In a decision that reverses the position taken by the Bush administration in 2007, when the U.S. voted against endorsing the declaration even as 145 nations supported it, the Obama Administration acknowledged the importance of this decision, which Indigenous, human rights and environmental organizations and activists in the U.S. have been working towards for over 30 years.

At the White House Tribal Nations Summit, Obama said, “The aspirations [UNDRIP] affirms, including the respect for the institutions and rich cultures of Native peoples, are ones we must always seek to fulfill. . . I want to be clear: what matters far more than words, what matters far more than any resolution or declaration, are actions to match those words.”

So by lending its support to UNDRIP, just what kind of actions can we expect the U.S. to take? That remains to be seen. As Indigenous rights organization Cultural Survival points out, Obama said that the White House would release an official statement on the declaration, and until that statement is released it will be difficult to know whether his endorsement is qualified, as were those of New Zealand and Canada, or a full-fledged endorsement of UNDRIP core principles, which include:

• The right of Indigenous Peoples to live on and use their traditional territories;
• The right to self-determination;
• The right to free, prior, and informed consent (known as FPIC) before any outside project is undertaken on their land;
• The right to keep their languages, cultural practices, and sacred places;
• The right to full government services;
• And the right to be recognized and treated as peoples.

Let’s hope for a full endorsement of these principles and “actions to match.” As many Indigenous leaders are saying, the U.S. supporting UNDRIP is something to celebrate, but much work remains to be done.

After its adoption in 2007 by the UN General Assembly, UNDRIP was heralded around the world by Indigenous Peoples, states, human rights and environmental organizations. Its provisions provide much needed guidance to governments, state institutions and society as a whole on how human rights laws and obligations can be best understood and applied to the distinct circumstances and the urgent needs of 370 million Indigenous People around the world.

First Nations across Canada pushed for the formal endorsement of UNDRIP as an important step towards the country improving its record on Indigenous rights.

RAN supported these efforts through a $1,250 grant to Defenders of the Land, a network of Indigenous communities and activists involved in land rights struggles across Canada.

Toronto demonstration on eve of G20 meetings

The grant supported the organizing of a national day of action to shine a spotlight on the country’s continued policy to remove First Nations’ control over their land and resource base, with the demand that Canada endorse UNDRIP and recognize Indigenous communities’ right to self-determination. Thousands participated, resulting in coverage from all of the major media outlets in Canada and some stories in the international press as well.

Canada’s endorsement of UNDRIP is an important first step towards addressing the demands put forth by First Nations. It also leaves the US in the shameful position of being the only country to remain in opposition to universally recognized Indigenous rights.

However, the US is currently undergoing a review and consultation process to determine whether or not to reverse its position from 2007 (as the other 3 countries that initially voted against the Declaration already have done).

Its well past time for the US to catch up with the rest of the world on this critical human rights issue. Ask President Obama to endorse the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples today!

Today I was struck even more by corporations trying to capitalize on Earth Day to green their images. As Becky Tarbotton observed in the Huffington Post, the New York Times summarized the situation well: “So strong was the antibusiness sentiment for the first Earth Day in 1970 that organizers took no money from corporations and held teach-ins ‘to challenge corporate and government leaders’… Forty years later, the day has turned into a premier marketing platform for selling a variety of goods and services, like office products, Greek yogurt and eco-dentistry.”

Photo by Diana Pei Wu

Against this backdrop, World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba today is a breath of fresh air.

The Indigenous Environmental Network celebrated today by explaining that “this morning Bolivian President Evo Morales was joined by representatives of 90 governments and several Heads of State to receive the findings of the conference on topics such as a Climate Tribunal, Climate Debt, just finance for mitigation and adaptation, agriculture, and forests. The working group on forests held one of the more hotly contested negotiations of the summit, but with the leadership of Indigenous Peoples, a consensus was reached to reject REDD and call for wide-scale grassroots reforestation programs.”

