Rukka Sombolinggi, a Torajan Indigenous woman from Sulawesi, Indonesia, is the first female Secretary General of AMAN, the world’s largest Indigenous peoples organization.
Gathered in NYC in mid-April, 87 Indigenous leaders from 35 countries met to hammer out a set of demands to address a common scourge: the green energy transition that has our peoples under siege.
Worldwide, we are experiencing land-grabs and a rising tide of criminalization and attacks for speaking out against mining and renewable energy projects that violate our rights with impacts that are being documented by UN and other experts. Their research confirms what we know firsthand.
And yet political and economic actors continue to ignore the evidence, pushing us aside in their rush to build a system to replace fossil fuels, while guided by the same values that are destroying the natural world.
Ironically, we released this declaration amid the UN’s sustainability week – renewable energy was on the agenda. We were not.
Q&A: What you need to know about clean energy and critical minerals supply chains
Indigenous peoples are not opposed to pivoting away from oil and gas, nor are we opposed to investing in renewable energy systems as an alternative.
But we must have a say. More than half the mines that are expected to produce metals and minerals to serve renewable technologies are on or near the territories of Indigenous peoples and peasant communities.
Resource extraction causing triple crisis
In the words of the UN’s Global Resource Outlook 2024, released in March with little fanfare by the UN Environment Programme: “the current model of natural resource extraction…is driving an unprecedented triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution”.
Mining companies have been offered a path to sustainability. Few have started down that path.
And they won’t unless global and national decision-makers take advantage of this key moment in history to demand change. Indigenous leaders need to be at the table too.
As donors dither, Indigenous funds seek to decolonise green finance
We are not willing to have our territories become the deserts that mining companies create, leaking toxins into our rivers and soils and poisoning our sources of water and food, and by extension our children.
The playing field for Indigenous peoples is massively unjust. The authors of the Global Resources Outlook cite evidence of national governments that favor companies’ interests “by removing the judicial protection of Indigenous communities, expropriating land…or even using armed forces to protect mining facilities”.
Why should this matter to people on the other side of the planet?
Proven to outperform the public and private sectors, Indigenous peoples conserve some of the world’s most biodiverse regions. Negotiators at global climate events do cite our outsize conservation role, but treaty language allows our governments to decide when and whether to recognize or enforce our rights.
Companies are advised to “engage” with our communities – not so they can avoid harming us, but to prevent costly conflicts that arise in response to outdated and destructive practices.
These “externalities” that chase us from our ancestral homes and damage our health and the ecosystems we treasure are revealed only when they become “material”, of concern to investors and relevant to risk analysts.
Tensions rise over who will contribute to new climate finance goal
Our resistance is costly and material. Failure to properly obtain our consent before sending in the bulldozers can bring a project to a halt, with a price tag as high as $20 million a week. And communities are learning to use the tools of the commercial legal system to defend themselves.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School report that, over time, shareholders benefit most when companies heed the demands of their most influential stakeholders. Indigenous peoples are the stakeholders to please.
Our communities disrupt supply chains, but when our rights are respected, we can also be the best indicators of a company’s intention to avoid harm to people and planet.
Call for ban on mining in ‘no-go’ zones
In the declaration we released in New York earlier this month, we called for laws to reduce the consumption of energy worldwide, and we laid out a path for ensuring that the green transition is a just one.
We urged our governments to recognize and protect our rights as a priority; to end the killings, the violence and the criminalization of our peoples; and to require corporations to secure our free, prior and informed consent, and avoid harming our lands and resources.
A growing body of evidence suggests that Indigenous peoples rooted to their ancestral lands can draw on traditional knowledge, stretching back over generations, to help nature evolve and adapt to the changing climate. We understand the sustainable use of wild species and hold in our gardens genetic resources that can protect crops of immeasurable economic and nutritional value.
Current practices for extracting metals and minerals put our peoples at risk and endanger climate, biodiversity, water, global health and food security. Researchers warned earlier this year that the unprecedented scale of demand for “green” minerals will lay waste to more and more land and drive greater numbers of Indigenous and other local peoples from our homes.
So our declaration also calls on governments to impose a ban on the expansion of mining in “no-go” zones – those sites that our peoples identify as sacred and vital as sources of food and clean water. Indigenous communities, rooted in place by time and tradition, can help stop the green transition from destroying biomes that serve all humanity.
The UN Secretary-General launches a panel on critical minerals today that seems to recognize the importance of avoiding harm to affected communities and the environment.
This is a step in the right direction, but Indigenous peoples and our leaders – and recognition and enforcement of our rights – must be at the centre of every proposal for mining and renewable energy that affect us and our territories. This is the only way to keep climate “response measures”, made possible by the Paris Agreement, from harming solutions that exist already.
The post Indigenous lands feel cruel bite of green energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Delegates will soon gather in the Turkish resort city of Antalya for UN climate negotiations, against a backdrop of war, energy crisis and climate extremes.
At COP31, nations will try to find agreement on various issues, including climate finance for developing countries and a global “just transition” towards a cleaner economy.
This summit is unusual due to its joint presidency, which means that Australia is leading the negotiations while Turkey hosts the conference.
