 Welcome to one of the first sessions of this conference on fossil fuel supply and climate policy. This session will be about indigenous and community-led resistance to fossil fuels. I will be your moderator. My name is Ximena Warnars. I work at the Ford Foundation based out of New York. And it is really my pleasure and honor to be here and to be able to moderate this session and being among friends and colleagues. I'm especially excited because I've also worked very closely and supported a number of indigenous resistance and litigation in various countries for about two decades. So I'm very excited to do that. So we are here to listen, to learn and to share some innovative and promising experiences from local struggles, stopping fossil fuel projects, which is, as you all know, very important for our climate, for territories, for oceans, for livelihoods and indigenous rights. We have 75 minutes and I will present the panelists and each of them will share their stories and then we'll save the questions and discussions for the end. So please keep those questions in mind or noted down for the end of the session. To the panelists, each one of you have ten minutes and I apologize beforehand if I cut you off if you go past the ten minutes. But so then let me start with the introductions. In order of presentation, Nonce Mutuma from the Amidaba Crisis Committee from South Africa. Johann Lorenzen from the Richard Sport Incorporate Attorneys. Angelina Robertson from Stand Earth. Kevin Koening from Amazon Watch and Kate Horner from Amazon Frontlines. So without any further ado, I'll hand it over to you, Nonce. Thank you so much for getting this opportunity. Yes, my name is Nonce from South Africa. I'm a human rights land defender. Yeah, we've been facing with quite a lot of issues in South Africa because of the crisis economy that we are facing, especially in the rural areas where people are living because it seems it's a space for a plifting economy. It's just been known as a place where there's no people, whereas we are living there. We've been facing with quite a lot of challenges where the mining they discovered the minerals where we're living, where our livelihood is there. And the government always go ahead and give the mining rights to those mining companies. Without consulting people, without considering that we existing. And we as communities fighting those battles, not just for the livelihood and also for the planet, which is something that at this stage our state is not considered the planet as something needs to be protected. The only thing that is ahead is making profit. There was first attempt where they discovered titanium in our ancestral land. And we fought that battle. And we won in 2018 where the judgment says that the people of Amadeba must give a full free prior informed consent before any mining right, which was a big judgment for all of us, not for the people of South Africa. Because mostly when these mining companies they come to our communities, they always promising jobs to our communities without even consider that these jobs are short term. But what they've done, they destroy the sustainable development that is there. And they don't even consider that. You know, when we want that, it was a good thing. But unfortunately our own state willing to appeal that judgment that if that judgment it goes ahead is going to cause a chaos. That means there will be no mining in South Africa because all the communities will use this judgment that they must give a consent, which is something they conduct it themselves because they are part of the UN binding treaties where the free prior informed consent they sign for. But now when it comes to the judgment, they just differ. And it was not only that case. Also, while we're fighting the land mining recently, they just discovered oil and gas in our wild coast ocean where they want to explore oil and gas. Again, as communities we stand up against a shell, which is the company that they want to extract those oil and gas. And we said no oil and gas, but yes to ocean and yes to life. That's what we're saying. Again, we were alone at our own when we fight that battle. The state always sleeping with the same blanket would be cooperates. And they will keep saying that they're going to create jobs because our community is one of the poor of the poorest. But if our community is one of the poor of the poorest, why they choose the oil and gas because oil and gas is not going to create any jobs for our community. Instead is going to create poverty. Right now in our community, there is no poverty. Our livelihood it dependent from the ocean. And we are fishing in a sustainable way where we are not taking everything where we just fish for it, not fish to sell. You know, this is how we should do things. But you can see that even if we fish to it, the regulations are very biased towards the communities. We given the licenses that are very limited to catch the fishes. But the big companies, they given the big licenses where they can just wipe everything in the ocean. That is why also on the issue of Shell, our own government were just going ahead and then to grant the right to explore the oil and gas where we interdict that. And many people were saying that no, you are wasting your time. This time around Shell, it's a biggest company in the world. It has money. Now you are just a community, you don't have money. Don't fight Shell. Shell is a giant company. But we know that we are small. We are few, but we are very well organized. That's what we are proud of. And they said, you know, many people said that, you know, to fight Shell, you don't have enough information to argue because, you know, our communities are just being known of uneducated. And we told them that, yes, we are uneducated. But when it comes to the ocean and land, we are the professors, and nobody can tell us anything. We live, we're born, and we don't need to go to be schooled about our ocean and about our land. That is how we just get confidence to go to court and fight that issue of Shell. And we want this year, again, that Shell must consider our spirituality, our culture, and also the climate impact, which is something that it tells us our judicial system. It still works in South Africa. And if it wasn't, the way South Africa is in crisis, we were not expecting much in our courts of law. But we were really, really surprised that our judicial system, it still works when they also mentioned the climate crisis that we are facing because we were just worried that the energy crisis that we are facing in South Africa, it will give more impact to our judgment that they will judge according to the crisis that we are facing because the energy crisis. I can say South Africa is in dark right now. It's low-shading, left-hand center. It's not about we don't have enough energy. The energy is there. The problem is the corruption because there is a lot of power stations that are not being fixed. Now, instead of fixing the existing power station, they are just changing the will to say, no, let's go and have our own oil and gas, which is not the way we're supposed to do things. Right now, we just need all of us to look at the climate change that we are facing at the ecological crisis that we are facing. But it's clear that our government is not looking for that. It's looking for making more profit. That is the situation that we are facing. And we said that before the court judgment in September this year, we're saying that if we lose this judgment against Shell, it means that the planet lost. And if we win, it means that the planet win. This is our argument right now. And right now it means that the planet win. But it's not the end of the battle. This is the beginning of the battle because a few days, Shell together with our own state, they said that they're going to appeal the decision, which means they're still a long way to go to fight. And we're still going to fight all what we need as communities. We need to be organized ourselves because the enemy hate the organized communities. