Lima Declaration
Lima, 11 December 2014
The Peoples Climate Change Summit, which took place in Lima on 8 – 11 December 2014, is the expression of the mobilization and resistance processes undertaken by diverse organizations, movements, platforms, networks and collectives dedicated to social, trade, women’s, campesino, indigenous, youth, environmentalist, religious, artistic and cultural issues, both Peruvian and international. We met to continue discussing and sharing our multiple forms of struggle and resistance, to build social justice and fight the patriarchal, racist and homophobic capitalist system, with respect for diverse ways of living, neither exploiting nor expropriating nature’s gifts, to give people the capacity to decide about community energy sources, to reduce social inequality as well as promote Good Living as a model for existing in harmony with Nature and Mother Earth.
Capital seeks to confront its systemic crisis by imposing control over water, land and natural heritage by plunder, depredation, fossil fuel production, greater worker exploitation, repression of social movements and physical and psychological violence, increasingly multiplying the forms of criminalization of our struggles, of peoples, of militarization and territorial control, all of this fostered by the media corporations. In addition, economic power’s control of States and their bureaucracies, the payment of unjust and corrupt debts, and other things which exclusively benefit the real powers in the reigning governments, which obey the mandate of national companies and the major transnational corporations and their political operators, must be added to this reality.
At this point in time, the Peoples Summit represents the voice of the world’s exploited and oppressed sectors, marginalized by an economic and cultural system that subordinates them to racist, fundamentalist, and sexist business leaders that benefit from the capitalist model. At this crucial moment humanity is now experiencing, during which the very serious climate change we are suffering from demands urgent actions on the part of global society, we demand that the Governments and the United Nations System meeting at the COP 20 adopt accords that respect and value the lives of original, campesino and urban peoples, and promote the preservation of global biodiversity. We reject any market measures planned to solve climate and environmental problems.
Those of us meeting at this Summit, gather our experiences from previous struggle processes in our homelands, and arrive at this moment with the skills for constructing collectives. Out of this, we declare and demand:
That World Governments respect our territories, rights and ways of life, our cultures, customs and universal views on life and the world we live in. We denounce the exploitation of our natural resources and lands by extractive industries, affecting our means of sustenance, our source of identity and the harmonious relationship our communities have with Mother Earth. We demand the recognition of the territorial rights of the communities that have traditionally lived on their lands. We do not accept external control of land, nor the negotiation and implementation processes of false climate solutions. Governments must have as their central focus respect for our ancestral ways of living and recognize our self-determination as nations and original peoples.
We demand that States open discussion with civil society on the concept of net avoided emissions, which would allow for a 2015 climate accord that would compensate non-industrialized countries for not exploiting fossil energy sources and thus finance transforming their energy grids. We exhort the adoption of a global tax on international financial transactions, which would offer funds sufficient to guarantee a just transition to an inclusive model of social justice.
Therefore, we clarify that the set of initiatives to reverse the trend destroying the climate to which our planet has been driven, must consider the historical responsibilities of developed countries and recognize and make reparations for the historical and ecological debt owed the Global South. In particular, developed countries’ private capital, transnational corporations must be held responsible for their practices and actions on a global level. We demand full justice in the pollution cases of Newmont, Doeran in Perú, and Chevron-Texaco, among others, who in the wake of their actions in the Amazon left one of the greatest ecocides in the history of the planet.
We demand that Governments and businesses accept and respect our human right to dignified work, with the full exercise of individual and collective rights, in which a just transitional process to a world that allows us to improve our quality of life is guaranteed. We demand guaranteed universal access to social security and protection systems, respect for our freedom to organize labour, and a just and equitable repartition of the wealth produced by our work and skills.
We consider that no action to confront climate change will be efficient or viable if not coupled with effective public policies in favour of small family and campesino agriculture, agrarian reform, our peoples’ food security and sovereignty, and self-sustainable production, with a base that is agroecological, indigenous and free of transgenics and agritoxics, adapted to human consumption and preserving of our biodiversity. We believe that to advance toward a world that is just and an economy that is local, mutual, cooperative, feminist and communal, it is fundamental to recognize the human right to food, as well as the great benefit brought by campesino family agriculture, which contributes more than 70% of the world’s food. We demand a stop to the production and expansion of agrifuels, which lead to deforestation, land erosion, which pollute air and water sources, and represent a form of territorial recolonization.
