Campaigners will lay down the gauntlet with a rally for a Labour Green New Deal on the first day of Labour Party Conference 2019. Supporters will gather at 4pm on 21 September on Hove Lawn in Central Brighton. 

The rally is being organised by campaign group Labour for a Green New Deal and brings together those leading the calls for a transformative Green New Deal with co-hosts: Momentum, Youth Strikes for Climate, Communications Workers Union (CWU), and Brighton Labour for a Green New Deal. 

Speakers will include Dan Carden, Labour’s shadow secretary of state for International Development; Dave Ward, general secretary of CWU; Matt Wrack, general secretary of FBU; Faiza Shaheen Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green; Ali Milani, Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Boris Johnson’s Uxbridge and Ruislip constituency; Patrick Foley, Brazil Solidarity Initiative; and Sasha Das Gupta, Labour Against Racism and Fascism. 

Climate emergency

MC’d by Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar, the rally will be reminiscent of the Parliament Square rally which took place in May 2019 as the UK Parliament declare a climate emergency. On that day Parliament laid the foundations for a bold, fair and urgent response to climate breakdown with its declaration. 

That move was backed up by trade unionists, labour members, climate activists and global justice activists at the rally. At Labour Party Conference four months on, this coalition will come back together to demand bold next steps as the labour movement and the left takes charge of building climate justice in the UK.

As Tim Roache, general secretary of the GMB union, argued at Trade Union Congress 2019: “The potential now exists to unite green new dealers and the labour movement around the economic, not just the climate necessities of tackling climate change.” 

Our calls for a transformative Green New Deal fundamentally recognise the inseparability of workers’ rights, powerful trade unions, and the struggle for climate and global justice. Labour’s plans to expand democratic public ownership of the economy while repealing repressive trade unions laws don’t just complement, but are fundamentally necessary to a just energy transition. 

Labour policy 

The rally for a Labour Green New Deal comes as more than 90 constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) have voted to submit Labour for a Green New Deal’s motion to Labour Party Conference. That motion includes a commitment to zero carbon emissions by 2030, backed up by calls to rapidly phase out fossil fuels; large-scale investment in renewables; green public integrated transport; supporting developing countries’ climate transitions with transfers of finance, technology and capacity; and more. 

These demands are supported by Labour members across the country, but even if the motion passes at Labour Conference its adoption by the Labour Party is not guaranteed. That is at the discretion of the National Policy Forum and Labour leadership. 

That’s why we need a strong mobilisation of people across the labour movement to make it clear that a transformative green new deal is not only necessary for addressing climate breakdown, but also securing workers’ rights as the economy changes and crucially to win the upcoming election for Labour. 

Climate change will define Labour Conference 2019 and dominate the next government. Labour will form that government, and with around a decade left to overt runaway climate breakdown, Labour will be judged on its response to the most existential crisis of our time. Nothing short of a transformative Green New Deal will do. 

This Author

Chris Saltmarsh is co-director of Labour for a Green New Deal. 

I’m a pessimist. I sometimes doubt that human existence is a good thing. And I generally doubt that societies have the capacity to tackle anthropogenic global heating before its effects become truly horrendous.

My pessimism, I’m sorry to say, can be tinged with misanthropy. I reflect more than is healthy on the human capacity (including my own) for cruelty, complacency, selfishness, and bigotry. The political situation across the world, including where I live in the UK, has done nothing to temper this tendency.

One might think, therefore, that I would be a receptive reader of Jonathan Franzen’s recent essay in The New Yorker – “What if we stopped pretending?” – in which he argues that catastrophic climate change is inevitable. But I’m not. First, the article seems flawed in its understanding of the situation. Secondly, it’s over-confident. Like Franzen, I run pessimistic models in my head. Unlike him, I don’t assume that they are reliable guides to reality. 

Climate apocalypse

I find a weird pleasure in reading pessimistic takes like Franzen’s, and the more insightful and nuanced work of Roy Scranton. But I’m aware that my understanding of global heating is very limited. It’s also conditioned by my identity as a depressive middle-aged white man with little scientific training, who lives in a wealthy country that has so far been relatively sheltered from climate change. To someone with my privilege, climate apocalypse has so far been spectator sport, even if I fear that at some point I will end up in the arena.

Franzen’s argument is that little or no progress has been made to address global heating, although the science has been clear for at least thirty years. He sees expressions of hope that the problem can be “solved” as a denial of reality. He therefore takes issue with “progressive” rhetoric (i.e. around the Green New Deal) as well as the outright denialism of some on the right. If the global mean temperature rises by more than two degrees, he suggests, various feedback loops will cause climate change to spiral out of control.

Franzen sees no hope that this target can be met, given human nature and global political and economic structures. He claims: “In the long run, it probably makes no difference how badly we overshoot two degrees; once the point of no return is passed, the world will become self-transforming”. 

He accepts that cutting emissions is worthwhile if it slows down global heating. However, he also sees false hope as harmful. His concern is that it gives too much emphasis to mitigation rather than adaptation, and distracts from more soluble ecological problems. He also points out that large-scale renewable energy initiatives can destroy ecosystems.

His conclusion that we should focus on “smaller, more local battles” – in his case supporting a farm that offers opportunities for homeless people –­ as a way of hedging against the future is unsurprising. An emphasis on local rather than global concerns is often to be found in the work of other “doomist” writers such as Paul Kingsnorth. It is also has a long history in pessimistic thought, going back at least as far as Voltaire’s conclusion in Candide that we are best off cultivating our own gardens.

Climate de-nihilism

Franzen’s article has not been well received by climate scientists and activists. It has been attacked on several grounds including scientific misunderstandings, political confusion, and an irritating lack of self-awareness. (A useful summary of criticisms can be found here.)

