 Hello, good evening, and welcome to another session of COP-OFF, DM25's Alternative Climate Conference. This session is titled, Same Storm, Different Boats, The Global South. So we're going to talk about the global south in this session. I'm Luca Cerbrado, and I'm joined tonight by two wonderful guests. Originally scheduled to be three wonderful guests, but congresswoman Joanie Abishana from Brazil unfortunately is unable to attend tonight. Regardless, we have two great guests and I'd like to introduce them now. Our first guest is a human rights lawyer and a PhD candidate at Warwick Law School, where her research focuses on climate justice. Earlier this year, she co-founded Tipping Point UK to support grassroots groups to build power for systems change and has contributed and written to many publications, including Perspectives on a Global Green New Deal. Harpreet Kaulapal, welcome Harpreet. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Our second guest is the co-chair of the left group in the European Parliament and the co-founder of the intergroup on the Green New Deal. She has lectured human rights at CN SPO Paris and was previously a spokeswoman at Oxfam France and attacks justice campaigner, a cause that she has continued to champion as a member of the European Parliament. Monono, welcome Monon, thank you for joining us. Hi everyone, thanks. Okay, so let's get right into it. I would like to ask a couple of opening questions, one for each of you. Starting with you Harpreet, a very short and basic one. Why is it that we need to think the climate crisis and climate change globally? Why is it that national plans and national solutions at the national level are not enough? A short question with a very long answer that could probably take out the entire space but I'll try and be as succinct as possible. We all woke up this morning and some of us would have made ourselves a cup of tea or coffee. We would have likely checked our phones and within those first few moments we work in front of it with a globalised world whether it's the places in which the things that we eat are grown and harvested and move across borders or the minerals that make up the batteries in our phones and laptops that are then shipped to usually South East Asia and then North Asia or Eastern Europe. The global is in our daily lives and the industry is not only responsible for a quarter of greenhouse gans but also implicated in deforestation, workers' rights abuses and the system with neoliberal globalization which enables workers in our supply chains to be disregarded workers particularly in the mining industry to potentially be working in conditions of modern slavery, child labour is a system that allows corporations to treat workers in that way but also avoid tax in local jurisdictions and extract resources so global justice now research suggests that the African continent experiences something like 40 billion dollars more being extracted from it and the level of reminiscences aid and loans that are provided to it so in that kind of very basic sense we can't avoid the global in our daily life how does that connect to the climate crisis? If a country like Mozambique which experienced two unprecedentedly strong storms is paying significant amounts of money in loan repayments is not getting a fair level of tax paid to its economy, hasn't received and rebuilt following storms then we are seeing very clearly how economic precarity, neoliberal globalization and climate are confronted while I'm speaking, we've got half a million children in Madagascar under the age of five experiencing climate 300,000 people this year being impacted by floods in the DRC and the average person in the UK where I'm currently based amid something like five times more than the average person in Madagascar 65 times more emissions than the average person in the DRC and so the global in terms of climate injustice and economic injustice has to be very central to however we think about new deals Thank you Aprilit and the question for you Manon you work at the belly of the beast if you allow me the provocative expression you're a member of the European Parliament, you spend a lot of time in Brussels Well the European Union, they have a European Green Deal and that sounds wonderful we talk a lot about the Green New Deal how much of a difference can a world make, the world new so what is it that in your opinion is being done if anything in Brussels currently in order to make sure that some of those structural inequalities are addressed what is it that isn't being done and what is it that you and your parliamentary group is pushing for Well it actually does make all of the difference and it's good that you notice that the word new is missing because precisely the way they see the climate issue at Brussels and EU level and when I say they is like the Libos that are governing in the European Union is to try to save the planet with all the recipes with all free trade agreements with all the austerity rules with all the agricultural, productive financial support etc and I could go on for quite a while actually with fossil fuels etc so indeed you know it's not enough to package it it's not enough to take all policies and say look this is a great Green New Deal I mean a Green Deal this is a great Green Deal because actually they refuse to question the same policies that are actually leading to the current climate situation we're in and the terrible consequences that we are going to face if you just take and that might be something we're going to discuss later but basically the Green Deal of the European Union relies on what we call a fit for 55 package so I'll explain it so first off they made us vote an objective of a reduction of 55% due to emission by 2030 what might think that this