Jason Negrón-Gonzales of Movement Generation elaborated on how they do Earth Day in Cochabamba: “…from now I’ll be talking to my children and 2010 will be remembered as the year that Earth Day took on new meaning. It will be the year that humanity turned a corner in our relationship to Mother Earth and began struggling along a new course…more than politics, the conference in Cochabamba brought to the table humanity’s relationship with Pachamama. This question, raised most pointedly by the Indigenous communities present, was reflected in the project of creating a declaration of Mother Earth Rights, but also went way beyond it. Can we really reach a sustainable relationship with the Earth unless we stop looking at it as something to be conquered or fixed that is outside of us? How would it change our lives and our struggles if we thought, as Leonardo Boff of Brazil said, ‘Todo lo que existe merece existir, y todo lo que vive merece vivir (Everything that exists deserves to exist, and everything that lives deserves to live)’? Or if we understood the Earth as a living thing that we are a part of and that, ‘La vida es un momento de la tierra, y la vida humana un momento de la vida (Life is a moment of the earth, and the human life is a moment of life)’?”

Photo by Diana Pei Wu

And the politics do matter. The cross-pollination of grassroots social movements in Bolivia are charting a course and global program that articulates both an analysis of the state of play of the United Nations negotiations as well as a set of solutions moving forward. Jason helped outline the core points of the ABC’s of the Climate Negotiations distilled from analysis coming out of the Cochabamba conference:

1. The key question (aside from decreasing emissions) in negotiations is how to divide up the atmospheric space left for emissions given that the US and other developed countries already used up most of the space that there was for greenhouse gas emissions. This then leads to the obvious follow-up question of whether or not the same countries that overused already should get the overwhelming share of what’s left. The obvious answer that most children would tell you is that no – that isn’t fair, or for that matter, just or equitable. Yet when a country like the US says it can’t or won’t cut emissions to the level it demands of others, that’s what happens.

2. Many countries in the Global South, and certainly the Bolivian government, believe that when developed countries like the US need to decrease their emissions that we should do it domestically, in US industries and the US economy, instead of creating carbon markets that let the US pollute away while paying someone else to decrease for them. This makes sense because history has shown that the projects that are supposed to “offset” emissions in the US or EU are often dubious, or might have happened anyway, or cause other problems for the people who live where they are happening (like with dams).

3. Regardless of the above points, the rich nations pushing the current arena of international negotiations are not seeking to get industrialized countries to decrease their own emissions by their fare share. Right now there are two competing options for a global framework to address climate change– a backroom deal the US is trying to move called the Copenhagen Accord, and the continuation of the international negotiations that have been happening according to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process since the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997. You read that right. The US-backed “Copenhagen Accord” has no relationship to the ongoing global negotiations process. As Angelica Navarro, one of the UN climate negotiators from Bolivia told the story, “It (the Copenhagen Accord) was given to us and we were told we had an hour to decide if we would support it enough. How are we supposed to make a decision about the future of the earth in an hour?”

4. The Kyoto Protocol, adopted through the UNFCCC as the global plan to set targets and mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in 1997 has lots of well documented problems: a carbon market has allowed developed countries to avoid making real reductions to their emissions, a “clean development mechanism” which has spurred all kinds of destructive projects in the Global South, and the use of offsets which lead to continued pollution in communities of color in industrialized countries while paying projects elsewhere to cut their real or planned emissions. However, on the positive side Kyoto has: shared legal limits on emissions that are (at least prospectively) based on science; the concept of “common but differentiated responsibilities” meaning that those who have polluted the most should have a different burden than those who haven’t; exceptions for Global South countries with the intent of not restricting their development; and an enforcement mechanism if targets aren’t met.

5. The Copenhagen Accord, on the other hand, has: voluntary limits set by each country, no process to reconcile or pressure countries that offer less regardless of responsibility, no enforcement, continued carbon markets with offsets, etc., and an overall target set not by what science says in necessary, but only representing the total of what all the countries offer up. A study done by the EU estimated that if the Copenhagen Accord was approved with the existing commitments by countries it would optimistically only decrease emissions by 2%, probably locking us into a 3.9 degree Celsius temperature increase globally (this comes from a recent MIT study) – which would be a serious disaster.