Even with my limited knowledge of the science, I am confident that Franzen is wrong that a mean global temperature rise of two degrees (although clearly very bad indeed) constitutes a “point of no return”.

His dichotomy between adaptation and mitigation also seems false, as does his attempt to separate climate change from other pressing ecological concerns.

Some of the rhetoric used to attack Franzen is unhelpful, though. As pointed out by @libshipwreck on Twitter: “Framing those who are very scared about climate change as “climate cowards” is a great way to ensure that people won’t honestly express their worries”. The problem is not that Franzen is pessimistic, but that he has been given a media platform not commensurate with his limited understanding of his subject.  

The most powerful response that I have read, by Mary Annaïse Heglar, coins the phrase “climate de-nihilists” to describe people (generally white men) who, by preaching the gospel of doom, dangerously distract from the fact “that every slice of a degree matters. And right now, that means everything we do matters”.

Heglar also takes issue with the climate community’s “insistence on hope” and its “tone-policing”.  For  “both smack of the privilege wrought from the deluded belief that this world has ever been perfect and that, therefore, an imperfect version of it is not worth saving, or fighting for”.

As a humanities scholar, I feel ill equipped to face the climate emergency. But my training does at least help me to view with suspicion the absolutist pronouncements that make headlines and publishing deals. We should distrust mantras such as “tech will save us!”, “markets will save us!”, “socialism will save us!”, “planting trees will save us!”, and “we’re all doomed!”. The future will be messier.

The problem of “we”

In a measured response to Franzen, Kate Marvel argues that it is “the fact that we understand the potential driver of doom that changes it from a foregone conclusion to a choice, a terrible outcome in the universe of all possible futures”. On Twitter, Roy Scranton responded sceptically: “Well sure, but whose choice? Who has the power to make these changes?”

It’s a fair point. There’s no one in control of global carbon capitalism, which lumbers around like a blinded giant, crushing everything in its wake. Climate discourse often talks about “we” as if humanity was a unified agent, which is obviously far from the truth.

That’s not to say that things can’t change. As Genevieve Guenther has argued, “we” also occludes the varying degrees of complicity with and responsibility for the world’s fossil fuel addiction. I am highly sceptical that the powerful vested interests that keep the giant alive can be defeated. But I am also sceptical of my scepticism, aware that it has at least as much to do with my emotional makeup as it does with my partial understanding of a complex situation.

When “doomists” write about “we”, they often seem to mean people like themselves. (I probably do the same in this article; it’s hard to avoid.) It’s highly likely that a privileged way of life, fuelled by high consumption and fossil fuels, is coming to an end. But this way of life has only ever been enjoyed by a minority of the global population, and by no means everyone even in the rich countries where it is most prevalent. 

To confuse the end of that way of life with the apocalypse, or even the end of human species, seems (to put it kindly) parochial. It also speaks of a complacency arising from the fact that the people and countries the most responsible for global heating have been, to a large extent, the ones the most sheltered from its effects. This may not remain the case for ever.

Climate possibilities

My pessimism tells me that the worst predictions of David Wallace-Well’s The Uninhabitable Earth and Mark Lynas’s Six Degrees will come to pass. But I do not confuse pessimism with prophecy. And if anything is likely to hold back my misanthropic tendencies, it’s the remarkable efforts of people across the world to tackle global heating.

The climate crisis is not going to be solved. With a huge amount of effort, ingenuity, and luck, it might be possible to mitigate and adapt to its worst effects. I don’t see that we – individually and collectively, locally and globally, in fear or hope or rage or despair or whatever – have much to lose in making the attempt.

This Author 

David Higgins is an associate professor in English Literature at the University of Leeds. His work focuses on British Romanticism and the environmental humanities. His most recent book, British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene: Writing Tambora (Palgrave, 2017). 

Image: NPS Climate Change, Flickr.

The voting age should be lowered to 16 to give young people a voice on their future in the face of environmental breakdown, a think tank has urged.

Today’s youngsters and future generations are facing a “toxic inheritance” of environmental crises caused by climate change, the loss of wildlife and damage to the oceans and soils, a report from IPPR warned.

Without urgent action by the current generation of political leaders, future generations will not just be economically worse off than their parents, they will face huge challenges from environmental damage and its impact on society.

Strikes

The report is calling for votes at 16, as is already the case for Holyrood and local elections in Scotland, to give a voice to those who will face the consequences of what older generations are doing to the world and give them a say on their future.

It also calls for a “Future Generations Act” which would provide a formal legal recognition of the right of future generations to live in a world with a stable environment, and make sure policy-making takes that into account.

And it wants to see greater value given to environmental projects which have long-term benefits for future generations in the process of making public investment decisions.

The report comes ahead of global climate strikes on Friday, when children and students across the UK are set to walk out of lessons and lectures to call for urgent action from politicians to tackle the climate and wildlife crises.

In the UK, one of the demands of the climate strikers is to lower the voting age to 16, in recognition they have the greatest stake in the future.

Breakdown

Luke Murphy, Head of IPPR’s Environmental Justice Commission, said: “Current and future generations face a toxic inheritance as a consequence of environmental breakdown.

“Political leaders and policymakers must recognise the duty they owe to the next and future generations.

“Crucially, they must act to protect them by giving legal recognition to their rights and by giving them a voice in our political system.”

The report warns that younger and future generations will have to experience impacts on the environment which are partly the result of greenhouse gas emissions caused by older generations and “decisions taken by elites in these generations, most of whom have only a small chance of being alive by 2050”.

In order to limit environmental breakdown younger generations will have to use far smaller quantities of resources over their lifetimes than older generations.

