By Abigail Van Neely
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 15 2023 – “What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!” youth chanted in an unusually lively conference at the United Nations Headquarters.

Earlier on Thursday morning (September 14), almost 500 young people had streamed into the room to a DJ’s upbeat soundtrack. Spirits were high despite the more somber rallying cry of this year’s International Day of Peace youth event: the planet is on fire. Many speakers focused on the idea that there cannot be peace without climate justice.

“We cannot begin to talk about peace without talking about the climate crisis,” environmental justice advocate Saad Amer said after leading the crowd in the kind of chants more likely heard at a protest. Fossil fuel disputes spark wars that disproportionately affect people of color, Amer explained. Youth must take charge to “re-write destiny.”

To 21-year-old Mexican climate justice activist Xiye Bastida, “Peace is the ability to drink clean air and clean water.” Bastida, a member of the Otomi-Toltec indigenous community, spoke of her community’s traditional commitment to living in harmony with the earth. Now, indigenous people are being displaced as regenerative practices are forgotten. Bastida called for a world free of extreme weather and exploitation. The climate crisis reflects a broken system, she said, but peace is the bravery to imagine a better world.

Young people are “creating a youth movement for climate action, seeking racial justice, and promoting gender equality,” the Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, Melissa Fleming, told the audience. In a recorded statement, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reiterated that youth action has power. Still, only four governments have concrete plans to include young people in policymaking, Youth Envoy Jayathma Wickramanyake noted.

As she lived through brutal conflicts in her home country of Sri Lanka, Wickramanayake said she wondered why people around her continued to fight. Today, she told other young activists that the root causes of conflict always run deep – from inequality to poverty. She stressed that peace cannot be differentiated from development.

The event occurs days before the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Summit, a critical opportunity for world leaders to address failures to implement the goals so far.

“Next week there will be an important breakthrough in creating the conditions to rescue the sustainable development goals. I’m very hopeful that the SDG summit will indeed represent a quantum leap in the response to the dramatic failures that we have witnessed,” Guterres said during a news conference.

Meanwhile, youth are left with memories of their chants: “The oceans are rising, and so are we!” “We are unstoppable – another world is possible!”

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By Silas Kpanan’Ayoung Siakor
MONROVIA, Sep 15 2023 – The fate of Liberia and its forests are entwined. Yet a new climate change deal, set to be announced at the UN climate change talks in Dubai this November, would drive a wedge between our communities and their woodlands.

Currently, forests make up more than two-thirds of Liberia’s land area, and are crucial for people’s livelihoods. They were illegally plundered by the former President Charles Taylor to fund a civil war that left an estimated 150,000 dead.

If this deal proceeds, it is likely to do so under dubious legality and without the prior consent of the communities living in the forests.

What’s more, it is part of a global trend called ‘carbon colonialism’, where instead of taking concrete steps to decarbonise, corporations offset their greenhouse gas emissions by paying to preserve forests or other ecosystems—often against the wishes of the local or Indigenous communities who live there

And since 2003, when the war ended, vast swathes of forested land have been signed over to foreign investors, as a corrupt minority have enriched themselves through illegal logging at the expense of the impoverished majority. We have lost nearly one quarter of our forests to economic development projects since then—with most of the loss occurring in the last ten years. This is a disaster for the communities that live on these lands and for efforts to reduce the impacts of climate change.

Now another chapter is unfolding in the tangled history of Liberia’s forests.

At the end of March, Liberia’s Ministry of Finance signed a memorandum of understanding with a United Arab Emirates (UAE)-based consultancy called Blue Carbon LLC, giving it the exclusive right to manage an area of rainforest covering one tenth of our national land. The deal, which has been negotiated in secrecy, is reportedly in the process of being finalized.

Under the agreement Blue Carbon will pay Liberia to manage and preserve one million hectares of forest for 30 years, and sell carbon credits from the emissions ‘saved’ by protecting these forests to major polluters, who will use them to offset their own emissions.

That is a significant chunk of our country, set to be pawned to the planet’s major polluters, enabling them to continue extracting and burning fossil fuels while claiming to protect the planet.

If this deal proceeds, it is likely to do so under dubious legality and without the prior consent of the communities living in the forests.

What’s more, it is part of a global trend called ‘carbon colonialism’, where instead of taking concrete steps to decarbonise, corporations offset their greenhouse gas emissions by paying to preserve forests or other ecosystems—often against the wishes of the local or Indigenous communities who live there. A similar deal with Zimbabwe’s government was announced in the middle of August.