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for the inspiring stories and really lots of similarities with what we just heard in the opening session with our keynote speaker. Over to you, Johan. Thanks. I'm Johan. It's been the privilege of my lifetime to be one small part of the wonderful legal team that represents Nantes community, which is often called the Coloveni community, which is a village along the coast of the Amadeba community. And I was saying to Kate, it's been quite a challenge thinking about what to say in this forum. So it's been shifting a lot as I go along. And I am, but it my initial thought and the title is land first and the rest followed and reflection on the modest role that lawyers have played. And I want to still start with that because I think as there's a growing appreciation of the powerful role that indigenous peoples are playing, I think in stopping fossil fuels and in limiting production of coal in limiting and extract unsustainable extractivism. I think there needs to be a reflection of how do people like those who are in this room stand in solidarity with those communities and work with them. And what has been quite useful for me is coming with my small skill set and being one tool in the toolkit that the community has for resistance, and that the broader picture of the Coloveni community's resistance to extractivism has been fundamentally about their self-determination. And I do want to just make clear by the end, I want everyone to appreciate that there's no using that communities aren't just a tool in the toolkit of environmentalists to stop climate change. That won't work if you are not standing with communities in the full spectrum of what their self-determination means. It's the only way that this is a victorious strategy. So a little bit about the way we approached the case, which it was in early November last year that notices went up in newspapers that Shell was planning on commencing a seismic survey of the Wild Coast. And where a ship, ironically enough, after Nemonte's presentation, called the Amazon Warrior, was going to be blasting every 10 seconds for five months along the Wild Coast. And the notice was met with nationwide outrage, with environmentalists swiftly organizing protests around Shell stations and people going to beaches to save the Wild Coast. The petition was put to the South African government to block the seismic blasting and gain thousands of signatures. Environmentalists went to court with specialist lawyers to bring a stop to the blasting. That was unsuccessful. It was really only the mobilization of communities, including Coloveni, but throughout the Wild Coast who were then able to articulate their stories in a way that was powerful enough for the court to intervene. And that led to the worship, as our advocate called it, being stopped on the 28th of December. And just a word in terms of the strategy is we're often encouraged as lawyers to be creative, to win these types of cases. And I've always found that to be not quite the right word. It's our clients who are creative. They're just creatures of instructions, as we say in the law. I've been reflecting on these words from Zadie Smith that writing is routinely described as creative and that's never struck her as the correct words. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a flower is to participate in some way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control. It's taking this large and shapeless bewilderment and pouring it into molds of our devising. And so, no enclave is sketched out and we'll get to some of the pictures that the Coloveni community is living and breathing the cyclic miracle of creation. It's our job as lawyers to mold that miracle into a story compelling enough for judges sitting thousands of kilometers away. And the reason why I'm saying this is not just about our approach. It's to say that as you consider ways that you can be standing in solidarity with the community, be with communities around the world, including the Montes, including non-clays, be thinking about how the creativity comes from those communities and how you can bring your own skill set and your own unique background to be standing in solidarity with the communities. Turning back to the land, I mean the phrase some of you might know, the land first and the rest shall follow, was the liberation movement of the Pan-African Congress captured imaginations. But for me what's been striking about that is it certainly seems that the colonialists took that approach. That of claiming political jurisdiction of land and the rest following. When we look at the history of both conservation and extraction in Southern Africa, where black people were on top of minerals they were forcibly removed, where they were in and often conservation would be developed as part and parcel of those removals together with commercial agriculture. And this was meant to change, of course, after apartheid. And unfortunately it hardly did. So our firm first got into these fights around the Mohalla-Kwena Platinum mine, the world's largest opencast platinum mine. And there the democratic government decided that what was sufficient was the traditional leadership's agreement. And they allowed platinum mining to commence and expected communities to negotiate compensation for as mine blasts cracked their homes, as their grazing and plowing fields went under mountains of mineways. And we came in too late and the court said that they would not grant an interdict because the community had not approached the court timeously. And when my boss Richard went on to the radio to call the mines conduct corrupt, two things happened. And he was personally sued for millions of rands and defamation. And a social worker also heard him and invited him down to visit Poloveni. And so learning lessons from those communities and learning lessons from the global movement towards free, prior and informed consent. And principally learning lessons from the community, a strategy was developed for asserting self-determination that was rooted in the community's own indigenous form of democratic and accountable self-governance with an ethic of stewardship of the land that they had. And so in