“Loss & Damage” beyond charity, into solidarity, and suffused with Climate Justice?

Confronted with its more general ecological debt (not just climate), the Global North may begin to comprehend how many trillions of dollars worth of resources have been spirited out of the eco-South thanks to ‘ecologically unequal exchange’, as a Berkeley research team determined (http://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/jan/21/environmental.debt1).

And for that important goal of consciousness raising, I would have hoped Martin could have pointed out, for the sake of any US allies reading, that a great deal more work is needed to highlight the Global North’s climate debt to the South. (By way of generating a definition, I’d suggest we include South Africa’s climate debt to Africa, and my filthy city of Durban’s to our KwaZulu-Natal provincial hinterland from where we draw cheap labour, food and energy, and my profligate flying compared to my township neighbours’ dangerous kombi-taxi transport.)

Here are a couple of short films that helpfully put the climate debt in Global North-South context: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWfb0VMCQHE (superb!); and http://storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-cap-and-trade/

And third, we urgently need great pilot projects, such as the Ecuadoran people’s strategy to ‘leave the oil in the Yasuni Amazonian soil.’ Such pilots are vital, in part because on many levels Yasuni would have been an excellent inaugural climate debt project. It still may be, if next year’s no-drilling referendum is won by environmentalists, indigenous people and all in Ecuador who care about sumak kawsay or buen vivir: http://ens-newswire.com/2013/10/09/ecuadorean-voters-may-decide-fate-of-yasuni-national-park/

But given the German government’s recent funding flip-flop, that particular pilot requires a great many more supporters in the Global North. They should consider the Yasuni pilot as an ideal-type way to halt fossil fuel extraction and burning, to protect pristine biodiverse sites and indigenous people, and to make a downpayment on the climate debt to a country – like so many – requiring resources for underfunded social programmes (tap in here: http://www.accionecologica.org/ ).

We need more eco-investments of this type, driven by conscious citizenries who argue for environmental protection and restoration, and for a Just Transition away from carbon-addicted capital-intensive economies, to projects like the South African ‘million climate jobs’ campaign (http://www.climatejobs.org.za/).

And what about those ruined by extreme weather, like the Filippino victims of Super Typhoon Yaiyan? Another kind of compensatory climate-debt pilot I think should be considered as a means of avoiding the Loss & Damage funds being frittered away within the aid bureaucracies and corrupt regimes, is the ‘Basic Income Grant’. In one recent case, we witnessed a superb trial run in a Namibian community affected by desertification. In the rural town of Otjivero, mainly women-headed households utilised a $10/month/person grant (donated voluntarily by solidaristic Germans) in salutory ways: http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/Bond%20Sharife%20SPII.pdf

My impression in Warsaw was that only outside the COP19 were the more visionary — yet also eminently practical — discussions underway about how best to raise and spend climate debt. In Peru and Paris for the COP20 and COP21, I suspect power balances will really not have changed enough to warrant UN relegitimation, even if a little trickle moves into a Loss & Damage fund.

So in my view, the appropriate orientation to the UN climate negotiators operating under the thumb of a carbon-trading ‘clean coal’-promoting UNFCCC secretary Christiana Figueras in conjunction with the US State Department, is yet more delegitimation.

That means more work ahead for the incipient Climate Justice movement: acknowledging and moving Loss & Damage beyond emergency charity and UNFCCC distractions, and into systems of sustained solidarity.

We can all agree that climate solidarity is long overdue from North to South. Those lobbying for a carbon tax in many Northern jurisdictions can use climate debt as an opportunity to raise this as one of the worthy spendables. (I think a carbon tax strategy is a mistake, though: too market-related, with too much hope for marginal change rather than the reboot so many of our systems require: http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2013-11-12-at-warsaws-cop19-climate-summit-south-africa-has-no-bragging-rights/#.UpO_d-I64o0 )

And we should take heart, just as so many tens of millions of South Africans did when offered mass-popular anti-apartheid sanctions solidarity, until the point democracy was won in 1994. We learned then that the ability of a global movement to change structures of power can be formidable.

In coming months, getting the CJ house in order will include our making climate debt a stronger and more universal demand, with the opportunity to foreground many more heart-warming pilot projects of our allies in the Global South, such as those in Ecuador, in Namibia – or in the courageously reclaimed urban gardens of an impoverished Detroit once known mainly for building hedonistic autos.

So many people of the Global South are doing so many great things to protect, repair, regenerate and compensate – let’s name these as downpayments on the climate debt, fund them appropriately – and make demands on Northern governments to start chipping in – so we can finally build a low-carbon, post-capitalist, ecologically-sound society of the commons, on the foundations of these initial climate-creditor inspirations.