Just as companies are using Earth Day to green their images, the Copenhagen Accord was an attempt to pretend a lot more is being done than it really is. It gets worse. This Earth Day comes on the heels of the leaked U.S. Government document trying to “Reinforce the perception that the US is constructively engaged in UN negotiations in an effort to produce a global regime to combat climate change,” “managing expectations” of the UN Climate talks in order to undercut critics. Though the story has predictably gotten little attention in the U.S., the 40th anniversary of Earth Day is framed by extremes filling my email inbox: the predatory opportunism of corporations and some governments on one side, and real solutions proposed by Indigenous groups and other front-line communities on the other. Today, I’m grateful for the 15,000 people making history down south.

To keep up with the summit:

For photos and video, check out Diana Pei Wu’s site.

Global Justice Ecology Project’s Climate Connections Blog

Evelyn Rangel-Medina of Ella Baker Center

Check the Weather

Grassroots Global Justice Alliance

Indigenous Environmental Network

World People’s Conference on Climate Change

Carwil James’ Blog, Carwil Without Borders

Bolivia Rising Blog

Twitter hashtags to follow: #cochabamba, #wpccc, #cmpcc, #climatejustice, #climate

African negotiators at the U.N. climate talks in Barcelona just refused to continue formal discussions about all other issues until wealthy countries live up to their legal and moral responsibility to commit to deep emissions reductions. Rich countries (also called “Annex 1 countries”) have ground negotiations to a halt by failing to agree their new targets under the Kyoto Protocol (KP), driving developing countries to put their feet down. This walkout is significant and opens up political space – it means many of the countries in Africa just stopped one half of the UN climate negotiation process until rich countries say how much they will reduce their carbon.

We’re down to the wire: just four negotiating days left before the big agreement in Copenhagen is supposed to go down. Its day one, and we saw just a taste of the breakdowns to come. While rich countries continue to undermine commitments for the Kyoto Protocol (one of two negotiating tracks for Copenhagen which is supposed to be renewed for a second commitment period of Annex 1 targets), the spin has already taken hold: they’re blaming Africa for their own delay-mongering. Oy vey.

In response, movement and civil society organizations held a demonstration at the U.N. building in support of African delegates’ insistence that developed countries commit to new, strong binding targets. Delegates and observers were invited to join a human shield against the killing of Kyoto targets (complete with an Annex 1 grim reaper) and instead urged to promote at least 40% emission reductions with no offsets by 2020.

Kamese Geoffrey of NAPE/ Friends of the Earth Uganda warned, “Rich countries are attempting to dodge their legal and moral responsibilities to reduce emissions. Developing countries and communities have historically had practically no fault in the creation of climate change, yet they will be the first to face the devastating impacts of climate change.”

Many of us have longstanding criticisms of the Kyoto Protocol, particularly its market mechanisms. But here’s why Kyoto is important:

It contains a few core provisions and basic justice frameworks that the U.S. and other Annex 1 countries are trying to avoid.

1) Compliance. This means the international community evaluates whether or not you’ve come through on your commitments, and they are set to a specific time period.

2) Overall targets (aka top-down target setting). This means the international community decides what the targets for C02 reduction are, and then divide up responsibilities accordingly. Equity and science decide. The U.S. wants the opposite – each country consulting with industry to see what it thinks it can muster, and then we just see where we land.

3) “Common but differentiated responsibilities.” This is the most important framework to save. It means that the industrialized countries caused the problem of global warming, and the Global South is dealing with the worst of the impacts first (droughts, floods, famines, hurricanes, etc are all hitting the equator now in ways that will only come to the rest of the world later). In order for the Global South to reduce emissions, they need finance and technology from industrialized countries or else we are robbing them of their right to develop – there just isn’t space for everyone to follow the North’s dirty development path. “Ecological debt” is one way to think about it. This is the most basic framework of justice, which is what people mean when they say “the North must lead” and why the idea that both Annex 1 and G77 countries “need to act together” is actually a deeply corrupt and unjust framework.

The idea that we can somehow replace a legally binding instrument with a voluntary pledge system is insanity. In 1997 when the KP was first ratified, it had been watered down tremendously in the hopes of getting the U.S. to sign. The U.S. didn’t sign (though it remains party to the convention). Yet under the Bali Action Plan, agreed to in December 2007, the US is required to take on comparable efforts to other Annex 1 countries under the KP – which means that in theory, the rest of the world could continue the KP, and the U.S. would have to come along whether it signs or not. Instead, we’ve seen a race to the bottom – other Annex 1 countries hiding behind U.S. inaction and refusal to sign, claiming the world cannot make an agreement without the U.S. on board.