Outside the formal negotiations, Turkey is also pushing its own priorities as part of a wider “action agenda”, including electrification, oceans and “green industrialisation”.
In order to track parties’ positions on key negotiating points and wider issues at COP31, Carbon Brief has analysed around 100 documents and captured them in the interactive table below.
The first column shows the countries and UN negotiating blocs, the second shows the topics up for debate and the third indicates specific issues within those topics.
The final column indicates the positions that the parties have expressed on each topic. These range from “priority” – meaning the party is likely to be pushing the issue – to “oppose”, meaning it is likely to push against it.
This is a “living document” that will be updated over the course of COP31.
Please get in touch if you would like to offer additions by emailing policy@carbonbrief.org.
Brief explanations of the key issues and jargon-filled language that permeate the talks can be found below the interactive table.
Just transition
At COP30 in Brazil in 2025, nations agreed to establish a practical mechanism to help drive a “just transition” to a low-carbon economy.
Key aspects of this “Belém-Antalya mechanism” (BAM) – often referred to as the “just transition mechanism” (JTM) – were agreed during the June climate negotiations this year, but many details are missing and dividing lines remain between parties.
Parties have disagreed about the scope of the mechanism and whether it should be tied to the provision of finance.
Nevertheless, following progress in June within the “just transition work programme” (JTWP), civil society groups highlighted that getting the mechanism up and running is a “key expected outcome” from COP31.
Climate finance
Climate finance is always a highly contested issue at UN climate negotiations.
Developing countries have successfully pushed for a “work programme” on climate finance to feature on the conference agenda.
These parties see this programme as a way to pressure developed countries into providing more funding from their public coffers, specifically under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement. Some are even proposing a “burden sharing” arrangement for climate-finance provision.
This comes against a backdrop of major donors cutting their aid budgets and the Trump administration in the US pressuring multilateral development banks (MDBs) to drop their climate objectives.
Developed countries, which have traditionally been responsible for providing finance, would prefer to keep a broader focus on issues such as improving access to existing finance and broadening the range of donors. Some developing countries, such as small-island states, also support these goals.
Nations have also been discussing Article 2.1c of the Paris Agreement under the “Veredas dialogue”. This focuses on making all global “financial flows” consistent with climate action.
Countries have different views about what this involves, with developing countries again hoping to keep the focus on developed countries’ responsibilities to financially support them.
Adaptation and mitigation
At negotiations in June, parties were unable to agree on the details of a “global goal on adaptation” (GGA), which is intended to drive climate adaptation worldwide.
Having agreed at COP30 on a list of 59 “indicators” – ways to assess progress towards the GGA – nations now need to refine these before COP32 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This is a highly technical process that involves a taskforce working out how to use and track these indicators.
Broadly, developing countries stress the importance of finance to fund adaptation efforts, rather than simply to track progress. They also want reassurances about a pledge made last year to “triple adaptation finance”.
At the June climate negotiations, negotiators also failed to make any progress when discussing the mitigation work programme (MWP) – the only formal agenda item that concerns cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Among other things, parties disagreed on whether the MWP should continue running over the next few years, or simply be brought to a close.
Global stocktake and NDCs
Back in 2023, the first “global stocktake” (GST) of the Paris Agreement set out the state of climate action and what needed to be done to set the world on course.
On mitigation, nations agreed to a package of measures, including “transitioning away from fossil fuels”, tripling renewable energy and “halting and reversing deforestation” by 2030.
Some of these outcomes remain contentious among certain parties, particularly large, developing countries and those with economies that rely on fossil-fuel exports.
Developing countries have persistently argued that they need more climate finance to implement the global stocktake outcomes.
Parties were meant to update their climate plans under the Paris Agreement, informed by the first global stocktake, by 2025. These plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), cover the period out to 2035.
So far, only 150 parties – responsible for three-quarters of global emissions – have submitted new NDCs.
Iran, Vietnam, Egypt and Argentina are among those without new NDCs – and the US has withdrawn its climate plan under the Trump administration.
Some parties, such as the EU, have stressed the need for countries to submit their new NDCs ahead of COP31 – and to ensure they are aligned with the 1.5C temperature limit.
COP31 will also see the launch of the second global stocktake, which will conclude in 2028.
Action agenda and other issues
Turkey will be pushing its “action agenda” priorities at COP31, including global targets for electrification, reducing waste and reducing building-sector emissions.
(The Australian “presidency of negotiations” is intending to pursue a “cover text” decision at COP31 that may capture some of these wider targets, such as the electrification goal.)
The action agenda is meant to provide a complementary track to the formal negotiations, where governments and non-state actors can advance specific, real-world solutions.
A new COP31 presidency effort dubbed the “climate implementation bridge” is also meant to complement these ambitions by turning NDC goals into an “investable project portfolio”
Some parties have explicitly signalled their support for various elements beyond the formal negotiations, in the run-up to COP31.
For example, a joint letter signed by 105 parties called for COP31 to “put the ocean at the heart of climate action” by embedding ocean-based climate action in the UNFCCC architecture.
The post Interactive: Who wants what at the COP31 climate change summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Who wants what at the COP31 climate change summit
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