fending off, one of the reasons why the community was able to fend off the titanium mine was having gone through the 1990s, having an initial moment of hope and aspiration with democracy where the government came and worked with them to develop community-based conservation schemes where jobs were being created and wealth was being created. So there's a very clear sense of an alternative way forward for the community. So it wasn't just that we're saying the community says no to mining. It's not only a right of consent, it's not only a right to say no. It's a right to say yes enthusiastically. And so with resisting a toll road, with resisting the imposition of a smart city, of the mine and of gambling company the community, when Shell came, the partnership with the lawyers was not something where we were learning on the job what the community's voice was. So the community was able to articulate this powerful narrative, sadly out of practice, sadly out of a muscle of having to go to court and so it came together really by chance with a few phone calls being made that this interdict came together. It very nearly didn't happen and that's where I think the conversations of having you in the room and from all of your various backgrounds is so important because there's too much chance if you're leaving it up to lawyers and the courts as Nonce says and there's also nothing romantic about expecting communities to use their own parties to prevent these developments from happening. Our late chairperson Bazooka Khadebe was assassinated and we still haven't had justice for him and so the solidarity of this group that I'm hoping for is a solidarity both to help the community be a stronger shield for themselves and for the planet but also to change the game so that the community doesn't need to be fighting and putting their bodies on the line so that we can have a transformed world and that's what I'm hoping for out of view. Thanks for your patience. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yes, it's amazing to also hear about all the different kinds of tools there and a sad point to end on about how also these resistance movements also lead to a lot of repression and killings of friends and colleagues. So we'll hear now from Angelina first I believe and then from Ken. Thanks and thanks for those powerful and compelling presentations and almost for creating a perfect segue because I also am just sort of providing a service and pouring my skill set into a context in which Indigenous people have shown leadership and creativity in creating opposition strategies. So we'll be talking about how we can inform Indigenous led opposition strategies with supply chain research which is a very narrow and admittedly quite dull area of research sometimes but can provide some important opportunities. So just to give you context of why we do this research. The impetus was really about a request from Indigenous organizations fighting oil and gas in the Amazon to find new ways to one build leverage and to open up different avenues of accountability for the industry and for the government. They had been fighting seeing and we heard this morning from a Mante and her powerful presentation about the rights violations, the lack of free part informed consent, pollution and sickness in communities, food insecurity, water quality issues, oil spills happening daily in the region, biodiversity loss in deforestation, I'm just going to start my timer so I don't run over, and corruption and violence. And they really wanted to know what other actors in this constellation of strategies could be targeted to help move the needle on finding leverage and accountability. And they asked us to look at customers for Amazon oil and also for the banks that were financing the industry. So we put out a report because what we found when we tracked Amazon oil was that almost 50% of all the oil that's exported from the Amazon crude oil goes to California. We found tracing the oil through the refineries and also through the consumption patterns within the state and through its exports that about one in nine gallons of gas diesel and jet fuel consumed in the state comes from the Amazon. And about 89% of that comes from Ecuador. Sorry, from the Ecuadorian Amazon. In Southern California, it's even more concentrated. And it's Los Angeles International Airport, for example, it's one in every six gallons of jet fuel pumped into a plane comes from the Amazon. So this is a Sankey diagram, something I'm quite familiar with in my work. And just to give you a sense of what it what it's like to trace oil, we have to look at various different data sources. And we look at crude stream characteristics and crude streams to try to geographically identify the origin of the oil in country and then look through all these different trade flow data sets exports and imports to trace it out of the country. And find where it's going and then we look at this pattern over and we hope five to 10 years in order to see if our what we're seeing our steady trends. And this is really just the tip of the iceberg so tracing it into country and then allowing that informing indigenous opposition strategies with this information is really an opportunity for them to engage with the state of California. But also, we have to think about with the impact of strategies like asking the California government to consider reducing their reliance on Amazon oil. So some next steps of our research to look at leakage to look at what other oil sources might come into play if Amazon oil is taken out of the equation. And how are there just transition strategies that could support an overall reduction in oil consumption in a place like California, which would allow for the reduction of their reliance on Amazon oil, but without shifting it to say Arctic oil or tar sands oil. We also looked at banks and we found first something surprising in our customs data that we could actually trace trade financing, which turned out to be an important source of credit for the oil trade from the Amazon. And we found that because letters of credit require that the bank providing the trade financing be the consignee and for the barrel of oil coming into the into the into the United States in this case. We were able to identify 19 banks who traded about 155 million barrels of Amazon crude about $10 billion in financing. And we identified the top six banks responsible for that trade and of those top six through through strategies that Kevin will elaborate on. We were able to see commitments from four of them to exclude that trade financing for Amazon oil for our financial flow research. We did look at various different sources of information Bloomberg SEC filings company and bank annual reports sustainability reports and policies, investor presentations and things like this so it's a combination of publicly available information and great literature. And what we wanted to see next was of the banks that we had identified in the research but also other banks that we knew were financiers of the Amazon oil and gas sector. What did this finance did the financing align with their ESG and exclusion