So the shit is hitting the fan. And Africa isn’t taking it. We should applaud their courage, and be skeptical anytime the media tries to shift the blame for the breakdown of negotiations onto G77 countries. Make no mistake, these talks have been polluted by self interested corporations and governments, and all roads lead back to Annex 1 (and the U.S. in particular).

It’s a myth that Kyoto expires in 2012 – only the first commitment period of Annex 1 greenhouse gas emission reductions ends. We need to support the basic frameworks of a legally binding treaty, and need to ensure there is a KP second commitment period. Period.

Today marked one of the final days of the Bangkok UN Climate Negotiations. With the end of this intersessional in sight, the International Youth Delegation (IYD) has officially declared “No Confidence” in the road to Copenhagen.

With youth delegates from over 30 countries engaging in the Bangkok process, the IYD cited pathetically weak targets from the North, alarm that a second commitment period in the Kyoto Protocol will not be secured, and a lack of guarantees for protection of Indigenous peoples’ rights and interests, in its Declaration. The current text of the draft climate deal is so weak and so full of “false solutions” (measures like offsetting that actually make the problem worse) it is unacceptable.

Youth delegates representing each continent addressed the U.N. today, detailing the urgency of the crisis as it affects their communities currently, telling stories of their hope and organizing alongside their denunciation of the state of play in the UN Negotiations.

This week the Annex 1 (rich countries), attempted to kill the Kyoto Protocol (KP). We are nearing upon the end of the current KP term, and a lack of renewing it means that the world would lose the few legally binding international climate agreements it has (as insufficient as they are). The excuse is that the United States will not sign, and therefore the whole thing should be scrapped and an entirely new deal can be struck on its own. It is lunacy to think that this will yield a stronger outcome, and the G77 (the rest of the world) countries are furious. We have always known the US wont sign the KP; the world cannot continue to wait for the US to get on board. In Bali, the U.S. already committed to setting comparable targets to other Annex 1 countries, so the world could deal with the U.S. in the LCA (Long Term Cooperative Action).

This all amounts to a shell game: more dirty delaying tactics from self-interested countries who are content to strip away basic attempts at an international agreement (for example “compliance” – meaning that the U.S. would have international oversight of its targets, or “top-down target setting” – meaning the international community sets carbon targets together based on science, rather than each countries independently setting their targets based on what their fossil fuel extraction industries dictate).

Allowing the U.S. to drag the world out of existing legal obligations is disgraceful. These negotiations are going backwards.

Make no mistake: Our future is being held hostage to interests that have consistently thumbed their noses at the international community and their obligations to the rest of the world. This process has been polluted by self-interested corporations and nations looking to profit off of our crisis. They have been pushing false solutions that exacerbate rather than fix the problem. Not only are the targets set by rich countries weak, but they are deceptive. Rather than representing actual emissions reductions, they contain unacceptable proportions of offsets, which do not reduce emissions, and displace the burden back onto the developing countries of the world.

In the meantime, further language on Indigenous Rights is being removed and diluted from the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) text. “Rights” are being defined as “right to participate,” as opposed to “rights over land and communities”, and existing UN language (such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples or UNDRIP, and the principles of Free Prior and Informed Consent or FPIC) is far from being adopted. This has led to major protests all week and this morning youth supported the Indigenous Caucus in a “No Rights?? No REDD!!” demonstration on the front steps of the U.N.

The youth will not accept a dirty deal.

Rights-based language in the text (including UNDRIP and FPIC), no offsets, limiting global temperatures to 1.5 degrees C and 350 ppm of c02, unconditional legally binding targets for Annex 1 countries of at least 40% reductions by 2020, and a LOT of money for adaptation and technology transfer are just some of the baseline components that must be in the text to even begin to sensibly move forward. Regardless of what governments decide, youth across the world are continuing to organize social movements to build meaningful solutions in their own communities, working on local, national, and international levels. Our hope for the future is in the power of civil society to reshape what is perceived as politically possible.

