Proposal
To respond to the capture of the climate negotiations and the worsening of the ecological crisis
While scientists[1] warn about the seriousness of the ecological crisis and the urgency of drastically reducing greenhouse gases, climate and biodiversity negotiations are moving slowly, and there is concern that the next climate change conferences, known as COP27 and COP28, will be held in 2022 and 2023 in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, two oil-producing countries where civil society participation is restricted.
Three decades after the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity, it is clear that this negotiation process is captured by the logic of power and capital, which seeks to hinder energy transition processes in order to maintain the interests of dirty energy.
As Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ puts it: «The drama of political immediatism, sustained also by consumerist populations, provokes the need to produce short-term growth. Responding to electoral interests, governments do not easily expose themselves to irritate the population with measures that could affect the level of consumption or jeopardize foreign investments. The myopia of power building stops the integration of the environmental agenda with a broad view in the public agenda of governments». A negotiation based only on governments that respond primarily to the logic of power rather than to the logic of life cannot build the results we need to face the ecological crisis that is producing the sixth extinction of life on Earth.
Added to this is the capture of the United Nations by large transnational corporations that invest billions of dollars to maintain the status quo of climate negotiations in order to continue profiting from extraction and fossil fuel subsidies, the expansion of the agricultural frontier, and the promotion of false technological[2] and market solutions that impact ecosystems and provoke conflicts within indigenous and social organizations.
The war in Ukraine further aggravates this situation by relaunching dirty energy projects; driving the plunder of regions such as the Amazon and Africa; driving price increases, economic crisis, food crisis and care crisis; hurting the economy of the people, who are just beginning to emerge from the pandemic crisis; and further undermining the already insufficient commitments of the Paris Agreement to curb the planet’s temperature rise.
Civil society participation in climate negotiations has always been limited and insufficient. The few advances that were achieved in climate negotiations were due to social pressure rather than to institutionalized mechanisms for the formal participation of civil society in this process.
The capture of COP27 and COP28 by two countries that do not respect human rights and civil and political liberties is a challenge to rethink our action strategies.
Therefore, from the Amazon we propose to build national and regional Earth Assemblies to advance towards a World Earth Assembly that by the end of 2023 will allow us to unify the resistances, not only in terms of negotiations, but also to forge a broad, diverse and creative movement that unifies and strengthens the different resistances against fossil fuels, mining and the expansion of the agricultural frontier.
Earth Assemblies to articulate action against the different crisis at the environmental, economic, military, political and social levels. There will be no solution to the climate crisis if we only think in terms of climate. The struggle against climate change is intrinsically linked to the struggle for peace, for the survival of territories such as the Amazon, for food sovereignty, for democracy, for human rights and for overcoming the care crisis.
Earth Assemblies not only of peoples but of nature, where we learn to think not only from the human perspective and build non-anthropocentric systemic alternatives that embrace all human and non-human beings of our common home. It is time to embrace alternatives that do not seek growth and progress without limits, but balance among all components of the Earth community, guaranteeing the rights of nature.
Earth Assemblies to build proposals that allow us to reconfigure the roots of the anthropocentric multilateralism dominated by political and economic power, and to forge an effective participation of civil society and nature in the realization of agreements capable of addressing the climate and ecological crisis.
Assemblies of the Earth that practice and build a real democracy that overcomes vertical, autocratic and patriarchal structures, recovering the nexus between feeling and thinking, between spirituality and the materiality of life, and embracing the ethics of the Earth that summons us to recognize ourselves as nature.
Assemblies of the Earth to recover the indigenous vision of «Land without Evils» and build self-managed territories free of oil exploration and exploitation, mining, deforestation, transgenics, contamination, authoritarianism and violence against nature defenders, indigenous people and women.
[1] Sixth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
[2] False technological solutions include, among others, geoengineering and carbon storage and sequestration.
Asamblea Mundial por la Amazonía 
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