is ambitious but as often the devil is in the details and first because that objective of minus 55% even in the trajectory we would need to meet the Paris Agreement would make a target of 65% so we weigh below this with the 65 second of all actually they made a little bit of a mathematical trick in calculating it because they're actually not taking into account the impact and consequences of imported CO2 emissions so when you import the product the environmental impact it has so it's one way to sort of externalize the pollution which obviously doesn't change the overall impact that is massive and thirdly even though that objective would not be sufficient they're actually not meeting it precisely because there isn't a fundamental change in the EU core policies that have been mentioning just before so most experts agree that the EU will not even be able to meet that objective of 55% and the main reason of this is precisely because there isn't a big shift in the EU policies the one that are responsible of most climate change impact being transport, being the type of energy that we're using being the agricultural policy once again in just one week we are going to vote the European agricultural policy the main budget at EU level and guess what? well we are going to vote the same old agricultural policy that support massive agro-industrial type of land and of production that has a lot of climate impact and the policy that we're going to vote is for the next six years so it does jeopardize our future for the next six years at least and when you think that it's the main budget of the European Union and we're not able to make it climate compatible then there's lots to worry so in short, the EU is very good at words and it's very good at making those very nice speeches being the president of the European Commissioners who live on the land we need to save the planet, we need to think about the future we need to think about the use blah blah blah but actually not very good at meeting the discourse with the EU policies unfortunately yeah and I find it interesting that you mentioned the tax on imports proposal and the Fit for 55 plan which has been criticized a lot for the reasons that you mentioned in sort of deflecting the responsibility towards the people the regions of the world that are the most affected by climate change first of all and that also without financial support are the least capable of complying to such regulations and coming from the Global South coming from Brazil more specifically I know that there is this pervasive sort of mentality even among the left that sort of takes offence at this hypocrisy so even though some among progressives you understand that climate change is real and that is here but at the same time you see the hypocrisy in it basically and you tend to be averse at this sort of like moralizing that the Global North institutes sometimes especially institutions such as the EU I remember there are even myths when I was growing up in American school textbooks the Amazon was shown as an international territory so it was not Brazilian territory at all of course it's not real but it sort of exemplifies that mentality so my question is how is it that we overcome that how is it that not only at a policy level but also at a communications level and I know that both of you have experienced ideas in that of course you Manon you are a founding member of the Global Alliance for a Green New Deal and I'm sure that you've had a lot of exchanges with Congress people from the Global South on that and how you can unify not only at the policy level but also at the message level so that people can get on board in the Global South as well yeah and I think it's very key and very important because we tend to do you know in some of the richest countries we tend to do policies that are completely disconnected from the reality completely disconnected from the impact on the ground and in particular in southern countries so one of the objective and one of the reasons why we put together this Global Alliance is precisely to join forces but also to adopt a common narrative that will be a stronger you know in all places of the world in particular for example you were talking about Brazil bringing in the voices from Brazil whenever we discuss the free trade agreements with Mercosur that will definitely have a primary impact in Brazil sometimes it's not true for everyone obviously but sometimes some of the you know colleagues in the European Parliament don't really you know measure the impact on the ground so bringing in the voices from the south I think is also really key it was key as well for the last cup without the success we could have hoped for but it's very key to have them on board at every stage because it help us keeping you know keeping in mind the priority the trajectory that we aiming for because sometimes when especially at the EU level when there's this culture of compromises when there's this culture of are you negotiate I do a step you do a step and to be honest being in the EU level and coming from the activist world the so-called activist world and coming from Andrews sometimes you know I'm sitting in these rooms and I'm like what do you actually know what you're talking about it's just like it feels like okay I do one step in your direction you do one step in my directions completely losing the reason why we're doing it and what is going to make a difference and it's just like my frustration that I am that I am you know bringing in there and sorry for being one way to outsource my frustration but it's you know that culture of compromise I think is killing every potential ambition when it comes to tackling climate change and here is not about who's right or who's wrong it's about you know what are the means to