Latin America: New Development Model to Achieve Climate Justice

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ENCASUR

Thanks to the intervention of civil society, climate change has moved from being a technical and scientific problem to being a strongly political one that questions the world development model in a fragile planet, concluded activists at the event “Latin America: Advances, Regressions and Perspectives in the Struggle for Climate Justice” held on May 13, in Buenos Aires.

The Citizens’ Forum of Participation for Justice and Human Rights (FOCO) of Argentina invited to participate in this discussion as a contribution to reflection after one year has passed since the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth that took place in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

The conference in Cochabamba, which was attended by 35,000 people from all over the world, was a personal initiative of president Evo Morales in light of the failure of climate negotiations carried out in December 2010 in Copenhagen.

The meeting in Buenos Aires had the participation of Bolivia’s consul general, Ramiro Tapia, and Álvaro Zopatti, on behalf of the Argentinian Department of Climate Change of the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development. 

The same as with everything that involves the future of peoples, the discussion on climate change should not be exclusively left in the hands of governments and groups of expert negotiators in order to raise the voice of civil society, concluded the participants in this discussion event.  

For that purpose, civil society organizations should increase their capacity to build “social surveillance” tools to monitor the fulfilment of international agreements on climate change, since the implementation of this international legislation has been very contradictory.

This implies the construction of a space within the negotiation of these agreements, in which the interest of peoples is thus defended, they added. However, the rule has been that only the ruling sectors have coerced the governments in favour of their particular interests.

Therefore, the participation of civil society must no longer be considered as something that follows the negotiation of agreements, as until now, that it has been limited to taking a position on what has been already agreed; rather, its perspectives and opinions should be a constitutive part of the national actions towards agreements.

In this sense, Zopatti, the representative of the Argentinian Ministry of Environment, undertook the commitment to evaluate the opening of a dialogue process with the organizations participating in the discussion and those wishing to join the preliminary stages of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Climate Change in Durban, South Africa, and the Rio+20 Summit.
 
Participants in the discussion agreed on the importance of broadening the perspective towards the construction of a South-South agreement in terms of climate change, since they considered that the multiplication of negotiation spaces to such effect within the framework of the United Nations ends up neutralizing any possibility of making effective decisions in favour of the countries of the region.

Participants referred in particular to UNASUR as a body to which an urgent evaluation of climate change impacts on the region can be demanded. To this effect, they will demand the creation of a technical and political space within its sphere, aimed at coordinating common positions with a view to multilateral negotiations.