Over the last ten years, capital’s strategy can be seen in the privatization, commodification and financialization of nature have been intensified, as demonstrated in the principles of the green economy, which gives us false solutions to the climate crisis. Some of these false solutions are: Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM), Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation projects (REDD), genetic modification, agrifuels, geoengineering, hydroelectric megaprojects, nuclear power stations, hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), climatically intelligent agriculture.
Capital’s strategy can also be seen in what we call the architecture of transnational corporations and governments’ impunity, through free trade and investment protection agreements, among others, whose intent is to privatize essential services like water, education, health and housing, which infringe workers’ and peoples’ human rights. The Peoples Summit rejects all these strategies of capital.
As mentioned above, we denounce the patriarchal capitalist system that oppresses and controls women’s bodies, work and lives, and that promotes sexual violence and trafficking, and marginalizes women from social and public life in numerous ways. It is necessary to transition the social division of labour to a new way that eliminates the subordination of feminine work, and does not render invisible the work of caretaking – which makes social reproduction possible – nor subordinate it to market mandates. We demand a radical change that recognizes reproductive work as the foundation of human sustainability and the relationships between persons and communities.
All alternatives must incorporate a feminist perspective and promote a more just relationship between men and women.
We advocate for the promotion of responsible and non-alienated consumption, based on the adoption of healthy consumption habits and patterns, in accordance with human need and not subject to capital’s ambitions. A consumption that does not contribute to either environmental pollution or climate change. We encourage the responsible use of vital resources, recycling and the sustainable management of solid wastes. We are committed to promoting civic awareness of actions we can take to individually and collectively advance towards a more just world.
States must make immediate decisions to act to protect, conserve or restore the watersheds, ecosystems, highlands, marshes, wetlands, moors, steppes, forests, aquifers, lakes, rivers, springs, and marine coasts that nourish Mother Earth. These ecosystems and water sources are affected by industrial extractive activities, like mining and oil, coal and gas exploration, by tree cutting and dumping, among other causes. The human right to water and sanitation, under equal conditions, access and healthfulness, must be guaranteed. This can only be guaranteed through public companies in public hands.
The Peoples Summit questions the incoherence of the Peruvian Government in its capacity as president of the COP 20 in terms of its recent adoption of environmental, labour and fiscal policies favouring private investment –lowering standards and regulations affecting collective, environmental and cultural rights. We denounce the repression imposed upon indigenous representatives, labour leaders, campesinos, and environmental activists, as well as the harassment of delegations which came to the Peoples Summit from diverse regions of the country and abroad.
The Peoples Summit questions the corporate control of the United Nations Marco Convention on Climate Change. The major transnational corporations “accompany” governments in global negotiations to adopt measures whose only objective is to cleanse industrialized countries of their responsibilities for greenhouse gas emissions and for being those mainly responsible for climate change. We demand that payment on foreign and domestic debt servicing – which is drowning peoples and limiting the ability for States to attend to populations’ basic necessities – be directed to confront the environmental and climate crisis, because the survival of Humanity and all the living species on the planet depends upon it.
The Peoples Summit salutes the committed and enthusiastic mobilization by tens of thousands of citizens from around the world who participated in the Great Global March in Defence of Mother Earth (10 Dec) in Lima and other cities on the planet. This great concentration of organizations, movements and delegations from Perú and numerous other countries is the clearest expression of the peoples’ position in favour of a just and democratic world, that guarantees harmony between human existence and the rights of Nature and Mother Earth.
We shall continue to actively and permanently strengthen coordination of our struggles through 2015’s multiple mobilizations, with a special activist event in Paris, France, where the COP 21 will be held. Our worldwide social movements are already preparing to continue the struggle from our homelands in defence of life and until our demands are met. We shall continue the fight until we change the system… Not the Climate!
The Peoples Summit
Lima 11 December 2014
(English translation by Danica Jorden)
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