No to backtracking and delaying!

The letter below expresses the anger and unhappiness of many Africans at talk of a 'new mandate' at COP17. It is currently being circulated for signature by organisations, and will be handed over tomorrow. (Signatures - of organisations but not of individuals - can be added by emailing greeder@coa.edu.)

No Durban mandate for the great escape

As African civil society, social movements and international allies, we reject the call of many developed countries for a so-called “Durban mandate” to launch new negotiations for a future climate framework.

A new mandate for a new treaty in place of the Kyoto Protocol should be understood for what it really is – rich countries backtracking and reneging on “inconvenient” obligations, at the expense of the poor and the planet. While developed countries may appear progressive by asking for a mandate to negotiate a new legally binding treaty, the truth is that this is nothing but a veiled attempt to kill the Kyoto Protocol and escape from their further mitigation obligations under the already existing mandate in the Protocol itself, and the agreement in 2005 for negotiating further emission cuts. A political declaration to continue the KP is, in practice, another nail in its coffin. Anything less than a formal legal amendment and ratification process, will deliver an empty shell of the Kyoto Protocol.

Agreeing to a new mandate would mean action is effectively delayed for five to ten years. A new treaty will take several years to negotiate with several more years needed for ratification. Further, there is no assurance that countries that have repudiated the existing legal architecture, like the United States, will agree to or ratify a new agreement, nor that such agreement will not be a weak and ineffective “pledge and review” system.

Developed countries must urgently scale up the ambition of their emission reduction targets. As the latest reports by the International Energy Agency make clear, deep emission cuts are needed now to have a realistic chance of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C. Current emission reduction pledges will lead us to a world that is 5°C warmer. For Africa, this means 7 or 8°C of warming and unimaginable human suffering. This is why a pledge-based approach with weak review rules, instead of the Kyoto Protocol’s approach of legally binding commitments and international rules that give meaning to these commitments, is completely insufficient to ensure the necessary emission cuts.

While many developed countries condition any further action, including fulfilling their legally binding obligations to a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, on greater action by emerging economies, developing country pledges already far outweigh pledges by developed countries. In fact, with accounting loopholes and the use of carbon markets, developed countries could make no net contribution to reducing emissions by 2020.

While many developed countries seek to end the Kyoto Protocol, they simultaneously attempt to retain and expand their favored elements of the Kyoto Protocol, like the CDM, in a new agreement and shift their responsibilities onto developing countries. Without legally binding emission reductions under the Kyoto Protocol, developed countries must not be allowed to have access to the carbon markets. Further, with the price of carbon crashing, paltry emissions reductions pledges from developed countries, there is no rationale for the continuation of the CDM or the creation of new market mechanisms.

Developed countries must scale up their ambition and stop blaming other countries who have contributed far less to the climate crisis, yet are taking on more aggressive action. Developing countries are living up to their promises made in Bali, while developed countries are attempting to re-write the rules of the game to avoid meeting their obligations.

Developed countries are also denying developing countries the necessary finances and technology to address the climate crisis. The provision of finance from developed to developing countries is an obligation in and of itself. It must not be used as a bargaining chip in the Durban negotiations, nor should it be dangled in front of poor countries as a bribe to get agreement for a very bad mitigation deal. The same applies to the operationalization of the Green Climate Fund. Success in Durban depends on the Green Climate Fund not being an empty, ineffective shell.

We will not accept a “Durban mandate” or any outcome that locks in the current low ambition and inaction for many years, and condemns billions of people in Africa and across the world to suffer the worst impacts of a warming world.

Signed by:

Africa Trade Network

Alternative Information Development Centre

Democratic Left Front

Friends of the Earth International

groundWork, Friends of the Earth, South Africa

Jubilee South (Asia Pacific)

Pan African Climate Justice Alliance

Rural Women’s Alliance

South Durban Community Environmental Alliance

Southern African Faith Communities' Environment Institute

Third World Network

Trust for Community Outreach and Education

Give the earth her due

Captions: Energy is the key to South African protests; the thick blue line;
Natlie greene's impassioned plea; the Engen oil refinery with houses in the background.