policies or climate policies and things like that. And so we did a scorecard in which we were looking at risk management within their policies and their risk exposure measured in the amount of financing they were providing to the sector. So we identified about 155 companies operating in the Amazon oil and gas sector look through all of their financing and identified the top 14 banks that we were concerned with. And looked if their ESG policies and exclusions and climate policies were able to manage the risk of their complicity in Amazon destruction in the violation of Indigenous peoples rights, in pollution and corruption, biodiversity loss and deforestation. And we found that most of them failed to do this even when they thought they were creating policies that would address this they missed very key points within those policies that would actually would actually curtail their investment or their financing. And that they had many, many loopholes, which allowed all sorts of financing to occur. And I probably should leave it to questions to talk about some more of those that there's a whole myriad of ways that the financial world has adapted to the pressures put on them in order to still provide their clients with the kinds of financing they're looking for but do it in ways that they are less accountable for. And this was the result of that scorecard we really looking at risk management versus risk exposure, the laggards, the front runners and identifying, excuse me, how banks either they have no policies in place, or they have policies in place but they don't follow them. So the ones on the bottom side of the of this chart. The scatter graph are banks that don't have the policies in place, and the ones on the sort of mid upper side or ones that have policies, but don't actually follow them and you can see that the European banks tend to have the policy in place but lots of loopholes and American banks tend to not have the policies in place. Again, a sort of trend that we saw across the board. And we're actually still working on this, the financial flows as well. We're looking at gathering all of this financial information into a database which will make publicly available that identifies about 220 different banks that are involved in financing the Amazon oil and gas sector across Columbia, Peru, Ecuador and Brazil. And the amount of funding that they're providing the types of funding and also whether they're providing projects to say carbon bomb projects in the in the region, or major projects which we know can have incredibly incredibly negative impact on Indigenous communities. So that work is forthcoming. But that just gives you a sense of, you know, how we were trying to provide information to Indigenous groups across the Amazon, particularly in Ecuador to inform their opposition strategies. It's a modest contribution to what is a huge and long standing effort on their behalf to fight the oil and gas sector and expansion of that sector. But we feel like it's an opportunity to provide some actors outside of the national context, foreign banks and foreign governments, who may be willing to listen to Indigenous people when they tell their story and they testify to the impacts of the industry. And make decisions that the government and the industry in country can influence. And that can provide these points of leverage, which Kevin will talk about next. Great. Thank you, Angeline. So basically, yeah, I'm going to talk about, so we've done all this research and we're going to kind of try to lead us through a little bit of some of the concrete examples of the impact that has had. But I did want to circle back for a second to what Angeline was mentioning at the beginning around the, you know, the why, you know, why do this research and I think another thing to mention is, you know, when we were first considering this and having the conversations with the regional Indigenous organization in Ecuador and Cueca, the umbrella Amazonian Indigenous organization, one of the things that we're really looking at and considering too was just, you know, the different dynamics and what's changed on the ground in the country, right. And so you also had a couple of things at play, right. You had a major influx of state-run companies, primarily Chinese state-run companies, but also a big expansion of Petro Ecuador. They're playing a bigger role. So some of the traditional strategies that we had been using over the years, you know, shareholder advocacy, direct corporate campaigning weren't effective in a state-run enterprise scenario. Then you also had a huge influx of small sort of EMP players that, you know, with no downstream retail, it was hard to link any brands to that as well. So we, you know, a lot of this came out of this real need to look for new actors, look for new avenues of accountability. And so basically what we did when the research came in, you know, we sat down with Indigenous organizations and tried to map out a strategy of what do we do with it now, right. And so particularly we looked at the bank work that Angelin was explaining and began a series of basically dialogue with all those top six banks. And so that involved, yeah, lots of conversations with Stan and Amazon Watch and Konfonyi and Koika with the banks. And it was basically the first agreement came in after six months. And so to mention, you know, Angelin laid out, there were the four banks that made commitments. And yeah, to just dive into a little bit of the details, I mean, it was a significant, it was a big deal. Basically we had four banks that committed to restrict financing for any crude coming out of Ecuador and Peru, right. And collectively the banks were responsible for 85% of the trade finance. So it was a huge blow just with those four banks. But then additionally, we had a, we were in dialogue with UBS and Rabobank. UBS does not mean a commitment, but they have been declining some of the crude transactions. Rabobank interestingly said basically on the eve of our report that they were already doing it and that they were going to rule out doing it in the future. So there was an interesting, in that six months of dialogue, there was interesting, as Jen Angelin mentioned, you know, some of the banks had policies on the books and weren't applying them and others created new ones. So, you know, again, what does this mean on the ground? So basically, as I said, 85% of the trade finance, it was 10 billion in trade financing over 10 years, right. And so, you know, as Bloomberg said, I mean, these lines of credit are the lifeline of the Ecuadorian oil industry. So it put Petro-Equador in a really hard position. So essentially, yeah, what it forced Petro-Equador to do, and you can see this article up here, I mean, basically in the national newspaper saying Petro-Equador is encountering a financial blockade from four European banks, right. And it basically forced Petro-Equador to do something that was pretty unprecedented. And most of the times you see something like this, if there's sanctions involved or something, right, but they basically had to almost double their list of banks approved to