Mobilize and organize to Stop and Prevent Planet Fever! (Civil society declaration)

Statement released ahead of the UN Climate Summit convened by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon in September 2014

Endorsed by over 330 civil society organsiations. Selected extracts from the declaration:

“We also need to go beyond identifying right and wrong prescriptions to naming the disease that constantly causes and drives this planetary fever. If we don’t take this step, the fever will keep coming back again and again in a much more aggressive way.”

The declaration makes a clear distinction between the policies that should be adopted and those that should be rejected. The policies to adopt are:

• “Make immediate binding commitments — not voluntary pledges — to control planetary temperature rise to no more than 1.5ºC [2.7 ºF] this century by reducing global greenhouse gas emissions per year to 38 Gigatons by 2020.
• Let the Earth rest by making binding commitments to leave more than 80% of known fossil fuel reserves under the soil and beneath the ocean floor.
• Move away from resource extractivism by placing bans on all new exploration and exploitation of oil, bitumen sands, oil shale, coal, uranium, and natural gas including pipeline infrastructure like Keystone XL.
• Accelerate the development and transition to renewable energy alternatives such as wind, solar, geothermal and tidal power with more public and community ownership and control.
• Promote local production and consumption of durable goods to satisfy the fundamental needs of the people and avoid the transport of goods that can be produced locally.
• Stimulate the transition from industrialized, export-oriented agriculture for the global supermarket to community-based production to meet local food needs based on food sovereignty.
• Adopt and apply Zero Waste strategies for the recycling and disposal of trash and the retrofitting of buildings to conserve energy for heating and cooling.
• Improve and expand public transportation for moving people and freight within urban centres and between cities within urban regions through efficient trains.
• Develop new sectors of the economy designed to create new jobs that restore the balance and equilibrium of the Earth system such as climate jobs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and Earth restoration jobs.
• Dismantle the war industry and military infrastructure in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions generated by warfare, and divert war budgets to promote genuine peace.”

The policies that should not be taken forward are:

• The commodification, financialization and privatization of the functions of nature through the promotion of a false “green economy” agenda which places a price on nature and creates new derivative markets that will only increase inequality and expedite the destruction of nature.
• This means saying No to REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) … No to Climate Smart Agriculture, Blue Carbon and Biodiversity offsetting — all of which are designed to create new for-profit business for corporations.
• Techno-fix “solutions” like geo-engineering, genetically modified organisms, agrofuels, industrial bioenergy, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, hydraulic fracking, nuclear projects, waste-to-energy generation based on incineration, and others.
• Mega and unnecessary infrastructure projects that do not benefit the population and are net contributors to greenhouse gasses like, mega dams, excessively huge highways, stadiums for world cups, etc.
• Free trade and investment regimes that promote trade for profit and undercut domestic labor, destroy nature, and substantially reduce the capacity of nations to define their own economic, social and environmental priorities.

Read declaration

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This summary was prepared by Why Green Economy?. The views expressed have been paraphrased. See the original source for more information.