ensure that we stay below the 1.5 degrees trajectory and if you take the commitments from last week COP is actually 2.4 you know warming of 2.5 at global level it means that there are places in the world that are literally going to be underwater there will be more floodings there will be you know the whole agricultural sector will be damaged everything will be damaged and for sure some countries are going to face more the consequences than others and so only a global movement and with strong voices from both the global north and the global south will help I think challenging the ones that are trying to convince themselves and I have no other explanation that they are trying to convince themselves that they are acting while actually they are making us losing time A quick note before I ask basically the same question to Herpreet the comments on our YouTube chats were disabled but if they are disabled for you you just have to refresh your page and they will be enabled and then please feel free to throw your questions at us as well that we can then pose to our guests Herpreet on the same topic I think Manon gave us a great overview as to how her experience is at the institutional level I think you also had a very interesting perspective to that at a different level I know that you have this this sort of vision with regards to the different struggles that working class people and poor people face in the global south that are sometimes overlooked even by progressive voices and how to draw those connections and to build solidarity there can you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah, I think to start there is at the core of this conversation a real equity issue. The global north has used up about 60% of the carbon budget if we're serious about trying to reach 1.5 degrees which is absolutely essential to aim for the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees is the difference between 2 billion people being subjected to heat stress let alone the other impacts on sea level rise and other impacts but a lot of the dynamics which increase vulnerability and which bring countries from the global south to climate summits asking for enhanced climate finance is the equity issue sure but it's also making countries talk about the ways in which finance systems also increase precarity so starting with an example from the global south last year Zambia missed two consecutive repayments on its Euro bond debts and its credit rating was downgraded and the IMF refused to implement a bailout unless the country agreed a new economic program and following its default Zambia's had to allocate 44% of annual government revenue to its creditors and the Jubilee debt campaign has estimated that some banks are making something like 250% profit on Zambian bonds meanwhile 1 in 2 Zambian people live below the global extreme poverty line of just $1.90 a day and you know we're talking about a context where the global 1% are contributing double the emissions of 50% of the population so there's obviously extreme economic climate injustices the fact that Zambia has to allocate nearly 50% of its revenue to creditors means that it can't invest in transitions it can't invest in the climate resilience that would help it address climate change impacts that are already underway let alone the health infrastructure that's needed to address the immediate pandemic and a lot of these dynamics are replicated within the global north as well so a piece that I recently wrote for open democracy took the example of Britain's banks Barclays for example not only one of the biggest investors in fossil fuel infrastructure in Europe the biggest in Europe in fact after the 2008 financial crash it lent a number of local authorities within the UK loans with interest rates linked to quite scandalous interference on the rates that they've gone into quite a bit of trouble for but again it meant that some local authorities within the UK were paying more in interest payments to Barclays than they were able to invest in domestic violence shelters in housing in retrofitting schemes in youth centres so part of the work that we're trying to do at tipping point is to connect the financial industry as one of the root drivers of investments in fossil fuel infrastructure and in driving precarity as well and we did that a couple of weeks ago on the 29th of October with protests starting outside the Lloyds of London which is in fact an insurance company an insurance company by the way that also profited from the enslavement of African peoples and received compensation on the end of slavery and continues to invest in fossil fuel infrastructure through Indigenous territories in Australia and Canada today and so our aim is really to look at home and say how are the ways in which our institutions are continuing to exacerbate a crisis that the Global North is categorically disproportionately responsible for and how can we have these conversations of solidarity by leveraging the power that we have in relation to the institutions that exist here so part of that work is in relation to banks and insurance companies but the other part of it is speaking through labour for a Green New Deal for example to municipalities, constituencies that are going to be buying electric car vehicles and saying yes we're not going to address the root causes of exploitation labour extractivism in the Global South but as a bare minimum when local authorities public purchases within the UK buy Green infrastructure at a bare minimum we should see procurement happening in compliance with human rights, norms international labour organisation standards and we've got good precedence on this from the Workers' Rights Consortium and Electronics Watch that have done this work for some time and we're hoping to push