The sharp end of fossil fuel use is felt in the South Durban Basin, nicknamed ‘cancer valley’. This is not just one of the most polluted places in South Africa, it’s one of the worst in the world – and it’s just a twenty minute drive from where the so-called Conference of Polluters (COP17, the 17^th Conference of the Parties) is taking place.

South Durban is where 80% of the imported crude oil in South Africa is refined, at Sapref (jointly owned by Shell and BP) and the Engen refinery which has had a number of fires, the latest in October 2011.

More than a quarter of a million people (mostly blue-collar) live all around these refineries and other polluting industries, including a paper mill – 150 smoke stack industries in all. About 15 years ago, locals started to campaign around the issue of the health impacts they were experiencing – more than half the children in local schools suffer from asthma, for example, while cancer is far too common. (Bobby Peek, one of the founding fathers of activism in this region, grew up playing rugby on a field close to the Engen refinery. Four of his team-mates have since died of cancer. If you live here, research has shown, you are 250 times more likely than residents elsewhere to get cancer.)

The South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) won some notable victories, pressurising the authorities to create a local system monitoring and regulating air quality – sadly, this year the staff complement was cut by half, so the activist now use the ‘Bucket Brigade’, a cost-effective system which enables them to sample the air themselves (it gets sent to California for independent testing – the results show massive readings of nasties like benzene, methanol, sulphides and jujst about every chemical you can think of, some of which can readily be smelt in the air). Today, under the guidance of another long-term local activist, Desmond D’Sa, a group of COP17 visitors took what the SDCEA calls ‘the Toxic Tour’ to see houses cheek-by-jowl with massive refineries and stacks belching smoke. We can smell rich whiffs of pungent stuff, and Desmond tells us it’s worse at night.

The tour was followed the whole way by police who, tellingly, conferred with members of the refineries’ security staff. We ended up at the front gate of the Engen refinery, where, it turned out, we had a welcoming committee. Dozens of police, many in full riot gear, were lined up at the gates.

A protest had been planned, and activists whipped out a slew of banners to line the road.

I stepped across the road to get a picture, but was ordered back:

“Get back!”

“But I’m a journalist, I just want to get a picture…”

“Get back, that was NOT in your permit!”

Turns out he took the blue cap I and many others were wearing, with the simple slogan, ‘Unite against climate change’, to mean I was a protestor too. Which made me one of those alien creatures the police have been warmed against. At Saturday’s march, a policeman told me, “These people can be dangerous, you know,” which did seem odd at a moment when a trio of dancing, half-naked women happened to be passing… Yesterday, the waste pickers were protesting – in accordance with their permit – outside the ICC, but when they held up banners and posters, they were apparently ordered to desist – the banners and posters were ‘not in your permit’. (Surely banners and protesters are as natural a combination as love and marriage, beans and samp or cops and guns?) Control of the aliens from NGOs and civil society – fatherly but firm – has been the name of the game.

The protest was used as an occasion to publicise, on a world stage, the campaign to recognise the Rights of Mother Earth. Last year, on Earth Day, a group of 35,000 people adopted a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia. This records that Mother Earth has:

The right to live and to exist;

The right to be respected;

The right to regenerate its bio-capacity and to continue it’s vital cycles and processes free of human alteration;

The right to maintain their identity and integrity as differentiated beings, self-regulated and interrelated;

The right to water as the source of life;

The right to clean air;

The right to comprehensive health;

The right to be free of contamination and pollution, free of toxic and radioactive waste;

The right to be free of alterations or modifications of it’s genetic structure in a manner that threatens it’s integrity or vital and healthy functioning;

The right to prompt and full restoration for violations to the rights acknowledged in this Declaration caused by human activities.

This legal route, says Cormac Cullinan, a South African lawyer who helped draft the Declaration, may be the best to take to protect the environment – give Earth legal rights which can contested and enforced through the courts.

