2013-2017, in which developed countries must commit to significant domestic reductions of at least 50% compared to base year 1990, excluding carbon markets or other diversion systems that mask the failure of actual reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases.
We require that a goal for all developed countries be established first and then that individual allocations for each developed country be made, in the context of a comparison of effort between each of them, thus maintaining the system of the Kyoto Protocol for emission reductions.
The United States of America, as the sole country on Earth in Annex 1 which did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol has a significant responsibility to all peoples of the world, so it should ratify the Kyoto Protocol and commit to respect and comply with emissions reduction targets across its entire economy.
The people have the same rights of protection from the impacts of climate change and reject the notion of adaptation to climate change understood as resignation to the impacts caused by historic emissions of developed countries, who must adapt their living and consumption styles to this planetary emergency. We are forced to deal with the impacts of climate change, considering adaptation a process rather than an imposition, and also a tool that serves to counteract this, showing that it is possible to live in harmony under a different model of life.
We need to create an Adaptation Fund, as an exclusive fund to address climate change as part of a financial mechanism operated and managed in a sovereign, transparent and equitable manner for our states. Under this fund the following should be evaluated: the impacts and their costs to developing countries and the needs that derive from these impacts. And the support from developed countries should be recorded and monitored. It also must manage a mechanism for compensation for damage casued by impacts, past and future, for loss and restoration due to extreme and gradual weather events, and additional costs that could arise if our planet exceeds the ecological thresholds and impacts that are curtailing the right to live well.
The “Copenhagen Understanding” imposed on developing countries by certain States, beyond offering insufficient resources, intends in itself to divide and pit peoples against each other and seeks to extort money from developing countries by placing conditions on access to resources needed to adapt in exchange for mitigation measures. Addition we establish that it is unacceptable in international negotiation processes to attempt to categorize developing countries by their vulnerability to climate change, creating disputes, inequality and segregation between them.
The immense challenge we face as humanity to stop global warming and to cool the planet will only be achieved by carrying out a profound transformation of agriculture into a sustainable model of agricultural production of indigenous/peasant origin, and other ecological models and traditional practices that contribute to solving the problem of climate change and ensuring food sovereignty, understood as the right of peoples to control their own seeds, land, water and food production, and ensuring, through local and culturally appropriate production in harmony with Mother Earth, access of the people to sufficient, varied and nutritious in complement with Mother Earth and deepening independent production (participatory, community and shared) in every nation and people.
Climate change is already having profound impacts on agriculture and ways of life of indigenous / native and peasants in the world and these impacts will be getting worse in the future.
Agro-business, through its social, economic and cultural model of globalized capitalist production, and the logic of food production for the market rather than to fulfill the right to food is a major cause of climate change. Its technological tools, commercial and political do nothing but deepen the climate crisis and increase hunger in the world. For this reason we reject the Free Trade and Association Agreements and all forms of implementation of Intellectual Property Rights on life, current technological packages (agrochemical and GM) and those that offer themselves as false solutions (agrofuels, geoengineering, Nanotechnology, Terminator technology and the like) which only exacerbate the current crisis.
At the same time, we denounce the way that this capitalist model imposes infrastructure mega-projects, invades territories with extractive projects, privatizes and commodifies water, militarizes territories and expells indigenous peoples and farmers from their lands, thus preventing Food Sovereignty and deepening the socio-environmental crisis.
We demand recognition of the right of all peoples, living beings, and Mother Earth to have access to and enjoy of water and we support the proposal of the Government of Bolivia to recognize water as a Fundamental Human Right.
The definition of forest used in the negotiations of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which includes plantations, is unacceptable. Monoculture plantations are not forests. Therefore, we require a definition for negotiating purposes that recognizes native forests and the jungle and the diversity of ecosystems on earth.
The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples must be fully recognized, implemented and integrated in climate change negotiations. The best strategy and action to avoid deforestation and degradation and yo protect native forests and the jungle is to recognize and guarantee the collective rights of the lands and territories, especially considering that most of the forests are in the territories of indigenous peoples and nations, farming and traditional communities.
We condemn the market mechanisms such as REDD (Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) and its + and + +, versions, which are violating the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples and their right to free, prior and informed consent, as well as the sovereignty of nation states, and they violate the rights and customs of Peoples and the Rights of Nature.
The polluting countries are obliged to directly transfer the economic and technological resources to pay for the restoration and maintenance of the forests in favor of the Indigenous peoples and organic, original, indigenous ancestral structures for farming. This should be a direct compensation and additional to the sources of funding committed to by developed countries, outside of the carbon market and never serving as carbon offsets. We demand that countries stop local initiatives in forests and jungles that are based on market mechanisms and that propose conditional and non-existent results. We require from governments a global program to restore native forests and jungles, managed and administered by the people, implementing forest seeds, fruit trees and native flora. Governments should eliminate forest concessions and support the conservation of oil in the ground and urgently stop the exploitation of hydrocarbons in jungles.
We call upon States to recognize, respect and ensure the effective implementation of international human rights standards and the rights of Indigenous Peoples, including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and ILO Convention 169 among other relevant instruments, in negotiations, policies and measures to meet the challenges posed by climate change. In particular, we call upon States to legally recognize the prior existence of the right to our territories, lands and natural resources to enable and strengthen our traditional ways of life and contribute effectively to solving the climate change.