institutions like the Transport for London to do some of this work as well Right on a bit of a different topic now of course COP26 just wrapped up and the agreement was finalised after much wrangling and one of the hot topics during the conference and during the negotiations for the agreement as well which is becoming more and more sort of in vogue especially from Global South Voices is the topic of of reparations or I'm sorry I said the forbidden term the topic of loss and damage as it's called at negotiation tables and it was of course there were many discussions about it during COP26 eventually it was symbolic included into the final agreement which I think the language that was used was something like a commitment to initiate a dialogue to talk about arrangements for funding of activities to avert minimise and address loss and damage which to me sounds like peak communicate speak what are your views on that do you think that this can be a viable element in addressing those inequalities those global inequalities I think that it's a star as well there's going to be a dialogue next year and that's really the bare minimum that's necessary there's an estimated 200 billion US dollars of loss and damage already experienced in the Global South after storms hit and that's likely to increase to between 280 to 590 billion dollars by 2030 that's not that far away and at the higher level that amount is the equivalent in GDP of the 80 poorest countries in the world so we're talking about a huge amount of loss and damage that's going to be experienced most extremely by not only countries that are least responsible but countries that have had regimes of neoliberal economic policies imposed on them which has meant that resources labour materials have been extracted from these countries in unfair ways neoliberal austerity measures imposed on them as conditions for loans that's reduced their resilience with higher and higher proportions of their expenditure on repayments so the issue is not only one that some people perceived as a political football I think unfairly saying that Global South countries bring this up with a view to not having to mitigate and I think that's incredibly unfair because the countries that have been leading in this in the negotiations are small island developing states who bought this issue up in 1992 before the framework convention was even signed and they're the countries that have been insisting on 1.5 to stay alive and are now saying actually on the latest science 1.5 is barely to survive and they were the most powerful voices for this and for them it's consistently being brought forward as an existential issue that absolutely has to be repaired and for the US and for other countries within the EU it's unfortunately linked too closely to an idea of reparational compensation which is perceived as dangerous but ultimately countries need debts cancelled they need space freed up within their economies to print money and not have that blocked by conditions of loans and they need loss and damage climate financing as well as pledges past climate financing to transition and to adjust also met and without that we're going to see cop negotiations completely poisoned on all three levels mitigation adaptation and loss and damage unless the global north accepts their responsibility as I said 60% of the country used by 18% of the population in the global north that continues on a per capita basis to be grossly responsible for emissions and unless that core justice issue is met we're going to continue to see a game being played by more powerful global south countries and that is unfortunate but I think at the core of it the justice demands from small island developing states and these developed countries has to be responded to in a meaningful way if we're going to see progress right and when we talk about how to finance transitions across the globe obviously that consolation those reparations as well those things are helpful and fine and well but I know that from your perspective Manon something that you've campaigned for a long time and that's one of the most prominent topics in your work and Terian as well is the issue of taxation and so if you would argue that these actions are not enough that taxation needs to play an essential part in it as well first of all do you agree with that and why is it that we can't propose a well encompassed solution without talking about taxation as well well I mean taxation is key in sort of two ways one is if we don't lie to people adapting yourself to climate change and changing our economic system does cost money but the good news is we can have that money the question is what do we want to collect it but clearly if you want to change your energy sector and your energy system and invest for example to have an objective 100% renewable energies if you want to change your agricultural sector etc this costs some money or at least some initial investment so that's the first role of a well functioning tax system is first of all to collect the money we need to make the transition and the second thing is related to the social distribution of climate change impact and also the different responsibilities that different people have in short and I'm sure everyone knows this that obviously the ways of life of the poorest people is definitely having less impact on climate than the way of life of richest people if I want to put it simply and caricature a little bit that's business when it goes in the space I don't have the word in English but you will follow this I don't have the exact data in mind but it's the equivalence of millions of people's life impact of climate change and it's just like we're talking about a few minutes of Jeff Bezos life compared to millions of people obviously this is a bit more