‘Greenwashing’

Money is desperately needed to support local communities protecting their forests in Liberia as much as anywhere and there may well be ‘offset projects’ that are truly beneficial for local or Indigenous communities—but this is not one of them.

The chairman of Blue Carbon LLC is Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, a member of the UAE royal family, which has major interests in the country’s oil and gas infrastructure.

The UAE—a fossil fuel state—is planning a huge expansion of oil and gas even though, at the end of the year, it will host the UN’s COP28 climate summit.

To burnish its environmental credentials ahead of the COP, the UAE’s government and various state-run companies have hired some of the world’s biggest PR companies to mount a greenwashing campaign.

The Blue Carbon deal—which is set to be unveiled at the COP to show how the UAE is fulfilling its commitments under the Paris Climate deal—is part of this greenwashing.

Dubious legality

Study after study has shown that community land rights is the best tool to preventing deforestation, better than the government or private sector managed protected areas—like those that ostensibly would be implemented if the Blue Carbon deal is finalized. The UN’s most recent report on climate change emphasizes community land rights as critical in both climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts.

The deal, which ignores this body of research, is also a primary threat to rural Liberians and their hard-won land rights. Around 70 per cent of land in Liberia is owned by communities. Roughly one third of our people live in forested areas, and the local people who live on the land targeted under the deal will only be consulted about it after it has been signed – that is, if they are consulted at all.

As such, it represents a ‘climate land grab’ that reverses some of the steady progress that Liberia has made on recognising community rights.

The deal’s legality is also dubious, and the agreement appears to violate our constitution and a number of Liberian laws, notably the National Forestry Reform Law (2006), the Community Rights Law (2009), the Public Procurement and Concessions Act (2010), and the Land Right Act (2018).

One can only sell carbon if you own it.  Liberian law is clear that communities own their customary forest lands and the resources on them.

The conditions of our people are worsening by the day. Liberia is one of the last countries in West Africa to still have vast tracts of forest – but this valuable resource is disappearing at an alarming rate.

Liberians must remain open to working with anyone, including corporations, who can help us protect our forests and our peoples’ rights. But we must remain resolute in our opposition to false climate solutions such as this deal.

Silas Kpanan’Ayoung Siakor has championed community forest and land rights in Liberia for two decades. His efforts were recognized with the Whitley Award for Environment and Human Rights in 2002 (UK), the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2006 (US), Award for Outstanding Environmental and Human Rights Activism from the Alexander Soros Foundation (US), and the Mundo Negro Fraternity Award in 2018 (Spain). 

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Sep 15 2023 – The Latin American and Caribbean region is arriving at the Sustainable Development Goals Summit on the right track but far behind in terms of progress, at the halfway point to achieve the SDGs, which aim to overcome poverty and create a cleaner and healthier environment.

“We are exactly halfway through the period of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, but we are not half the way there, as only a quarter of the goals have been met or are expected to be met that year,” warned ECLAC Executive Secretary José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs.”We are exactly halfway through the period of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, but we are not half the way there, as only a quarter of the goals have been met or are expected to be met that year.” — José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs

However, the head of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) stressed, in response to a questionnaire submitted to him by IPS, that “the percentage of targets on track to be met is higher than the global average,” partly due to the strengthening of the institutions that lead the governance of the SDGs.

The 17 SDGs include 169 targets, to be measured with 231 indicators, and in the region 75 percent are at risk of not being met, according to ECLAC, unless decisive actions are taken to forge ahead: 48 percent are moving in the right direction but too slowly to achieve the respective targets, and 27 percent are showing a tendency to backslide.

The summit was convened by UN Secretary-General António Guterres for Sept. 18-19 at the United Nations headquarters in New York, under the official name High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development.

The stated purpose is to “step on the gas” to reach the SDGs in all regions, in the context of a combination of crises, notably the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, new wars, and the climate and food crises.

The SDGs address ending poverty, achieving zero hunger, health and well-being, quality education, gender equality, clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, decent work and economic growth, industry, innovation and infrastructure, and reducing inequalities.

They also are aimed at sustainable cities and communities, responsible production and consumption, climate action, underwater life, life of terrestrial ecosystems, peace, justice and strong institutions, and partnerships to achieve the goals.