issue guarantees, right. And then they had to implement a whole series of measures to make it, yeah, basically easier for buyers to participate. And clearly the statement from Petro-Equador, you know, they had to take these measures because of the difficulty in obtaining letters of credit from some of these international banks as a result of these restrictions. So all of this though comes at a really important time, right. It had a big, it really started to restrict Petro-Equador's ability to get its product to market, right. And as well, it certainly damaged their brand in addition to a whole bunch of corruption scandals that were happening. And it came at a really critical time for Petro-Equador because the government of Guillermo Naso had made doubling the oil production during his administration a major priority, right. And so just on this map up here, all those green areas, that's where current production is happening. So he was looking to greatly expand extraction in those areas. And then the southern Amazon, those gold blocks there, those were all going to be basically concessions that were going to be tendered this year for new exploration. These are roadless, largely old growth, pristine forests, all indigenous territory. So you have a scenario where basically with this research, the banks are putting restrictions on Petro-Equador. And at the same time, our work in California to affect the market for Ecuador's number one project is also at play. Here just some, interestingly, this is the part of Ecuador's expansion plans. But the quote up there is from the president and basically him recognizing that now that the world is realizing they need to keep fossil fuels in the ground, that Ecuador better get their oil out as fast as possible. And here's just one of the first wells happening in the remote part of Yasuni. And yeah, you know, and so turning our eyes to California a little bit, I mean, as Angelin mentioned, it's still to me astounding the fact that Ecuador, I mean, the country is the size of the state of Nevada in the United States as a small country and it's the number one foreign source of oil for California. Back in the numbers that we ran earlier, but then yeah, also in 2021, and now given everything with Russia, we expect those numbers to also to go higher. And obviously coming to a state that touts itself as a climate hero, right? But they're the number one consumer of this problematic crude. So there, this obviously is more of a market strategy and we're having conversations with the Newsom administration and other the Ministry of the Environment in California. And obviously we're, you know, we're targeting them to first of all get the governor to admit that California has a problem, right? It's an addict first step obviously is admit you have a problem. And so we're really looking for him to do that. But of course in line with the overall demands around the phase out and a refinery ramp down. But, you know, and I'm not sure in terms of the demand, you know, the scissor analogy, right? But I think we're all familiar with both sides of the blade and, you know, whether this really qualifies on that demand side of the scissor. But what we're really looking to do though is to leverage movement and a concern from California in Ecuador. And to add that to the list of problematic things that force the government to curtail its exploration for crude. Here's just some photos of actions that were happening targeting both Ecuadorian President Lasso, Governor Newsom in California. And this is my attempt to do what I think young people do right on Instagram, how it started, how it's going thing. But it's important because the first slide how it started that was a presentation from last February from the Ecuadorian government. You know, Somos Ricos this is their plan all those red blocks up for auction up for extraction, right? And now the upcoming event is happening in October of this year's and the title of it is new. Yeah, basically new energy challenges in Ecuador. So it's a dramatic change. And, you know, maybe I'll just close by saying I think that, you know, obviously spoiler alert these these strategies I think are important they're building leverage over the government over Petra Ecuador. Obviously, you know, blocking in Petra Ecuador's ability to expand, we're affecting the market in California so that the the market for its number one biggest product. But, you know, obviously these strategies go hand in hand with a whole bunch of other strategies that we heard the months in talking about this morning, we'll hear from Kate as well. And I think that, you know, when you add up the all the strategies together these are all ingredients, but I think when they're all happening at the same time. They start to build a recipe that can pretty can be pretty effective I think at restricting fossil fuel supply on the ground. So I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you Kevin. Hi everyone. My name is Kate. I have the privilege of working with the montane and chemo and Amazon front lines. We had originally imagined the Monta being a part of this panel but for reasons that are perhaps obvious now to you all she was invited to give the opening keynote and share some of that visionary struggle of her ancestral wisdom her people's wisdom to inform our collective struggles to phase out fossil fuels. I'm going to talk a little bit more about the legal basis for that claim, drawing some links to the global applicability of those rights and discussing some of the broader political economy implications of indigenous resistance to fossil fuels. I want to start by by trying to dimension the scale and importance of this topic. This is similar to the map that Kevin showed globally speaking indigenous peoples claim and manage 50% of the world's land, 80% of the global biodiversity. This is obviously a map of the Ecuadorian Amazon it's not the sum total of Ecuadorian petroleum production but it is the vast majority on the right in multiple colors you'll see indigenous territory. On the left is mining allocations and it's a little hard to see I don't know if this has a. Yeah, the green doesn't show up on the forested photos in the north, the historic center of oil production and in the south as Kevin was mentioning is the frontier and expansion of land block 22 is in the left hand side of that blue stretch in the middle that's where on the territory that Monta spoke about. Now, obviously, not every country is going to have the same scale of overlap, but in a world where indigenous peoples control 50% of the world's land, I think it merits considering the extent to which rights intersect with fossil fuel production and supply. It's a threshold question that we have to be considering across all of our work and in all of our strategies. This is obviously the story of one country but I think taken alongside the South African case that you've just heard I think it offers some important lessons for our global community. Ecuador is a heavily oil dependent economy with deeply entrenched interests and a strong desire to grow oil extraction and still indigenous peoples