Policy

They will have to build sustainable economic models and cope with issues such as food prices pushed up by extreme weather hitting production and the emotional toll of dealing with rapid change and damage to society.

Shadow minister for voter engagement and youth affairs, Cat Smith, said: “Our young people are a force to be reckoned with, who are taking to the street, leading the climate strikes and using their voices to influence positive change.

“Yet instead of being supported and valued, young people continue to have their voices ignored by this Government.

“At the next election, Labour will set out a bold policy agenda that will radically change young people’s lives, including tackling the climate crisis, scrapping tuition fees, and extending the vote to 16-year-olds.”

Vital

But a Cabinet Office spokesperson said: “The age of 18, not 16, is widely recognised as the age at which one becomes an adult.

“Full citizenship rights – from drinking, to smoking, to voting – should only be gained at adulthood.”

“What is vital is that we educate people from a younger age about democracy and give them the confidence and enthusiasm to participate when they are 18.

“The Government has developed a variety of programmes to deliver this and works in partnership with schools and civil society groups across the country.”

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent.

Food supplies could be at risk as a result of a failure to act on “climate breakdown”, MPs have warned.

People’s health is also at risk from the spread of new diseases and heat stress as the climate warms, with a warning from the MPs that the NHS is not ready for a rise in health problems as a result of environmental damage.

The government should promote healthier and more sustainable diets which benefit the environment and people’s health, including a reduction of meat and dairy consumption, a report by the Environmental Audit Committee said.

Food security

And people in cities should have better access to health, sustainable food – with planning authorities able to restrict the number of fast food outlets without stringent evidence requirements, it urged.

Climate change is projected to have major impacts on food systems around the world, affecting the UK’s ability to deliver healthy, sustainable diets – with agriculture here hit by weather extremes and the spread of livestock diseases.

The government needs to recognise the risks to national food security from importing 40 percent of the UK’s food, including fruit and vegetables from countries which are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

A dependency on imports, combined with Government “complacency” over the impacts rising temperatures could have on food production, is risking national food security – compounded by Brexit trade uncertainty, the report found.

Committee chairwoman, Labour’s Mary Creagh, warned the country faced a “food security crisis” and called on ministers to publish all the information they held on food security and costs in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

Pharmaceutical

The MPs raised concerns over the impact food price increases could have on the UK’s poorest people, particularly pensioners and children, and urged the Government to set out how it plans to maintain food security in a changing climate.

Producing more food in the UK could cut the risks associated with depending on imports from a handful of countries, and the MPs said a new national food strategy should support sustainable production of more fruit and veg here.

The Agriculture Bill, which will govern agriculture after the UK quits the EU, should encourage a switch towards more sustainably produced food, including environmentally friendly farming methods to cut greenhouse gases.

Along with damage to agricultural production and provision of nutritious food, rising temperatures could also hit health with direct impacts such as heat-related deaths in heatwaves.

The report raised concerns the NHS and the pharmaceutical industry did not have enough resources to cope with the environmental changes.

Exacerbated

Public Health England (PHE) should broaden its focus to include guidance to GPs and the pharmaceutical industry on Lyme disease, malaria, zika and other emerging tropical diseases.

And PHE should advise local government on the impacts of heat stress and protecting vulnerable people, particularly the elderly, those in care homes and those with kidney failure.

There should be more efforts to protect wildlife, increase “green and blue urban infrastructure”, such as parks and wetlands in cities, improve air quality, and measures to improve energy and water efficiency in homes, the report said.

Ms Creagh said: “Everything we do to the planet, we do to ourselves. The health of the planet matters because it affects what we eat and whether we can eat in future.

“We are facing a food security crisis, exacerbated by uncertainty over the UK’s future trading position with the EU and the rest of the world.

Production

“Ministers must now publish all the information they hold from Operation Yellowhammer on food security and likely costs in the event of a no-deal Brexit.”

And she warned: “More people are living in cities at risk from over-heating and water shortages, they’re breathing polluted air, eating more fast food and getting less exercise.”

She called for “a planetary health champion” to put the agenda of people’s and environmental health at the heart of Government.

A government spokesman said: “We recognise the threat climate change poses to many facets of our national life, including our food production and supply, which is why the UK is the first major economy to legislate for net-zero emissions by 2050.

“We already have a highly resilient food supply chain in the UK, and our National Food Strategy review is considering how we can further address the challenges of a changing climate and continue to deliver safe, healthy, affordable food now and for generations to come.”

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent.

Old growth longleaf pine trees that towered as tall as 30 meters covered up to 90 million acres of the southern United States when English settlers first arrived to America in the late sixteenth century.

When cut, these ramrod-straight trees made an ideal ship’s mast, so many of the best specimens were cut down for use by the British navy. Others were slashed for “naval stores” — tar, pitch, rosin and turpentine — that were exported to England as early as 1608. Today, those majestic, old-growth longleaf pine forests are almost gone.

Given that these trees take 150 years to mature and grow for over 300, they were not replaced. Today, in my state of North Carolina, the British are still effectively cutting our forests. Our trees are being chopped into pellets, trucked up to 200 miles to a port on our southern coast, dispatched across the Atlantic in container ships, and burned in UK power plants. 

For what?

Even here, few people know this, because this environmental travesty occurs in poor, rural areas of color, where people are already beset by low health outcomes and high unemployment.

And for what? So you can tell yourselves that our trees are your “renewable biomass” and therefore better than burning coal. Apparently, burning our trees and leaving us a denuded landscape meets a European Union standard for carbon reduction.

I attended a public hearing last month by North Carolina’s Division of Air Quality in the latest county where Enviva Biomass, the world’s largest producer of wood pellets, wants to expand operations. To get an idea of the surroundings, the hearing was held in a rural high school where nearly 64 percent of all children are considered economically disadvantaged and 45 percent of students are chronically absent. 

