Solidarity with the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon – EU wins Fossil

Solidarity for Justice Award

Belém, Brazil – Climate Action Network is proud to present this week’s Solidarity for Justice Award to the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon – the frontline defenders of Earth’s greatest living system, and the guardians whose courage makes climate justice possible.

Indigenous environmental defenders in the Amazon face some of the highest levels of violence in the world. More defenders are killed in Latin America each year than anywhere else in the world – and the Amazon is at the heart of that danger. And yet they continue to protect forests, rivers, and territories that sustain the planet, even as their communities are threatened, displaced, and attacked.

Throughout this COP in the Amazon, their presence has been a reminder of what true leadership looks like: steadfast, embodied, and carried at great personal risk. While Indigenous leaders called for protection, rights, and a future rooted in balance with nature, they are met with intensified military presence: automatic rifles and bomb disposal personnel in a conference centre built to host unarmed people fighting for life. 

The message of the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon is clear: a Just Transition cannot be designed about them or around them – it must be shaped with them. Indigenous Nations deserve a permanent seat at the UNFCCC negotiating table, whether or not their colonial governments acknowledge their sovereignty.

We thank the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon for their courage: For marching, for raising your voices, for refusing invisibility, and for insisting on a future grounded in justice and survival. 

In addition, we extend our long-standing solidarity to the People of Palestine, and their bravery in the genocide that Israel continues to unleash despite international condemnation.

We see you all. We honour you all. We stand with you all.

Thank you.

_________________________

Fossil of the Day Award – European Union

Today’s Fossil of the Day Award goes to a Party at COP30 that likes to imagine itself as a true climate leader, but which has revealed itself to be a professional negotiation blocker – with a veritable CV of obstruction tactics and a full menu of ways to stall progress, which it calls “constructive engagement.”

As countries across the Global South wrestle with debt, droughts, floods, and soaring adaptation costs, the European Union has all too often dedicated too much of its energy to protecting banks, trade privileges, and corporate loopholes. Climate leadership, apparently, comes second to keeping accountants comfortable.

The EU’s blocking menu is a masterclass in creative avoidance:

• Blocking public, grant-based finance – offering long speeches about “high ambition” but refusing the predictable, grants-based public finance that many developing countries need. The ambition is loud; the money is silent.
• Stonewalling clarity on Article 9.1 – performing procedural acrobatics to ensure that finance obligations remain as vague as possible. If delay were an Olympic sport, the EU would win gold.
• Refusing to scale up adaptation finance – no response to calls to triple public adaptation finance by 2030, no 2035 signal, no real movement towards making the balance in the US $300bn goal a reality. It’s hard to lead on adaptation when you’re allergic to numbers.
• Two-faced on the Just Transition agenda – selling the Just Transition story with one hand while defending trade and mineral policies that endanger Black, Indigenous, and women human rights defenders with the other. The EU specialises in Justice as branding, not as behaviour.
• Cutting Overseas Development Aid and climate budgets at home – celebrating increased climate finance for 2024 while some member states have been planning deep ODA cuts that will make future delivery increasingly unlikely. It’s the classic trick of pledging with flourish, funding with disappearance.

For this committed and impressively diverse portfolio of obstruction and avoidance, Climate Action Network awards the Fossil of the Day to the European Union.

But we don’t want to suggest that it’s too late for the EU to redeem itself – things can still turn this around.

• It can still walk back into the room as a true partner for a high ambition COP30 outcome across ALL key topics, and not be a roadblock.
• It can match its Just Transition rhetoric by supporting the establishment of a Just Transition Belem Action Mechanism at COP30 as backed by G77+China.
• It can prove that real climate leadership is something you deliver – not something you declare.

The opening is here in Belem.

But it will not remain open for much longer.

Dishonourable Mention – Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia spent the week trying to chip away at the foundations of global climate action – rejecting the ICJ’s landmark opinion on States’ obligations, attacking protections for women environmental defenders, and shrinking human rights in loss and damage to a footnote. It also led sustained attacks on science, pushing to sideline the IPCC, despite the ICJ reaffirming it as the authoritative source of climate science.

-ENDS-

Notes to Editors

1. Photos and video of today’s award ceremony:

Solidarity Award: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1TXavIQ_1HJZqYXn6x7IpdGLZu8_ysXe7?usp=drive_link

FotD: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1coQnzx3BCDykxM9ORy7j2h9UvQ3EwKmD?usp=drive_link 

Stream: https://www.youtube.com/@caninternational/streams  

2. Fossil of the Day happens every day at 6pm in the COP30 Blue Zone, Zone D, Action Area 1. (This is near the delegation offices and before you get to Meeting Room 1.)
3. The Fossil of the Day awards (which now include Ray of the Day and the Solidarity for Justice Award) were first presented at the climate talks in 1999, in Bonn, initiated by the German NGO Forum. During United Nations climate change negotiations (www.unfccc.int), members of the Climate Action Network (CAN), vote for countries judged to have done their ‘best’ to block progress in the negotiations in the last days of talks.

Contact: Attila Kulcsar, CAN International, akulcsar@climatenetwork.org, +44 7472 124872 (WhatsApp)