in that context are finding new and innovative ways to resist that production. And really changing the game in terms of policy approaches nationally. I think that's especially important in terms of what we heard this morning in terms of the gaps within emerging economies. Historically, the Warani have defended their lands with spears from external invasions which have become a symbol of their struggle and territorial defense. I think it's important to recognize that indigenous peoples are innovators. They're holders of ancestral wisdom, but they're also incorporating new technologies and new sources of wisdom to defend their lands. The map that Nemonte spoke about uses camera traps, GPS technology, drones to cover nearly 200,000 hectares of pristine remote forest. It covers more than 10,000 GPS points and it was a process of collective mapping where young people who had learned the tools to map gathered together with their elders to document their hunting trails, their fishing sites, where their ancestral medicine is the trees to build canoes and fortified their community based struggle in that process. When the community learned of the consultation, the so called consultation that the government had conducted, they came together to plan a strategy of action and resistance. And the basis of that claim was that the government had an obligation to conduct free prior and informed consultation as per the Ecuadorian Constitution, but failed to do so. And I want to talk just a little bit more about this right of FPIC. FPIC is a collective human right of indigenous peoples to give or withhold consent for activities that and policies that affect their lands. It's grounded in the fundamental right to self determination. It's not simply a procedural requirement. The UN Human Rights Council noted that it's a manifestation of indigenous peoples right to self determine their political, social, economic and cultural priorities. Therefore, we have to think about FPIC in a wider context and it has to be differentiated from terms that perhaps as environmental communities might understand as participation and consultation in decision making. I want to also emphasize that when we think about this as a tool for self determination, it's also about maintaining and supporting indigenous communities in furthering and advancing their ancestral wisdom, their collective identity that offers us a new way of relating and thinking about the world in which we live. It's about broadening the scope and aperture of our thinking about what's the problem that we're trying to solve and listening to indigenous peoples in their wisdom. It's a key pillar of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. And I want to note here too that the specific article in the UN DRIPS doesn't envision a single moment nor a single action but a process of good faith dialogue and negotiation to achieve consent. The Ecuadorian Constitution explicitly recognizes collective rights, it recognizes self determination, and in the Constitution itself the language that they use is free prior and informed consultation. That is less than the international standard of consent, but through the indigenous led strategies there has been important advances in the national jurisprudence. Something that is a trend that's happening globally. I want to just briefly mention what these elements mean. This is way too small to read and I apologize for that. Free, it has to be free from intimidation, coercion, and manipulation. And indigenous peoples have the freedom to use their traditional governance structures. It has to take place in advance of the policy measure action and not launch the later stage to just rubber stamp something. It has to be adequate information and time to grapple with the often highly technical language. It has to be presented in a language that indigenous peoples understand and there needs to be culturally appropriate procedures for engaging indigenous communities. Consent can only be achieved when the first three threshold criteria have been met. And the withholding of consent can indicate any number of things including that the process was flawed, it's not in their best interests, or that there's a legitimate distrust in the government's good faith. If the leaders of your community are being criminalized, they're under threat, their assassinations take place, it's extremely difficult to conduct an f-pick process in that context. The map that the Warani communities built was fundamental in demonstrating the special relationship that indigenous peoples have with their lands. And it was fundamental in establishing their right to f-pick. And in 2019, the panel of judges ruled that the Ecuadorian government must repeat the process in these communities and must adequately train the ministry in conducting f-pick processes. The ruling itself protected 200,000 hectares of indigenous lands directly, but because the government had applied the same f-pick consultation process to the whole of the many oil blocks that were up for auction at that time, it indirectly protected several hundred thousand more because that prior consultation process had been ruled unconstitutional. I want to just briefly mention another community in the north, the Aikofan community of Sinangwe, who similarly brought suit against the government when the indigenous land patrols who were patrolling their territory found that the government had allocated mining concessions adjacent to their land without their prior consultation. In that instance, and importantly, establishing a precedent, the government ruled that the courts ruled that the government has an obligation to conduct f-pick even when the activity happens outside of indigenous lands, but has a meaningful impact on those lands. In 2020, the Constitutional Court of Ecuador selected both the Warani and Sinangwe cases for constitutional review. We were hoping that they would consider them jointly, they've taken them sequentially one at a time, and the court in February of this year established the historic right to consent. It goes beyond the Constitution, which had previously recognized only consultation to recognize consent. It forms a growing body of jurisprudence globally recognizing f-pick as we transition from a human rights norm recognized in international instruments to more binding, more operational jurisprudence at the national level. And it happened after the very first Constitutional Court hearing in indigenous territory in Ecuador. So there's really incredible footage of judges. It's time to wrap up. Oh boy. Just one more slide, I think. The Warani case is still pending at the Constitutional Court, but we anticipate that they'll provide additional jurisprudence on standards and protocols. Just very quickly, the indigenous movement in Ecuador has proven to be quite important political actors in the national policy development. The two decrees that Kevin mentioned were the subject of litigation in 2021 when they were first issued. And in June of this year, the indigenous movement mobilized a national strike across the whole of the country, shutting down the country for nearly 