Enviva put forward all the requisite support, including its VP for environmental affairs, director of sustainability policy, sustainability foresters, supporters from forestry and loggers’ associations, and a woman representing Enviva’s “community partnership.”

At a PR and legal level, the Enviva supporters said all the right things: more trees are planted in North Carolina than are cut down; the Enviva plant supports scholarships, apprenticeships, school supply drives, 300 “direct and indirect jobs;” and the company’s “significant capital investment” toward the proposed air quality permit modification seemed to meet what is required by law.

Sensitive forests

So why not let the Enviva plant in tiny Garysburg, North Carolina, spew out 46 percent more wood pellets than it did before? That’s 781,000 tons of wood pellets each year, not counting the three more Enviva plants in my state alone.

Plenty of reasons. Most of those newly planted trees come in the form of “pine plantations,” comprised of rows upon rows of artificially fertilized, crop-like trees, where the undergrowth is controlled just like weeds on a tobacco farm, and where biodiversity does not exist.

J.C. Woodley, a retired environmental biologist for the US Environmental Protection Agency who was raised in the latest county where Enviva wants to raze more forests, said: “The pine forests are monocultures – they’re just one kind of tree. They don’t store carbon in the manner that an old growth forest does.”

Of course, an old growth forest would take 30 to 40 years to regenerate, and environmentalists say Enviva wants to cut whole trees again faster than that. They also report that Enviva is cutting bottomland and coastal forests with wetland habitat, even though Enviva says it does not source wood from sensitive forests.

But really, who would know? In my state, private landowners have significant rights to do what they want with their land, even though we need the forests to help protect us from unprecedented hurricanes and rains that left sizeable areas of my state under water just last year.

Community opposition 

None of the biomass companies have policies where they reject the use of whole trees, according to the Dogwood Alliance, one of the groups fighting the cutting of our forests for the UK’s fuel. When these companies insist that they only use “residual” trees, that is, the treetops and branches, that promise is not in their company policies.

Environmental groups say they’ve been hindered when they want to see Enviva’s cutting and transport operations for themselves, instead of taking the company’s word for how it obtains its “product.”

The three other North Carolina Enviva plants are also in poor, distressed, rural counties where people struggle with poor health, low rates of insurance and not enough doctors. In two of the four counties, most residents are African-Americans, and in one, Northampton, discrimination against them was historically so bad that white county leaders took their intentionally racist voter “literacy test” all the way to the US Supreme Court, which in 1959 decided it was okay. 

Are these the places where a biomass company was likely to meet strong community opposition?  

No, says Woodley, the retired EPA scientist. People’s “issues are bigger to them than this, like keeping the electricity on.” Besides, Woodley added: “They’re very proud of those jobs,” probably not realizing that taxpayers of this poor county and the rest of the state are also helping to pay for them.

Measuring emissions 

Enviva has gotten $6 million in state and local subsidies, in part by taking advantage of North Carolina’s anti-environment Republican legislative majority to open and repeatedly expand operations. This is the same majority that in 2017 enacted an 18-month moratorium on the construction of new wind farms, even though the state’s lone wind operation had become the largest taxpayer in two other economically distressed counties the very day it opened.

Enviva’s jobs and even Enviva’s $5 million endowment of a Forest Conservation Fund to preserve bottomland hardwood trees in the Coastal Plain of North Carolina and Virginia doesn’t match the subsidies it receives.

Belinda Joyner, who leads the Concerned Citizens of Northampton County group, told state regulators at last month’s public hearing: “You don’t live here, so therefore you don’t have to be bothered with the noise. You don’t have to be bothered with the trucks” that grind their way to and from the Enviva plant seven days a week at all hours carrying logs or pellets. Referring to Enviva’s yearly school supply drive, Joyner added: “You’re going to kill us at the same time [that] you’re giving our children a book bag.”

But here’s the bigger picture, the thing that astounds my friends who had no idea this “sustainability” perversion is going on: the only reason why cutting our forests meets the EU standard for greenhouse gas emissions is because emissions are measured only at your power plants.

What never gets added to that equation are the effects of the carbon storage that is lost when the trees are cut down, or the carbon that is emitted by the massive, and hot, pellet plants, the carbon spewed from smog-emitting logging and pellet trucks, or the emissions from container ships that transport our trees across the Atlantic to UK power plants.

Lose-lose 

Even more astounding is that new studies are finding that burning wood pellets for fuel releases as much as, or even more, carbon dioxide per unit of energy than coal.

Woodley added: “The thing that’s disheartening to me is the scam. We’re emitting and [UK power plants are] at zero emissions, according to their calculations.”

Biomass supporters will respond to this piece and PR every claim. But they cannot deny the big picture. In today’s climate crisis, it is nothing but absurd that in the UK you burn our trees to power your homes and businesses.

As one opponent at the hearing summed up: “This is a lose-lose proposition on both sides of the Atlantic.”

This Author 

Cindy Elmore is a professor in the School of Communication at East Carolina University. She holds a PhD from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She was also a recipient of the Professional Fulbright in Journalism in New Zealand, and a Rotary International Fellowship for graduate study in the UK.

Image: Bobistraveling, Flickr. 

I am in the Amazon with Manari Ushigua, a shaman and healer, within the Ecuadorian territory of the Sapara indigenous nation, a people who have inhabited the forest for thousands of years, and whose deep immersion within it is legendary.

On our journey, Manari stops and points above his head to a thick vine snaking its way up the trunk of a tree. “This,” he says, “is the source of curare, which was used as an anaesthetic in the old days; we also use it as a poison for hunting.” He had rubbed the bark of another tree a few minutes beforehand. A white paste formed in his hand. As applied it to my head, he said: “This is our botox, use it if you want to appear young!”

