The Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South requests the Colombian government to convene, organize and carry out a World Climate Summit of Mother Earth, in the year 2023 in Colombia.
The request was made in a letter to the Colombian government, while notifying journalists on it on Saturday.
The request was deemed necessary by the group after observing that for more than two years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the catastrophic consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there have been an emergence of a “new normal”.
The letter reads in parts, “This new global status quo reflects a worsening of multiple crises: social, economic, political, ecological, health and geopolitical.
“Environmental collapse is drawing near and daily life, globally, has increasingly become militarized. Access to good food, clean water, and affordable healthcare has become even more restricted.
“More governments have become autocratic; the super-rich have become richer and more polluting, the powerful more powerful, and unregulated technology has accelerated these destructive trends.
“The drivers of this unjust status quo—capitalism, patriarchy, racism, colonialism, predatory relationships with nature, and various fundamentalisms—are aggravating the situation, escalating it to highly dangerous levels. We need profound changes, but they will not come from the current multilateral architecture.
“Social inequalities have worsened and CO2 emissions continue to rise. In the name of “energy security”, the European Union has enabled all kinds of dirty energy, which has further emboldened extractivist governments in the North and South to deepen maldevelopment programs, thus continuing their steady race towards planetary ecocide.
“Faced with this scenario, we must urgently debate and implement new visions that enable fair transitions and ecosocial transformations that are gender-based, regenerative and popular, at a local, national, regional and international scale.
“Furthermore, as we stated in the Manifesto for a Just and Popular Energy Transition of the Peoples of the South, the problems of Latin America and the rest of the Global South are different from those of the Global North and emerging powers like China. An imbalance of power between these two spheres not only persists because of a colonial legacy but has been deepened by a neocolonial global economy.
“Faced with climate change, growing demand for energy and the loss of biodiversity, the capitalist centers have increased their pressure to extract natural wealth, based on cheap labor from countries on the periphery.”
“We have to start from this recognition of the situation and therefore offer a creative and transformative counterproposal from the Peoples of the South. We have an enormous diversity of resistances, territories and peoples in struggle that are building concrete experiences of transition and socio-ecological transformation.
“We also have relevant alliances and articulations on various fronts. However, we lack broader spaces for convergence, which allow us to debate, act together, and agree on a shared roadmap.
“We don’t have to start from scratch. There are precedents in our region. In 2010, the World Conference of Peoples on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, or Tiquipaya summit, was held in Bolivia. No doubt, this event was the outgrowth of factors such as the accumulated organizational experience of the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre since 2001, the successful experience at the IV Summit of the Americas, held in Mar del Plata, in 2005, which concluded with the “No to FTAA”, and the failure of the COP in Copenhagen in 2009.
Unfortunately, the proposals and programs that came out of that summit did not have an international impact, not only due to geopolitical asymmetries, but also due to the weakness and features of the prevailing progressive regimes, chiefly, the continuation and deepening of extractivist policies.
“Likewise, we welcome and support the possibility of holding a summit of presidents linked to the protection of the Amazon. In this sense, we consider of utmost importance to promote in this space mechanisms that support the proposals emanating from the organizations that care for the Amazon, especially indigenous organizations and pan-Amazonian articulations, in order to save these territories for life.”