nuanced than this because not everyone is Jeff Bezos but if you take overall at global level the 10% the 10 richest percent are responsible of half of the CO2 emissions at global level meaning that the role of the tax system as well by redistributing wealth is also to minimize initially the climate impact of the way of life of the richest people that have an impact on climate change so with this kind of in two ways the tax system is very key for a fair transition the question is are we willing to change our tax system and that's why we've been pushing the whole of the tax-directed campaign at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as well in the U.S. is pushing that agenda and we many across the world and it's not only about money it's not only about fighting inequalities but it's also about fighting climate change and actually those two issues climate change and inequalities so the two sides of the same coin and by fighting inequalities we fight climate change and vice versa so that's why we cannot have a green new deal that doesn't come with a fair tax system meaning taxing more the richest introducing wealth tax because there are very few countries in the world that have wealth tax etc but also having much more efficient action against tax dodging which is one way also for the richest to hide money in the tax havens and not paying their fair share of taxes and to that extent the latest deal that has been done at international level on a global minimum effective tax rate of 15% is very low it's just above the rate of iron which is 12.5% which is one of the most well known tax havens it does include also some possibilities to decrease that rate I'm not going to go into the technical details there but there's been a race to the bottom at global level with the average effective tax rate of companies being divided by two in the last 20 years and the tax havens are going to sort of win the competition by actually taking everyone down to their level and when we do that we're offering the possibilities of the richest but also for some of the large multinationals not to pay their fair share of taxes and therefore depriving states of essential funds to actually help them fight climate change, help them adapt on one hand and on the other hand change the economic system to ensure that we drastically diminish our climate impact so for all of those reasons the finance issue is very important and is very often completely forgotten in all of the discussion because it does touch one of the key aspects of recurrent societies which is the distribution of wealth and money which is obviously very sensible because there's lots of people that are trying to protect their interest there I think it went on and we have a question from our audience a very strongly awarded the question from our audience the financial and economic system we live under is frankly ecocidal and managed and maintained by ecopathological insane members of our species how can we remove those influences who wants to take that one Harpreet? I will say some things I'm not sure if I'll answer I'm not sure if I'll answer the question exactly so apologies in advance if I don't I think the systems that expose people that are least responsible for climate change are the same systems that are responsible for economic precarity and how we remove those forces I guess is a question that different people respond to in different ways and in Glasgow recently I was helping to facilitate an assembly on climate reparations and there were lots of interventions made to the effect that this is actually a system that's been going on for over 500 years a system that viewed certain places and people's resources to be extracted and in his book The Memory We Can Be Daniel Voskoboynick summarises this very cogently by saying ecocide came hand in hand with ethnocide as whole landscapes changed to kind of make way for plantations with slave labour and a lot of the extractivism that is central to green transitions that are promoted even by well-meaning people within the north have the risk of replicating some of these dynamics because they are conversations that are within this current system and that's one of the things that influenced Dahlia and I to co-edit this book with over 30 people that's available for free kindly from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation at www.global-gnd.com but in it there are lots of interventions which say that if we don't address the root of this system we're going to see proposals to not only promote fanciful technology as we're already seeing in that zero proposals carbon capture and storage which is untested and potentially I'm very problematic bioengineering which views spacious land in the global south that's actually needed for tree planting again in ways that are often very unhelpful to local communities because they're water intensive monocultures not native and implicated in displacement but also proposals that view the Middle East as empty land for solar panels, ripe for renewable energy to be created and all sorts of proposals to have pipelines linking that energy system to Europe and there's an example that Hamza Hamashen gives specifically in relation to that in the book from Western Sahara and so I think we need to be creating movements that are yes capable of winning interim demands like progressive taxation it's incredible the amount of wealth that the billionaires have made during the pandemic and Oxfam analysis recently showed that a tiny tax on billionaires could pay for global access to vaccines and still leave billionaires more wealthy than they were during the pandemic so yes I think winning reforms like that is absolutely crucial but I think as we do that we need to be politicising and engaging in public education