18 days and forcing the government to the negotiating table, at which point they agreed to derogate the executive decree on doubling oil production and revise the mining decree to include f-pick. It is a major, major win for the indigenous movement. And just a couple of weeks ago, as a part of the dialogue groups, they agreed to a short-term moratorium on the expansion frontier and to not issue new mining permits until a new law on f-pick is developed. Can I just say two slides for quickly? I know you're right at the end. I just want to say to reiterate I think the points that Johann and Kevin have mentioned, that indigenous peoples are key rights holders and political actors capable of achieving meaningful reform and that indigenous peoples' rights need to be considered as a part of our broader fossil fuel strategies. And that community-based collective governance is key to these strategies. Sorry for going over. No, thank you very much. And thank you to all the panelists for keeping on time. It made my job easier. It went well. I just wanted to give two points of reflection, if I may, as moderator. And just to take a step back, that all of these kind of acupuncture pressure points that we use has been really, really key for both these movements related to oil as well as for other ones related to mining and also stopping deforestation. And it's really clear, as Nonne was also saying, how if communities are organized, it's the principal element for then our collective struggles together with lawyers, scientists, research, communications, efforts to really push for these kinds of outcomes. But I also want to say how, you know, in Latin America in particular, around free pride and form consent and the use of consultation has also been used to stop mining projects for over two or three decades. And there are some really emblematic cases there that are very much worth studying that also can share a lot of lessons for oil-impacted communities or communities where oil wants to go in. And also want to remark how incredibly emblematic and important it is the case in the wild coast in South Africa. Their struggle started in around 1996 and it wasn't until 2018 that they got a statement from the court saying that they had to stop the mining there based on this topic, on this right to free pride and form consent. And if I'm not mistaken, it was the first case on the continent to win that kind of, to win that, to win. So extremely worthwhile also speaking with her and, and oh, Johan afterwards about that. Clearly this is a collective effort and I think also with, with all of that it is definitely a way also forward in terms of stopping projects, which is important locally, but it's also extremely relevant globally for people who are living in other parts of the world to get to know the local struggles and link those up with also a global climate movement. So I just wanted to share some of my own reflections there and kind of wrapping that up and open it up for questions or comments and discussions. So we'll start here with a young man and then we'll take, is that, can you please say your name, where you're from and who you're directing the question to? And if you don't mind, we can take two or three questions and then do a second round. Okay, I got confused when you said young man. Thanks. I'm Karl from Denmark Aubrey University. First of all, thank you very much for this super interesting and inspiring session. I normally don't work in this environment, so it's very, it's very exciting for me. And I hope it's okay to ask silly questions, even though we are in Oxford. So it's maybe to Nonley and Nemonde and all the others. Thank you so much for all your work and your struggles and it's really super inspiring. I was wondering, as a silly question, so now we are going from one battle to the next, it seems. What is the long term in this? Can we at some point stop battling and just say, okay, we just don't do it anymore? No more, no more extractions and I don't have a good answer to it myself, but it seems to me that I guess more people have to become indigenous simply, just to grow the group of people that are aligned and are together on this. So I don't know if it would be about inviting some executives into the forest and living into the communities just to bring them together. What we work with in our protected northern European bubble is co-development. So I guess the question of if it is not oil, what else could be acceptable will come up at some point. And so would that be a way for forward to co-develop alternatives that bring value, first of all, to the indigenous communities could be by adding nature values, by adding to the diversity in these areas. Yeah, so I stop here. Thank you. And we'll take one question, yes? Here. And then, so there was one, yes, the lady. Thank you. Sorry. My name is Felipe Corral. I study at Theo Berlin in Germany. And my question is a little bit to the whole panel. So before, in the initial remarks, we heard that there is a huge expansion in renewable energies that is needed to solve the climate puzzle. And we've heard from the Monte and from the speakers here that until now, usually the way that the fossil fuel supply works implies almost inherently that communities are to be impacted, intervened, displaced, dispossessed to some extent. And the question is, to what extent do you think we're missing a conversation, honest conversation on coloniality in these kind of spaces, like in the praxis of transitions. So to begin not reproducing now what's happening with oil, gas and coal in a couple of years with copper, lithium, iron ore, et cetera. Hello. Thank you all for your presentations. My name is Amanda, and I work for a sustainable finance think tank in Germany. And I have a question for Angeline. So you said you were engaging with banks that are funding oil and gas extraction. My question is how and how has that process been? As kind of a follow up, I was wondering maybe it's easy for banks to identify where there's oil and gas extraction funding happening in their portfolios. But I'm curious, okay, and if not, you know, how are they doing that? And I'm curious about how banks can identify commodity driven deforestation in their portfolios and are there any lessons from what you've seen, how banks do that for oil and gas extraction? Thanks. Thank you for your questions. No, I'm clear you want to go take the first question. Okay. Yeah, I hope I get it right. The first question of what is the long term? I, yeah, I think when you ask the long term, you referring a what can be sustainable sustainability, if I get it right, your question. Yeah. Right now, we can see that to fix the crisis economy, we are more pushing the short term, which is going to hit us badly. We need to find a long term for our economy. Oil and gas is a short term. If we look at the natural resources on the ground are diminishing completely. Diamond, gold, you know, on the ground are starting to be depleted, to be finished. That is why now we focusing to go to the ocean, hardly to extract as much as possible. Also, oil and gas in the ocean is going to finish. When it