This has already happened in Ecuador, the first country in the world to enshrine these natural rights in law, says Natalie Greene, another speaker at the protest. Greene is an environmental activist with Fundación Pachamama, a group which helped rewrite that country’s constitution in 2008. A recent case in Ecuador offers an example of how such ‘Wild Law’, as Cullinan calls it, could work: “the Provincial court of Loja granted an injunction against the Provincial Government of Loja to stop dumping excavation material into the Vilcabamba river, because it violated the constitutional rights of the river to exist and maintain its vital cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes” (www.uncsd2012.org/rio20/).

By EarthSummit 2012/Rio+20 in June 2012, the aim is to present a petition containing one million signatures calling for the universal acceptance of the rights of nature. Go to www.rightsofmotherearth.com to find out how to add your name.

Call to action in health

Captions: The ever-popular Martin Khor; No South African event is complete without traditional dancers; Kumi Naidoo moved the audience; Dr Hugh Mongomery and Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi

“I doubt there is a more important group at COP17 than you,” said Professor Hugh Montgomery (a founding member of the UK Climate and Health Council and director of the University College London’s Institute for Human Health and performance). “I doubt whether I will ever give a more important talk than this one.”

He was talking to a group of delegates, observers and visitors to the 17^th Conference of the Parties running in Durban, South Africa, where governments and corporate interests are negotiating and advocating around climate change. The group comprised roleplayers in health-care worldwide, from nurses to student doctors to NGOs.

Why does he consider them so important? Healthcare professionals were referred to as a ‘sleeping giant’ during this day-long Climate and Health Summit: trusted by society as healthcare providers, they number millions around the globe and could be hugely influential, both in shifting public perceptions and swaying political interests.

The summit was held on 4 December, and organised by Health Care Without Harm, the Climate and Health Council, the World Federation of Public Health Associations, the Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine at University of KwaZulu-Natal and with help from the South African NGO groundwork, addressed.

Professor Montgomery followed South Africa’s Minister of Health Dr Aaron Motsoaledi as keynote speakers, and they as well as other speakers repeatedly spelled out a simple message, yet one that has never yet been so clearly articulated at climate change events: health is the core issue of climate change. Forget sea-level rise and tornadoes and melting ice, the images so over-used in this context: when it comes right down to it, the most important, tragic and costly impact will be on the health of humans (and of course, with them, all other animals and species).

By the end of the day, the group had racked up a first: a declaration from and call to action for all health professionals worldwide to use their considerable clout and societal leverage to fight climate change.

Here’s a few possible consequences for humans which are already being felt around the world, and nowhere more so than in the countries that are home to the world’s poorest:

* Deaths and increased illness from living and working in significantly higher temperatures

* Respiratory disease as a result of the fatal collision of pollutants and rising temperatures, which trigger chemical changes in the air we breathe

* Malnutrition and starvation as crops fail (or are destroyed by extreme weather events, from floods to landslide to cyclones to wildfires – remember Russia’s breadbasket in flames last year?)

* Under-nutrition as food prices rise around the world, and people are forced to make poorer food choices

* Rising incidence of allergens as allergenic plants produce pollen sooner and extend their pollen season as warm weather lasts longer

* Rises in water-borne diseases and those carried by insect vectors which are able to expand their range due to warmer conditions, as well as quicker breeding by diseases like malaria due to more favourable conditions

* More injuries and deaths due to conflicts provoked by migration in search of food or water

… and much more.

These are the risks we face – but there are also benefits, said Professor Montgomery. There is what he called the “convenient truth”: that tackling climate change seriously will entail making real changes to our lifestyles – and it so happens that those changes bring with them enormous public health benefits: reducing our use of cars would mean increasing exercise throughout society as people walk and cycle more; reducing our intake of meat, one of the most ‘expensive’ foods in terms of greenhouse gas production would bring down animal fat intake and improve cardiovascular health; reducing the particulate pollution in the air would mean vastly improved respiratory health across societies.

“Waiting for someone else to do what must be done does not show moral leadership,” Montgomery said. “The talk about delays of eight years is frankly nonsense. If we plan to write a prescription in eight years time, we might well find ourselves writing a death certificate instead.”