Drinking water is distributed from tanker trucks in the working-class Petare neighborhood in eastern Caracas. Access to safe drinking water and sanitation is another of the goals that are being addressed with a great variety of results within Latin American and Caribbean countries, and there is no certainty that this 2030 Agenda target will be reached in the region. CREDIT: Caracas city government

Progress is being made, but slowly

“In all the countries of the region progress is being made, but in many not at the necessary rate. The pace varies greatly and we are not where we would like to be,” Almudena Fernández, chief economist for the region at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), told IPS from New York.

Thus, said the Peruvian economist, “there is progress, for example, on some health or energy and land care issues, but we are lagging in achieving more sustainable cities, and we are not on the way to achieving, regionally, any of the poverty indicators.”

Salazar-Xirinachs, who is from Costa Rica, said from Santiago that “the countries that have historically been at the forefront in public policies are the ones that have made the greatest progress, such as Uruguay in South America, Costa Rica in Central America or Jamaica in the Caribbean. They have implemented a greater diversity of strategies to achieve the SDGs.”

A group of experts led by U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs prepared graphs for the UN on how countries in the various developing regions are on track to meet the goals or still face challenges – measured in three grades, from moderate to severe – and whether they are on the road to improvement, stagnation or regression.

According to this study, the best advances in poverty reduction have been seen in Brazil, El Salvador, Guyana, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay, while the greatest setbacks have been observed in Argentina, Belize, Ecuador and Venezuela.

In the fight for zero hunger, no one stands out; Brazil, after making progress, slid backwards in recent years, and the best results are shown by Caribbean countries.

In health and well-being, education and gender equality, there are positive trends, although stagnation has been seen, especially in the Caribbean and Central American countries.

In water and sanitation, energy, reduction of inequalities, economic growth, management of marine areas, terrestrial ecosystems, and justice and institutions, Sachs’ dashboard shows the persistence of numerous obstacles, addressed in very different ways in different countries.

Many countries in Central America and the Caribbean are on track to meet their climate action goals, and in general the region has made progress in forging alliances with other countries and organizations to pave the way to meeting the SDGs.

Young people in a Latin American country share a vegetable-rich meal outdoors. The notion of consuming products produced with environmentally sustainable techniques is gaining ground, and a private sector whose DNA is embedded in the search for positive environmental and social repercussions is flourishing. CREDIT: Pazos / Unicef

A question of funds

Even before the pandemic that broke out in 2020, Fernández said, the region was not moving fast enough towards the SDGs; its economic growth has been very low for a long time – and remains so, at no more than 1.9 percent this year – and growth with investment is needed in order to reduce poverty.

In this regard, Fernández highlighted the need to expand fiscal revenues, since tax collection is very low in the region (22 percent of gross domestic product, compared to 34 percent in the advanced economies of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), “although progress will not be made through public spending alone,” she said.

Salazar-Xirinachs pointed out that “in addition to financial resources, it is very important to adapt actions to specific areas to achieve the 2030 Agenda. The measures implemented at the subnational level are of great importance. Specific problems in local areas cannot always be solved with one-size-fits-all policies.”

Fernández underlined that the 2030 Agenda “has always been conceived as a society-wide agenda, and the private sector plays an essential role, particularly the areas that are flourishing because it has a positive social and environmental impact on their DNA, and there are young consumers who use products made in a sustainable way.”

ECLAC’s Salazar-Xirinachs highlighted sensitized sectors as organized civil society and the private sector, for their participation in sustainable development forums, follow-up actions and public-private partnerships moving towards achievement of the SDGs.

Finally, with respect to expectations for the summit, the head of ECLAC aspires to a movement to accelerate the 2030 Agenda in at least four areas: decent employment for all, generating more sustainable cities, resilient infrastructure that offers more jobs, and improving governance and institutions involved in the process.

ECLAC identified necessary “transformative measures”: early energy transition; boosting the bioeconomy, particularly sustainable agriculture and bioindustrialization; digital transformation for greater connectivity among the population; and promoting exports of modern services.

It also focuses on the care society, in response to demographic trends, to achieve greater gender equality and boost the economy; sustainable tourism, which has great potential in the countries of the region; and integration to enable alliances to strengthen cooperation in the regional bloc.

In summary, ECLAC concludes, “it would be very important that during the Summit these types of measures are identified and translate into agreements in which the countries jointly propose a road map for implementing actions to strengthen them.”