finish both, where we go? What is the solution? Those are the questions that we need to ask, but it's a pity. There is no time for that. The developers are not here to talk. I hear to make business. That's the problem. And when you push that space for talking, you pushed out because you are delaying the development. That's how we've been painted as an activist. That communities need jobs. We can't listen to your argument. You can't argue how people are starving. But this food is for whom? Because if you see right now on the issue of Shell in South Africa, the whole communities, they said no to oil and gas. But the states say yes. And the question, who are they representing to? Whose interest? Yeah, those are the issues. But we do have alternative. We do have long-term. Agriculture, tourism, if we do those things, it can bring our economy back to normal. But you can see that tourism and agriculture, it's a slow-making profit. But mining is a quick way of making money. Those are the dilemmas that we are facing. And when we talk about the climate change as well, we need to play our cards very carefully. Because agriculture also gives a negative impact to our climate change. So we need to play our cards very carefully. What type of agriculture that we need to put in place? And for example, in our case, we do permanent agriculture. Permanent agriculture as well, it doesn't suit the big corporate. Because it does not make profit. It means that everything what we are doing is about profit. It's not about living, which is going to cause a lot of harm to our earth. That's my question on that one. And also on the renewable energy, if I may proceed. Renewable energy also is a hot potato debate. You know, I can make an example. In our case in South Africa, you see the president of South Africa speak a little bit much better when it comes to renewable energy. That yes, let's go to renewable energy. But his own minister, which is the minister of minerals and energy, he's completely against. It tells you that we have a problem. Now the minister says, it's my final word because I'm the minister of energy. Now you are the president, but you can't rule. This is my work. Those are dilemmas that we are facing because the minister says that no, renewable energy is too expensive. We can't afford that. But yes, it's too expensive. But can we just go to destroy the planet in order to afford? I don't think so. I think it's a good time. We have too much wind outside. We have too much sun. You know, why can't we utilize those things that are not going to destroy the mother earth? Yeah. Thank you. I think you had a question on to me. Oh, yes. Are we done the first two? If anyone else wants to answer the first. So on the first part of that question on engaging with banks. I think that one of the, we sort of had the element of surprise with the trade finance research because banks didn't expect that that was an avenue. A line of inquiry, let's say. And we didn't really know that it's, you know, within the standard research group that I work in, we take our time. We pull a lot of threads. It's part of being creative in our research. And this wasn't actually something we had start, you know, started out with the idea in mind that this would be where our research went. But finding the banks in the, as consignees in a bill of laden in trade flow and then customs data was made me very curious. And it just happened that that because of the state of Ecuador's economy, letter of credit financing was quite common. And they bank has to be the consignee because they are essentially assuring that that the payment will be made. And, and so they, they didn't really anticipate that they'd be tracked in this way. And I think we put out the report. A lot of banks were caught on their back foot. And because there was a lot of new policy, maybe only a few years old in some cases for banks, related to excluding financing from for projects and, and for corporate financing and trade financing, excluding that from projects that caused forced compensation by diversity loss that were in intact forced landscapes that were a violated indigenous people's rights, although there's a real free part informed consultation thing that happens in the finance. It's not consents. So there's a disconnect there. And so they were caught on the back foot with this, not really seeing that this trade financing piece would come out, or that we could track it because it's a very kind of black box kind of kind of area of financing. And I think that's why they engaged. We also had some good connections and could could reach out to people within the organic within the bank. And the reason why they committed to these policies is that I think a lot of them saw that they wanted to step away from this type of this kind of engagement with their clients. But as I sort of hinted at in the presentation, the way that the what they're moving into is not necessarily a reduction in financing for the oil trade. It's towards revolving credit facilities and syndicated loans, where you have more than one bank and therefore no no bank is on the line for applying their particular set of ESG commitments or exclusion policies. And that means that they can provide even more funding, but they do it in an environment where they're held less accountable. So I think we also hit them at a time when they were already thinking, well, if we move to revolving credit facilities and syndicated loans, this won't happen again. I encourage you to, sorry, I encourage you to continue that conversation later if we can make it to lunch. I just want to give the last word to Johan. Yeah, just one thing on the question of long term and people becoming in indigenous and coloniality is I asked Noncler ahead of this talk why she thought her community had won the victory against Shell in a context where environmentalists had failed. And what she said is that environmentalists and NGOs separate the human being from nature and they protect the nature and not the human being. But for communities, we are not excluding anything we connect these to the human being in nature. We are connected by nature as this community in order to live. We are dependent on nature. And I think there's something really fundamental there to I don't think the to reconceive of how we think about the global economy and how we approach each of these issues. I don't think sending execs to become indigenous is the solution. I think the solution is transforming the economy in which they work to because fundamentally there's no question that we only have one planet and that we if the planet doesn't live, we don't live. And so I think that's a really powerful way of reorienting. And that means that if with renewables we're not rethinking how we engage with indigenous communities, we're just going to go into the same pitfalls and the same problems. So I think that's that's very important that we're one with nature. Thank you. Thank you very much. I don't want to hold you off from your lunch. And I know we're all timed in a lunch for those were 1215 it's time. So please let's give a round of applause to our panelists.