Manari is also head of the Sapara Association. He has just displayed a tiny fraction of what they know about the forest and its beings. Their knowledge is so profound that it has been recognized by UNESCO as part of humanity’s ‘intangible heritage’. 

Population decline

Unfortunately, this intangible wealth is threatened by the modern world’s quest for financial profit, and the ideology of economic growth that fuels it.

The Sapara are threatened by concessions given by the Ecuadorian government to oil companies within its territory. If these plans go ahead, it could be the death-knell for a people already beleaguered by severe population decline. The Sapara are down to about 600 from 20,000, decimated by diseases brought in by outsiders who also enslaved them for the rubber trade and other commerce.

Fortunately the population is now stable, but any new factor such as incursions by oil extraction and mining could tip it over towards extinction. 

The threat is not only physical – the destruction of the forest and water on which the Sapara depend – though that is real enough. Perhaps much more insidious, and very difficult for the modern world to understand, is the violation of the spirit of the Sapara and all the beings they live with, an attack that could kill them psychologically and emotionally even if they survive physically.

The Sapara have lived as part of nature, as one amongst millions of beings in the Amazon, for as long as they can remember. They believe their past, their ancestors, are what guide their present, and their dreams tell them what to do next.

Resisting and rebuilding

The Sapara ‘read’ their dreams, interpreting them to understand what the spirits are telling them, and what steps they must take today and tomorrow. Daily rituals to stay connected are as important as eating and drinking and making love; we learnt this as every day started with a ‘cleansing’ ceremony, washed with water in which chiricaspi leaves were immersed, or painted on our faces with the deep red of achote tree fruits, or given guayusa tea to drink.

Oil extraction, mining, logging, and any other such extractivist activities would irrevocably undermine this delicate balance between the material and the spiritual, as much as it would destroy the intricate web of life that this rainforest supports. 

As devastating is the decline of their language. Manari said: “Only 2-3 people now know it fully, the rest of us have grown up being told Spanish is the proper language to speak. We are trying now to bring it back by teaching it in our school.”

UNESCO’s heritage tag includes the Sapara language, since it encodes so much of their knowledge. It is a sobering fact that most of the world’s endangered languages, and there are thousands, are the ones that indigenous people have spoken, and they are mostly unconnected to the few globally dominant languages. 

The Sapara are resisting and rebuilding. They have travelled out of their territory to Quito, and other parts of the world, to tell their story. They have been supported in this by indigenous networks such as the CONFENIAE (Confederation of Indigenous Nations of Ecuadorian Amazon) and COICA (Coordinator of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon River Basin), and civil society groups like Fundacion Pachamama and the Pachamama Alliance.

These people have told the Ecuadorian Government in clear, unambiguous terms: we don’t want oil drilling and mining in our territory … or for that matter, anywhere in the Amazon. 

Palpable unfairness 

Resistance is one of two strategies they are using. The second is providing alternatives to the narrative of the Ecuadorian government, that extractive industries are the only way it can generate enough revenues to put into programmes for people’s welfare.

The Ecuadorian Government has over the last few years become seriously indebted to the Chinese, having taken enormous amounts of their investments without a thought on how they would repay. Chinese companies, fully backed by their government, have moved into Latin America in a massive way in the last decade or two, funding major infrastructure as a means to reach the continent’s rich natural resources. 

The Ecuadorian state’s inability (or unwillingness) to imagine and move towards an economy not dependent on extractivism (the only recent shift by socialist governments being to move away from private capitalist control to state control), has meant that indigenous peoples and civil society organisations are having to think up radical alternatives.

While the unfairness of this is palpable, nevertheless the Sapara and other indigenous nations are coming up with diverse ideas. 

Ecological understanding 

Our forest walk with Manari and other Sapara is part of one such attempt. The community has set up a community-led tourism initiative deep inside their territory, called Naku (Sapara for forest), near the village of Llanchamacocha.

It is not a typical tourism venture; rather, it is focused on healing, where visitors can spend a few days immersed in the sights and sounds and smells and spirits of the forest, receive the wisdom of the local people, have their dreams interpreted, and partake in cleansing and medicinal ceremonies including (if they so wish) a session with the legendary plant ayahuasca (iyouna in Sapara).

My colleagues and I are being treated to all this for five amazing days in June this year, days with no internet or phone connection, the pace slowed down to that of one of the stunning millipedes one could see in the forest, and no schedule to stick to.

It was so different from my usual routine of doing one thing after the other, of constantly referring to my watch, that it took me the first two days to just make the bodily, emotional and mental shift.

The Naku initiative is now providing resources for the community to invest in some other crucial needs. A school has been started where apart from the regular curriculum set by the state, the community has introduced elements of its own culture, knowledge, and ecological understanding.

The resources are now adequate even for the Sapara to employ a full time project coordinator: Estefania Paez is a young woman from Quito, who has taken to the task with enthusiasm (and was, incidentally, our trip organizer and interpreter). 

Ecological limits

The Sapara are also aware that dependence on tourism for generating alternative livelihoods is fragile. They have begun experimenting with products, made from things obtained from the forest using their artistic skills and traditions, that can be sold. They are conferring amongst themselves and with supporters from outside on other possibilities. 

The Naku initiative is of course a very partial alternative to the economic approach of the Ecuadorian state. There is no way it can compete with the revenues generated by oil and minerals.

Ecuador will need to look at alternatives like reviving its agriculture through agroecological approaches, community-led tourism, localizing the economy for basic needs, and other such options that are sensitive to the region’s biocultural diversity and fragility.