Executive director of the South Centre, Martin Khor, closed the plenary session with tough talk that also, in his inimitable style, had everyone laughing. He said we all need to change our way of life and our desires dramatically: “We used to have a shoe to wear; now we have a shoe to go running, a shoe to go jogging – but not running… we all have a little Imelda Marcos in us.” We are squandering resources on what we don’t need today – and in the process, we are ensuring there will be no resources for tomorrow, he said. “We have to change our perception of what life is.” It’s not the wasteful stuff we use that makes up life: “Life is the wealth we have inside of us.”

A highly informative afternoon of parallel sessions was closed by a pair of rousing speeches, one from the premier of the province of KwaZulu-Natal where COP17 is being held, Dr Zweli Mkhize (who said, “What is the problem at these climate change negotiations? It’s the politics of profit…”) Dr Mkhize called for health professionals to find a way to bring research and evidence-based information of changing patterns in health to support advocacy at this and future meetings of its kind.

Kumi Naidoo, our ‘homeboy’ from KwaZulu-Natal who now heads up Greenpeace, drew on his experiences as an activist in South Africa’s struggles to call for a commitment from health professionals and all of civil society to fight climate change. He told the group of a friend of his, Lenny Naidoo (no relation), who was also an anti-apartheid activist, and who asked him once, back in those days, what was the greatest thing he could do for the struggle. Kumi replied, “To give my life for it.”

“You mean to die for it?”

“Yes.”

“Wrong answer. The greatest thing you could do is to give the rest of your life for it,” said Lenny. (Ironically, some years later, while in exile, Kumi heard that his friend had been brutally killed by security forces.)

Naidoo asked that we all do exactly that: show our conviction and commitment by giving the rest of our lives to it.

The group made a fine start with a heartfelt and ringing reading of the declaration it had drawn up, followed by a Call to Action:

Given the gravity and urgency of the situation—and the opportunity to promote public health by addressing climate change--we call on our colleagues in public health organizations, health professional associations, hospitals, health systems and ministries of health around the world to endorse this Call to Action and take concerted action.

Having convened at the first Global Climate and Health Summit in Durban, South Africa, we hereby commit to:

1. Provide Leadership: As representatives of our organizations, we will drive the agenda for climate and health, promoting this Call to Action throughout the world.

2. Engage and Inform: We will engage and inform our constituencies of millions of doctors, nurses, public health workers, hospitals, health systems and health policy makers about the health risks from climate change, and the health benefits of climate action. As health professionals, we will also serve as messengers to our patients, our communities and our governments about the major health impacts of climate change and the steps they can take to reverse their impact.

3. Mitigate: We will lead by example and reduce the carbon footprint of our own institutions, practice and activities. We will strive to make our hospitals greener and healthier by reducing waste, investing in energy efficiency and clean energy sources, while promoting sustainable transport and resource consumption. By doing so, we commit to demonstrating how our societies can move toward carbon neutrality.

4. Adapt: We will strive to make our health systems more resilient and capable of withstanding and responding to the human toll of natural disasters and the shifting burden of disease.

5. Advocate Locally and Nationally: We will work within our countries to advocate for emissions reductions and/or low-carbon development strategies that promote both a healthy climate and public health. We will call for solutions that reduce the local health impacts of fossil fuels; solutions that foster clean energy and social justice; solutions that save lives and money while protecting public health from climate change.

6. Advocate Globally: We will advocate for a fair and binding global agreement, as articulated in the Durban Declaration on Climate and Health, that:

* Places the protection of human health as a primary objective of any agreement.

* Establishes an ambitious fair shares framework to reduce global emissions (based on the principles of Equity and Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities) in order to avoid a global public health disaster.

* Fosters both energy efficiency and clean, renewable energy that protects public health by reducing both local and global pollution.

* Provides the immediate necessary resources to operationalize the Green Fund, and in the longer term, appropriate mitigation and adaptation funding required to address the health impacts of climate change, assuring all countries’ Rights to Sustainable Development and their ability to pursue a low carbon development pathway.

The matter is urgent. The health of the world’s population is at risk. The time for action is now.

• For more information visit www.climateandhealthcare.org
• Download the Durban Declaration on Climate and Health
• Download the Durban Global Climate and Health Call to Action