As the “usual suspects” dominate COP29, is there hope COP30 can help protect environmental defenders?
Photo from Governo do Pará, Brasil.
More than 65,000 people are now attending the United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) 29 Climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan that began last Monday November 11 and that is scheduled to conclude this coming Friday November 22.
Will COP29 serve to enhance the protection of environmental human rights defenders in the context of climate action?
It doesn’t seem likely.
This past September, Global Witness documented: “Over 1,500 defenders have been murdered since the adoption of the Paris Agreement on climate change on 12 December 2015.” The Paris Agreement was reached at COP21.
After COP28 in 2023, Global Witness commented: “In the run-up to COP, we joined 150 organisations to call on the UNFCCC [the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] to recognise and protect Defenders. And yet, there is not a single reference to land and environmental defenders in the final text.”
On the first day of COP29 this year, Article 19 pleaded: “States must prioritise the protection of environmental defenders who demand action on pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change, often at great personal risk.”
“Blatant attempts” to eliminate references to defenders
And yet it appears that the dynamic is not just that defenders are not mentioned, but rather that any references to them are being removed.
A week into COP29, Camilla Pollera of the Center for International Environmental Law commented: “The blatant attempts to eliminate reference to the protection of environmental human rights defenders and human rights is especially alarming.”
And Floridea Di Como of CambiaMO in Spain added: “To take out from the text reference to Land and Environmental Human Rights defenders is to make a deep injustice from the recognition, procedural and distributive points of view.”
The “usual suspects”
This echoes the recent comments made by Michel Forst, the UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders (Aarhus Convention), on a PBI-Canada organized webinar on the COP16 Biodiversity conference in Colombia.
Forst told those at our webinar: “There are people who are willing to push for good results and at the same time we know that we also have people who are not our allies who are pushing also for counter-results and trying to delete paragraphs and good wording that some of us, some of them, would like to introduce.”
He added: “We have the same usual suspects who block the discussions.”
Forst did not name those “usual suspects”, but they are likely to include the United States, Japan, Canada and Australia.
“We can’t legitimize COP meetings”
Beyond this focused concern about COP conferences failing environmental defenders, there is also a broader critique of these annual gatherings.
Ahead of COP29, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg stated: “We can’t legitimize COP meetings in their current form. The last three years, they’ve taken place in authoritarian regimes, and holding them in such places leads nowhere.”
Thunberg added: “Every time those in power get a chance to act, they choose not to and instead listen to industries that destroy the planet and violate human rights, rather than doing what’s right. …The only thing that will come out of it is loopholes, more negotiations, and symbolic decisions that look good on paper but are really just greenwashing.”
And last Friday (November 15), The Guardian reported: “Future UN climate summits should be held only in countries that can show clear support for climate action and have stricter rules on fossil fuel lobbying, according to a group of influential climate policy experts. The group includes former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, the former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, the former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and the prominent climate scientist Johan Rockström.”
That article specifies: “At least 1,773 coal, oil and gas lobbyists have been granted access to Cop29, according to data analysed by the Kick Big Polluters Out activist coalition.”
The Guardian has also reported: “At least 480 lobbyists working on carbon capture and storage (CCS) have been granted access to the UN climate summit… Nearly half of the lobbyists were granted access as members of national delegations, affording them greater access to negotiations [in the exclusive blue zone]…”
For example: “Japan brought a representative from coal giant Sumitomo, while Canada brought representatives from [the oil company] Suncor and [the fracked gas company] Tourmaline, and Italy brought employees of energy companies Eni [that is linked to enabling genocide in Palestine by “fueling Israel’s war machine”] and Enel.
The United Kingdom also brought 20 corporate lobbyists to COP29.
And while UN Special Rapporteurs, including Michel Forst and Mary Lawlor, have highlighted the need for environmental defenders to participate in COP forums, as well as the very real risks they face for doing so, token participation and exclusion from national delegations and real access to negotiations will not address their continued situation of criminalization, judicialization, threats and fatalities.
Cautious hope for COP30?
But while Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva seeks to increase his country’s oil production from the current 3.3 million barrels per day to close to 5 million barrels per day by 2030 (a 40 per cent-plus increase), there appears to be some hope for COP30 scheduled to be held in Belem, Brazil in 2025.
Despite the previous government of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil is not considered to be an authoritarian state the way the last three hosts of COP climate conferences – Azerbaijan, United Arab Emirates, Egypt – are regarded.
Paradoxically some of the hope for COP30 may come from the fact that Brazil is an epicentre for violence against defenders.
According to Justiça Global, on average three defenders have been murdered in Brazil every month over the past four years. In 2023, Brazil experienced the murder of 25 land and environmental defenders.
While the structural flaws of a “green zone” for NGOs and an exclusive “blue zone” for member countries, the dominance of oil and gas lobbyists, and the exclusion of frontline communities from real decision-making should be expected to continue, there remains the cautious glimmer of hope for substantive outcomes perhaps in the same way those expectations were present for COP15 in Copenhagen and COP21 in Paris.
That hope could be easily dashed but Peace Brigades International-Canada will be looking for strategic moments to intervene at COP30 to serve the imperative of greater protections for land and environmental defenders.
The United Nations COP30 Climate conference will take place from November 10 to 21, 2025 in Belém, Pará, Brazil.
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