See the video of the press conference here:

Flooding in the Philippines yesterday displaced over 600,000 people. As if we didn’t need more of an urgent call to solve the climate crisis.

Increased intensity of flooding is among one of the may well-documented impacts of global warming. The implications have hit our organizing here at the UN in Bangkok too – as some activists had to go to support their families amidst crisis.

But Filipino groups are still here in full force, emboldened to call for the solutions their communities need – this morning The Peasant Movement of the Philippines and the National Federation of Peasant Women in the Philippines held a demonstration in front of the United Nations Climate Change Negotiations in Bangkok.

With vivid street theater, the groups called to abandon false solutions to climate change – such as biofuels.

Demonstrators this morning said “Climate change is not only jeopardizing our future but is being used by multi-national and trans-national corporations who are the main contributors to global warming to rake in more profit from our misery…vast tracts of agricultural lands around the world are being controlled and converted by plunderers into cash-crop plantations such as biofuels and other corporate schemes that forcibly drives us out from our land.”

Their calls for climate equity in negotiations were echoed by even more demonstrators today from Jubilee South and many others, calling on rich countries to pay their ecological and climate debt to the rest of the world. Activists from Thailand, Nepal, Philippines, Malaysia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Africa, and Latin America mobilized to push Northern countries to recognize their historical and disproportionate contributions to climate change, and the disproportionate negative impacts suffered by the Global South. This concept of climate debt is increasingly gaining traction among international civil society, flipping on its head the idea of the debt owed by the South to the North from loans from international finance institutions.

As civil society groups call for financing and compensation for the averse affects of climate change for affected peoples, delegates inside the UN continue to debate on our 3rd day of the climate talks. The pressure is on, and the 600,000 people displaced in the last day only add to the urgency.

cross posted from Grist.

Coming right off the heels of the UN General Assembly in New York and the G20 in Pittsburgh, the world has taken its next step on the road to Copenhagen: the Bangkok round of negotiations for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

This morning the Thai Prime Minister opened the session by saying “There is no plan B, if we do not realize plan A, we go straight to plan F, which stands for failure.”

So, no pressure.

With an invigorated sense of skepticism, civil society, governments, and of course business interests are here to try to hammer through obtuse and contradictory text to create something that can be of some use on the table at the Copenhagen meetings this December.

The UN press office was quick to hand me a defensive-sounding media release stating ‘Negotiations set to pick up in Bangkok as a result of New York Climate Change Summit’ – hoping to put a positive spin on the process. Sure, the New York summit yielded lots of big talk about Climate – unfortunately very little in the way of meaningful targets and commitments, as pointed out (to much applause) by a Sudanese delegate this morning.

The reality of the US being able to meaningfully commit is grim, as illustrated by the statement released by John Podesta and Rajendra Pachauri, this Friday. Despite Obama talking a good game (which in itself is a welcome departure from the Bush years), he still failed to put forward any details. Hopes previously pinned on Obama have been deflated by stalled domestic legislation that NASA’s Dr. James Hansen said, if implemented “would do more harm to the environment than nothing at all.”

On the flip side, many people here in Bangkok have been encouraged by China’s announcement at the NY summit that it is increasing commitments on carbon reduction. We all know though, that responsibility to lead with these negotiations lies on the global North to make bolder and serious commitments. India and China are moving, and the classic US approach trying to pin blame on them is increasingly seen as excuse-mongering even to those who may have bought the line before.

From where we stand now, it looks like Copenhagen will be a greenwash. But civil society here in Bangkok is not taking this as a moment to despair but as a higher call to action for just and equitable mechanisms to meet meaningful targets. Peoples movements and activist networks from across the globe are taking this opportunity to build and organize, invigorating local solutions back home, regardless of what ends up on the negotiating table. And so we keep pushing. If we temper our ambition along with our expectations, governments will feel more emboldened to backslide and allow the treaty to be an industry giveaway. Lets keep pressure up.

Here’s an inspiring quickie of organizers in the United States working for community based solutions to the climate crisis:

We are everywhere.