The government also needs to step up its efforts to get global assistance to keep the Amazon intact, emphasising its incredible role in maintaining global hydrological and climate cycles, the incalculable value of its biodiversity and its indigenous cultures and knowledge systems. Not as carbon trading kind of mechanisms, for those only legitimize the capitalist system that is one of the roots of the crises in the first place, but more in the form of reparations from the global north for the enormous damage it has done to both the Amazon and to the world’s environment, i.e. repayment for its ecological debt to the peoples and biodiversity of the Amazon. 

These are difficult and long-term struggles. For the immediate, the Sapara are expressing to the world that they want to be left in peace, with no incursions by oil and mining companies, and that they have ideas for how they can build a bioeconomy that respects ecological limits as also the wisdom of the peoples that inhabit that Amazon.

Ambitious initiatives 

Sapara are participating in an ambitious Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative, combining several indigenous networks in Ecuador and Peru, with support from groups like Pachamama Alliance and Amazon Watch, to build the case for protecting 30 million hectares of the Amazon from extractive industries. 

With one final ceremony, we bid an optimistic ‘hasta pronto’ to our Sapara hosts. Our tiny plane rumbles off the dirt runaway, and as it circles around Llanchamacocha and begins to head towards the nearby Shell airport, the enormous expanse of the Amazon comes into view.

The river along which we had camped appears like a snake gleaming in the sun. Verdant green all the way to the horizon, broken by winding water snakes, the crowns of skyscraping trees emerging like sentinels …  it’s a view unlike anywhere else on earth. Can it survive the onslaught of the greed-driven, power-hungry world of ‘development’? 

As I write this news of the fires affecting the Amazon (and nearby regions) is waning in global media, making the prospect of survival seem even more bleak. Nevertheless, people are resisting and rebuilding.

This Author 

Ashish Kothari works with Kalpavriksh, an NGO working on environmental and social issues, based in Pune, India. He is a member of the Global Commission of the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative. 

A top scientist has said it is “appropriate to be scared” about the pace at which climate change is taking place.

Former chief government scientist Professor Sir David King said the situation was so grave that the UK should bring forward the date for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases to almost zero from 2050 to 2040, according to the BBC.

Another scientist told the broadcaster about the “numbing inevitability” of climate change, while another expressed concern about public fear around the issue and compared it to the fear of nuclear war in his youth.

Hurricanes

Prof King told the BBC: “It’s appropriate to be scared. We predicted temperatures would rise, but we didn’t foresee these sorts of extreme events we’re getting so soon.”

He said the world could not wait for scientific certainty on events like Hurricane Dorian, but said he believes the likelihood that Dorian is a climate change event is “very high”.

He added: “I can’t say that with 100 percent certainty, but what I can say is that the energy from the hurricane comes from the warm ocean and if that ocean gets warmer we must expect more energy in hurricanes.”

Scared

He continued: “If you got in a plane with a one in 100 chance of crashing you would be appropriately scared.

“But we are experimenting with the climate in a way that throws up probabilities of very severe consequences of much more than that.”

Physicist Prof Jo Haigh from Imperial College London told the BBC: “David King is right to be scared – I’m scared too.”

Afraid

Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, told the broadcaster: “I have a sense of the numbing inevitability of it all.

“It’s like seeing a locomotive coming at you for 40 years – you could see it coming and were waving the warning flags but were powerless to stop it.”

Petteri Taalas, who is secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), said he wants to “stick to the facts”, which he said are “quite convincing and dramatic enough”.

“We should avoid interpreting them too much. When I was young we were afraid of nuclear war. We seriously thought it’s better not to have children.

“I’m feeling the same sentiment among young people at the moment. So we have to be a bit careful with our communication style,” he said.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist.

When your average person thinks of a climate activist in this country, they think of a white, middle-class person. Perhaps they have dreadlocks and chain themselves to buildings; perhaps they are less loud with their activism but sign online petitions and only eat locally-sourced vegan food.

Either way, British Muslims and other ethnic minority communities have long been excluded from the narrative.

But there is a shift taking place. More and more Muslims are engaging in the climate justice issues and beginning to see how protecting the living planet is an important part of our faith. 

Our values

As Muslims, we have a duty of custodianship over the Earth and its resources. It is said that Allah made the human race his khalif (trustee) of the earth. The Prophet Muhammad said: “The world is green and beautiful and Allah has left you in charge of it, so be careful of how you conduct yourselves”.  

At Islamic Relief UK, where I work as campaigns co-ordinator, custodianship is one of our key values and it is integral to how we operate as development and humanitarian practitioners.

Not only do we have custodianship of the Earth, but also of the trust placed in us by our supporters to be accountable and transparent to the communities we serve. We work in countries that are hit hardest by extreme weather events, like Somalia – frequently affected by drought – and Bangladesh – often affected by floods. It would be disingenuous to support these communities in their mitigation and adaptation projects while carrying on business-as-usual in a society largely responsible for the climate crisis.

Many of our supporters among the British Muslim community have relatives in some of these countries and are starting to understand the severity of the climate emergency. For example, there is a clear connection between the way we live in the industrialised world and people’s grandparents back in Bangladesh moving from place to place because of rising water levels.

My own Nana lives in Pakistan and when I look at her life – which would be considered ‘poor’ or ‘deprived’ by many in the West – I think of how much more sustainable it is than my own. She and her family grow all their own vegetables and rear their own livestock. Everything they live on comes from their own land – they don’t rely on out of season food wrapped in plastic and flown in from the other side of the world; or livestock from other continents that could be reared right where they live.

When my parents moved to the UK, they thought they were progressing, but our consumerist lifestyle and our reliance on fossil fuels is creating a crisis that will only force humanity and our life expectancy backwards.