We demand the full and effective implementation of the right to consultation, participation, and free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous Peoples in all negotiation processes as well as in the design and implementation of measures relating to climate change.
At present, environmental degradation and climate change will reach critical levels, and one of the main consequences will be internal and international migration. According to some projections, in 1995 there were about 25 million climate migrants, at present this is estimated at 50 million, and projections for 2050 show that from 200 to 1000 million people will be displaced by situations resulting from climate change.
Developed countries must take responsibility for climate migrants, welcoming them into their territories and recognizing their fundamental rights by signing international conventions providing for the definition of climate migrant so that all States abide by its determinations.
Establish an International Tribunal of Conscience to denounce, make visible, document, try and punish violations of the rights of the migrants, refugees and displaced persons in countries of origin, transit and destination, clearly identifying the responsibilities of States, companies and other actors.
Current funding for developing countries for climate change and the proposal of the Copenhagen Understanding are insignificant. Developed countries must commit to new annual funding, in addition to official development assistance and public sources, of at least 6% of their GDP to tackle climate change in developing countries. This is feasible considering that a similar amount is spent on national defense and five times more spent to rescue failing banks and speculators, which raises serious questions about their global priorities and political will. This funding should be direct, unconditional and not to violate national sovereignty or self-determination of the most affected communities and groups.
Given the inefficiency of the current mechanism, the Mexico Conference should establish a new funding mechanism that operates under the authority of the United Nations Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change and accountable to it, with significant representation from developing countries to ensure compliance with funding commitments of Annex 1 countries.
It was stated that the developed countries increased their emissions over the period 1990 – 2007, despite having manifested that the reduction would be substantially assisted market mechanisms.
The carbon market has turned into a lucrative business by commercializing our Mother Earth. This is not an alternative to tackling climate change, since it is looting, ravaging the land, water and even life itself.
The recent financial crisis has shown that the market is incapable of regulating the financial system, which is fragile and uncertain when facing speculation and the emergence of brokers, therefore, it would be totally irresponsible to leave in its hands the care and protection of human existence itself and of our Mother Earth.
We consider it unacceptable that the current negotiations seek to create new mechanisms that expand and promote the carbon market given that existing mechanisms have never solved the problem of climate change nor have they become real and direct action in reducing greenhouse gases.
It is essential to require compliance with the commitments made by developed countries at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change regarding the development and transfer of technology and reject the “technological showcase” proposed by developed countries that only comercialize the technology. It is fundamental to establish guidelines for creating multilateral, multidisciplinary and participatory control, management and ongoing evaluation of the exchange of technologies. These technologies must be useful, clean, and socially appropriate. It is equally fundamental to establish a fund for financing and inventory of technologies that are appropriate and free of intellectual property rights, in particular of patents that should go from private monopolies to public domain, freely accessible and low cost.
Knowledge is universal, and may not for any reason be the subject of private ownership and private use, nor its applications in the form of technology. It is the duty of developed countries to share their technology with developing countries, to create research centers to create their own technologies and innovations, as well as defending and promoting its development and application for living well. The world needs to recover, learn, relearn the principles and approaches of the ancestral legacy of Indigenous peoples in order to stop the destruction of the planet, as well as ancestral knowledge and practices and the recovery of spirituality in the reinstatement of living well together with Mother Earth.
Considering the lack of political will on the part of developed countries to effectively meet their obligations and commitments under the Convention United Nations Framework on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, and faced with the lack of an international legal body to prevent and punish all those climatic and environmental crimes that violate the rights of Mother Earth and humanity, we demand the creation of an International Court of Climate and Environmental Justice, to have binding legal capacity to prevent, prosecute and punish States, companies and people who by act or omission cause contamination and climate change.
It must support States submitting claims in the International Court of Justice against developed countries that fail to meet their commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, including their commitments to reduce greenhouse gases.
We urge the people to propose and promote a thorough reform of the United Nations (UN), so that all Member States comply with the decisions of the International Court of Climate and Environmental Justice.
The future of humanity is in danger, and we cannot accept that a group of leaders of developed countries want to decide for all countries, as they tried to do unsuccessfully at the Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen. This decision rests with all peoples. It is therefore necessary to undertake a world referendum, plebiscite or popular vote on climate change where we are all consulted on: the level of emission reductions to be made by developed countries and transnational corporations, the financing that developed countries should provide, the creation of an International Court of Justice Climate: the need for a Universal Declaration of the rights of Mother Earth, and the need to change the current capitalist system.
The process of a World Referendum, plebiscite or popular vote will be the result of a process of preparation that ensures its successful development.
In order to coordinate our international activation and implement the results of this “Peoples’ Agreement” we call for building a Global People’s Movement for Mother Earth, which is based on the principles of complementarity and respect for diversity of origin and visions of its members, constituting a broad and democratic space for coordination and joint action worldwide.
Toward this end, we adopt the attached global action plan so that in Mexico the developed Annex 1 countries will respect the existing legal framework and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 50% and take on the various proposals contained in this Agreement.
Finally, we agree to hold the 2nd World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in 2011 as part of this process of building a Global Movement of People for Mother Earth and to react to the results of the Climate Change Conference to be held later this year in Cancun, Mexico.
