Montes Claros Call to Action

The Centro de Agricultura Alternativa, the Comissão Pastoral da Terra, the Sociedade da Terra Redonda of Rio Pardo, and the Alert Against the Green Desert Network in coordination with the Durban Group for Climate Justice produced the following Call to Action during the recent Climate Justice meeting held in Brazil. It is aimed as a tool for local people struggling against a number of projects that are or could be subsidised by the carbon market. It is intended as a means of translating this issue in an understandable manner, thereby enabling people’s informed participation in the struggle against climate change and for climate justice. The Durban Group, aims at “bringing climate back to the people” and linking climate to already existing struggles constitutes an important means to that end.

Montes Claros, Brazil, July 27, 2006

Montes Claros Call to Action

Dear friends,

We have come from different places around the world to Montes Claros in Minas Gerais, Brazil, to discuss our grave concerns regarding Climate Change and issues of Climate Justice. We have together revitalized our optimism, deepened our indignation about the lack of meaningful action to address climate change and reinforced our commitment to Climate Justice.

In our common struggle for life and human dignity we are engaged against a number of activities and projects such as dams, monoculture tree plantations, sugar cane, oil palm and soy monocultures, legalized land-grabbing, industrial shrimp farming, mangrove and coastal area degradation, destruction of indigenous, peasant and traditional communities, theft of traditional knowledge, uncontrolled growth of big cities, denial of basic needs, air pollution, mass migration from South to North, all forced on us by an unwanted “development” that is invading our lands and livelihoods in order to enrich the wealthy landowners, industrialists, international banks and powerful economic groups.

Those struggles are now facing the new threat posed by carbon trading, because this trade is providing subsidies for yet more dams, air pollution, monoculture plantations, dispossession of local peoples’ lands and many of the “development” projects being opposed by local communities. While pretending to offer solutions to the real crisis of global warming and climate change, polluting Northern corporations have invented a perverse mechanism to enable them to continue to pollute the atmosphere while at the same time appropriating large expanses of land in Southern countries as well as water, biodiversity and many other resources.

For instance, the construction of dams for energy generation is being presented as a way of producing clean energy, thereby qualifying for carbon market projects to obtain credits that can be sold by polluting companies unwilling to reduce their own carbon emissions. Similarly, the planting of huge tracts of lands with a single species of tree, is being presented as absorbing pollution. Such projects are then obtaining additional funds and other resources through the carbon market, thus diverting them from activities that would actually slow, stop or attempt to reduce the effects of climate change.

Climate change is already happening: we feel the effects. It is vital to implement real solutions and not false mechanisms that not only do not solve anything but that add new problems for people. We therefore call on all who struggle for a world that is socially just, environmentally healthy and economically viable to resist and denounce this carbon market and to demand and insist on implementation of effective action to solve the very serious problem of Climate Change.