Holy pilgrimage

I have never been on holy pilgrimage to Mecca, or Hajjas it is known by our community. But it is a key tenant of the Muslim faith, and every Muslim from the UK to Indonesia is expected to do it at least once in their lifetime, if they are physically and financially able to do so. Like many of my peers, I have spent my life looking forward to taking part.

However, recent research from scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) shows that due to extreme temperatures, conditions in Mecca are getting more and more dangerous for human health. 

Through the analysis of historical climate models and past data, scientists project that should the world’s emissions continue in a business-as-usual scenario, temperatures in Mecca will soon rise to a level that the human body can no longer cope with. 

According to the research, summer days in Saudi Arabia could surpass the ‘extreme danger heat-stress threshold’ from as early as next year. When the temperature of our skin reaches this level, and combines with a certain level of humidity in the air, sweat no longer evaporates efficiently, so the body can no longer cool itself and overheats. 

But crucially, mitigating climate breakdown through reducing emissions could limit the severity of these temperatures. It is up to us as Muslims to make it as safe as possible for us and future generations to be able to practice Hajj. 

That doesn’t mean we’re only interested in tackling climate change so we can fulfil our religious obligations. Not at all. We are interested for the sake of all humanity.

Global strike

In June, Islamic Relief staff and campaigners marched to Parliament to lobby our MPs to take the crisis seriously. On Saturday 14 September, one of our brilliant young activists, Munadiah Aftab, spoke to an audience of two hundred about the link between her faith and the climate at the UK Youth Climate Takeover. 

On Friday 20 September, Islamic Relief staff will be getting up from our desks, leaving our offices in London and marching up to Trafalgar Square to join the #FridaysForFuture global climate strikes inspired by Greta Thunberg and other school strikers across the world. Colleagues in other offices will be joining – from Birmingham to Germany.

This is the first time as an organisation that we have fully backed and are joining a strike. 

Persuading people was no doddle. But the news about Hajj was a wake-up call for many and I have already noticed a shift in the way people are talking about the climate crisis and what it means for them and their families. 

On 20 September, we will march to Trafalgar Square where we will gather with other faith-based groups from the Faith for Climate network, including Christian Aid and CAFOD, showing  that people of all faiths and none can, and should, work together to tackle climate breakdown – the most pressing issue the world has ever faced. 

Net Zero

But what is our aim of the strike, you might ask?

In June, former Prime Minister Theresa May committed to ensuring our greenhouse gas emissions reach Net Zero by 2050. We don’t think this is adequate for the scale of the emergency the world is facing. We want the UK Government to bring this target forward to 2045 and immediately outline the specifics of their plans to achieve Net Zero through legislation. 

With increasing political uncertainty in this country, we are asking people to do what they can in their own lives. Making a stand by leaving work and going on strike will hopefully spark a conversation with colleagues about the severity of the climate crisis. But there are other things we can do in our daily lives: reduce car travel and flights; reduce meat and dairy consumption; say no to plastic. 

There is nobody on this earth who will escape the impacts of the climate crisis. I am pleased that the British Muslim community is taking action, and we hope that the COP26 summit in Glasgow next year will give us even more opportunity to make our voices heard.

We all have a stake in the climate emergency. There really is no Planet B.

The Author

Maria Zafar is campaigns and community mobilisation co-ordinator at Islamic Relief UK. She is passionate about social and climate justice.

Image: Floods in Pakistan, where Islamic Relief works. Asian Development Bank. 

Grassroots campaign group Labour for a Green New Deal have taken aim at airport sponsorship at Labour Party Conference in a statement released today, following their announcement of a protest against BP’s presence at the annual gathering in Brighton.

Labour for a Green New Deal called for Labour members to boycott events sponsored by Heathrow and Gatwick airports at the Party’s conference in September, and for “the Party as a whole to reconsider its relationship to corporate bosses at conference.”

The full statement read: “Labour for a Green New Deal is deeply disappointed to see Heathrow, City and Gatwick airports sponsoring events at Labour Party Conference, including with Sadiq Khan”.

Boycott events

The statement goes on to argue that: “Labour is rightly in favour of a dramatic reduction in emissions, not only to protect the natural world but as a necessary act of solidarity with the working class across the world, above all in the Global South, who suffer the devastating impacts of climate breakdown.

“Opposition to airport expansion should be as natural to the Labour Party and Labour politicians as support for new green jobs and a worker-led just transition. Just as we protest fossil fuel companies’ presence on conference fringe, so too do we condemn events with airport bosses intent on profit at the expense of the working class our party seeks to represent.

“We urge party members to boycott these events, and the Party as a whole to reconsider its relationship to corporate bosses at conference. We need a party conference for the many, not the few.”

The statement comes after Labour for a Green New Deal called a protest of the New Statesman’s event with BP at Labour Party Conference. BP is also hosting a stall inside the conference zone.

Climate criminals 

Noga Levy-Rapoport, a youth striker and spokesperson for Labour for a Green New Deal, said: “Airport expansion and further fossil fuel extraction are totally incompatible with Labour’s ambition to combat the climate emergency and keep global temperature rises beneath 1.5c.

“The fact is that these airports primarily serve the needs of a wealthy minority, with just 15% of the population taking 70 percent of UK flights, just as BP’s drilling enriches its executives at the grave expense of working-class people around the globe.

“Party members would rather have a Green New Deal which would make invest in cheap or free, high-quality transport linking up the country.

“We can’t allow environmentally destructive businesses free reign to use our party conference as a ground for lobbying and greenwashing. Labour Conference must no longer be a safe space for climate criminals.”

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from Labour for a Green New Deal. 

Ronaldo Golez, Mayor of Dumangas in the Philippines, is not a shy man but he is modest, especially  considering the challenges that he and his town of 70,000 are facing.

