A Sud, a partner of the 3° International Conference on Degrowth Venice 2012, will be in Durban during the next UN summit on climate on behalf of RIGAS, the Italian Network for Environmental and Social Justice. We publish their paper.

… The previous summits have failed because there is clearly a lack of political will from the governments to implement concrete measures to reduce the climate altering gases and reverse the trend before it is too late. Indeed, Copenhagen and Cancun have shown how everything – even the climate emergency causing 300,000 deaths a year (with an increasing number of whom are our fellow citizens, as shown by the national news) and forcing ten millions of people to migrate for environmental reasons – can be used as a gear in the capitalistic system which is feeding on everything. And so, the instruments to finance the ecological crisis are imposing in the negotiations: carbon trade, REDD+, geo-engineering. Further sources of speculation while the causes of the climatic upheavals remain undisturbed and while the extreme climate events continue to increase in frequency and intensity.

There are two fundamental misunderstandings which are good to reveal. One is to think that the climatic upheavals issue is far away from us, referring to tropical cyclones and desertification in Africa. It is not like that. The continuous floods affecting the territory should open our eyes on the spillover effects of climate change also occurring here, at home. In this sense, our politics, the governments as well as the opposition, need to address these issues, take positions and develop proposals to stop these climatic imbalances. To reduce the carbon emissions, they should invest in industrial restructuring, in mass transportation, in a widespread energetic model based on renewable energies.

The other misunderstanding is about the intervention priorities implemented by the governments for the supposed “development” of the territories and the entire country, often with the approval of the opposition. An example among all: they prefer to invest public money and years of propaganda in the construction of the unlikely and expensive bridge on the Stretto rather than to invest in securing the territory of Messina, which has been brought to its knees by a devastating flood in 2009.

In a time where one talks only about debt crisis, according to the priorities dictated by the European agenda, it is essential to see that the economic crisis is only a part of a larger crisis, planetary, the ecological crisis. A crisis on which our own survival depends more than on any other question of economic or financial nature.

A Sud will be in Durban during the work of the UN summit, on behalf of RIGAS, the Italian Network for Environmental and Social Justice, to participate in moments of discussion and mobilization of the civil society, which offers proposals and experiences a lot more concrete and effective than those emerging from the governments.

We are making this call so that the media deal with the seriousness and consistency that such an urgent topic deserves: too often, the voice of citizens and the proposals of movements and associations are simply being silenced or censored by the hysteric shouting of the politics. A topic which is, in the case of the climate, far from being technical, involves factors of political, social and economic nature. And above all, our lives.

A Sud