The Philippines and Dumangas would not normally be associated with desertification and drought, but throughout six months of the year the city experiences drought, and for the other six months, floods. Typhoons are also a common occurrence. 

How can he govern, adapt and prosper in this new climatic scenario with such optimism?  I spoke to him about urban and rural linkages during the Local Governments Day event at the recent United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification COP14. He said: “The key is land use. You see, we collaborate with local communities on land use maps and this is critical for developing a better relationship between urban and rural areas”. 

Unsustainable agriculture 

Dumangas is not alone in experiencing climatic change in a city due to the impact of changing weather patterns.

In Nepal for example, rainfall happens in March-April rather than in June-July, preventing the growth of crops and putting food security is at stake.

Ahmed Aziz Diallo, Mayor of Dori in Burkina Faso, tells us: “We experience climate change in our daily lives. We breathe climate change”. Deforestation and unsustainable agricultural practices have increased desertification, land degradation and drought.

Young people left in the rural areas no longer have any opportunities; there’s not enough access to education, healthcare and reasonable lifestyles. There are often visionary entrepreneurs that, due to a lack of any other opportunities become an easy target for terrorist organisations to recruit, not because they follow their ideology, but because of a lack of choices.

Some people end up migrating to cities, leaving behind the elderly and vulnerable, and exemplifying one of the biggest challenges of uncontrolled urbanisation: rural-urban migration.

Unofficial slums

There is much to say about the role of intermediate and secondary towns in holding the rural population away from the mega cities, but secondary infrastructure roads are also important. 

Rural-urban migration for better opportunities in cities is creating informal settlements on the urban outskirts. Gunda Prakash Rao, Mayor of Greater Warangal in India, shared his experiences of trying to assist one million citizens living in 93 slums in his city.

I asked Rao, “How do you that?” he replied: “You see 93 slums are the slums officially recognised by the government. We have in fact 183 slums in total, the remaining 90 with 300,000 inhabitants are not recognised by the government”.

1.3 million inhabitants living in 183 slums in one city is something that I find difficult to comprehend. Legalisation of informal settlements might be a solution to this problem, as A. Mahendra and C. K. Seto have pointed out in a working paper. 

Peri-urban areas have become the focal point of rural – urban migration stories, acting as connectors between rural areas and cities and places where we can, hopefully, change a paradigm.

Informal settlements 

Informal settlements upgrading without the provision of jobs is no longer a viable option – it is also no longer a story about aesthetics and the provision of low-cost housing, as this is simply not sufficient.

Economic diversification, can ideally be achieved here by sustainable resources management and the circular economy.  The ILO expects global employment growth services and waste management to create up to 45 million jobs in total.

There is also a role for local and regional governments, as candidly explained by Emani Kumar, Deputy Secretary General of ICLEI, which has in its network 1,750 cities from over one hundred and twenty countries. The local and regional governments are implementors of national policies because they are closer to the local communities – decentralisation has a very important role to play.

Policy recommendations 

It was a great privilege to be engaged by the UNCCD to produce ‘Rural – Urban Dynamics Policy Recommendations’ as part of the Global Land Outlook Second Edition Advanced Working Paper.

Research on the policy took me back to 1992 and the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, the Earth Summit and Agenda 21, which in fact points out solutions for the urban and rural continuum. Where did we go wrong in twenty-seven years of international dialogues and conceptual frameworks?

Perhaps the conceptual framework that separates cities and hinterlands needs to change. It might be that the fragmented approach to sustainability can impact on thinking and result in organisational silos, which in turn prevents a more uniform approach to city planning and governance. 

The paper offers a holistic review of relationships between rural and urban areas. It attempts to identify contemporary challenges that are encountered by both habitats and seeks to provide a variety of solutions to these challenges.

To effectively address the complexity of issues between rural areas and cities, the analysis is structured thematically around five ‘capitals’ – natural, human, social, manufactured and financial –  to enable the implementation of holistic approaches.  

Special focus is given to a possible way forward aimed at greater integration of rural and urban areas through sustainable land management to prevent productive land loss through the Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) Framework. 

Holistic approach

The paper identifies a diverse range of co-dependencies between rural and urban areas: ranging from food and water security, poverty alleviation, globalisation and migrations, governance and land regulations, affordable housing, land degradation and livelihood strategies in peri-urban areas, to sustainable resources management and circular economy opportunities.

This holistic approach may the answer to what Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of UNCCD, stated in his special address during Land and Regional Government Day: “We need to find a new development paradigm that is working for all,” using land as an agent for change.

His words on social inclusion were reiterated by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who during the Opening Ceremony of the High Level Segment of COP14 concluded his speech with a suggestion that we need to change our thinking about a sustainable development paradigm and replace “me” with “we” in order to come up with a prosperous model of society. 

In the meantime, the mayors Dumangas, Dori and Warangal are doing extraordinary work in extraordinary circumstances, delivering on many Sustainable Development Goals, but above all on the SDG13 – Climate Action.

I have learnt from them that doing business as usual is no longer enough.  

This Author 

Dr Sandra Piesik is an architect and a researcher specialising in technology development and transfer. She is the founder of Habitat Coalition and a director of 3 ideas Ltd, UNCCD policy support consultant on Rural-Urban Dynamics, and a stakeholder in several UNFCCC and UN-HABITAT initiatives. She is the author of Arish: Palm-Leaf Architecture, and the editor of HABITAT: Vernacular Architecture for a Changing Planet, both published by Thames and Hudson. 

The Local and Regional Governments Day took place on 7 September 2019 during the UNCCD COP14 and was co-organised by the UNCCD Secretariat, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability and the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change Government of India.

Image: Thar Desert, India © contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2017), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.