like this event and others where people know that that's not the end of the story and ultimately we need to move away from a system that creates billionaires while half the population that struggles to have access to infrastructure and food and housing and I don't think there's an easy answer to the question how my answer is pick a campaign run it successfully bring people into your movement through it have these conversations so that once you've won you can pick a bolder demand and some analysis says we need 3.5% of people actively engaged in campaigns to mobilise 25% of people to win transformative changes and that might sound like a huge number in the UK it's about 2.4 million active organisers but once you take it down to your local level if you imagine as I am sitting in Oxford it's a couple of thousand people and we recently had a couple of hundred people come out to an event around housing precarity in Oxford so if we can connect these struggles and talk about how housing precarity here shouldn't exist a small tax could pay for retrofitting and insulation reduce fuel poverty reduce the amount of people that die as a result of not being able to play their fuel bills address the rent crisis and address climate change and there's ways of bringing these issues together so run a campaign link it to climate change because everything needs to change so everything will be related to climate change and increase your members by not shaming people for not understanding how everything is connected when they walk into your campaign and actually make them feel welcome and part of a bigger struggle and be bolder as we win reforms along the way right thank you I appreciate and it's fitting that as we move towards the end we've strike this more hopeful tone so I'm going to give a chance for Manon here to do the same Manon we talked about a lot of issues obviously a lot of things that need to change but from your perspective at the national level in France and also obviously at the European level since you are a member of the European parliament are you hopeful that we can address these issues many people aren't are you yeah I'm full of hope otherwise I wouldn't be there you know I've been working you mentioned it for Oxfam before being elected to the European parliament and I would define myself just as an activist and I'm still an activist even now as a member of the European parliament and when I was approached by actually few political parties to run for the European election my initial intuition was just to say no like this is not my world I don't believe we're going to change anything and I was kind of skeptical but then when I thought about it and when I thought about years of struggle and years of frustration as well because when you're an activist you get frustrated because you have the impression that you win the herds of people but don't win the policies and there are things that become consensual in the population but still are not implemented at policy level and you know I ask myself you know do I think that we're going to convince Emmanuel Macron Boris Johnson or Bolsonaro from one day to another to really care about climate change to change our economic system to redistribute wealth well actually no I don't you know as much as I like my work of doing campaigning advocacy and I was my work to try to convince them let's be realistic I don't think we're going to ever convince them but what makes me hopeful is actually that we replace them that all of us even though we believe and I know that's a question that is really high at the moment in the use climate movement what's the relationship with the political world and I'm not going to say that's a fantastic world I'm not going to say I'm loving it every single day I'm just going to say there are no other ways to change the lives of people and I say this to all potential activists to all the ones that care a little are lots about a planet about the way wealth is distributed and I believe like me that we are not going to convince our current political leaders then we just need to replace them and to replace them well we need to invest ourselves into politics and there are many ways to do it I'm not saying all of us should be representative and should be elected members of parliament etc but I think we need to take over and it's time to take over we're a young generation of activists who are you know we're framed our our our society and we share a lot of concerns we share a lot of the solutions and the last reason why I'm hopeful and I'm trying to leave you on this because then I'll have to brush but it's not like we don't have the solutions at the beginning of the COVID crisis there were room not to be so hopeful because there were no vaccine at the time but now there can be room to be helpful because we do have the vaccines the question is to what extent we can produce enough of those vaccines and to what extent we can distribute them to the whole world and not only to the richest countries the same goes for wealth distribution the same goes for climate change we do have the solutions we do know how we would do it I'm not saying it's going to be easy but we do know it the question is whether we do manage to implement them and to implement them well there's no other solution that take back the power for those who are blocking it at the moment and those who are blocking it at the moment were the ones a lot of the ones that were gathering in the COP26 last week in the room there are the ones that are gathering in the EU council and I'm just hoping today that all of those activists that are at the moment in the street are actually the one taking the decisions and this would change a lot of things so I'm trying to leave you on that optimistic note and on that wonderful note we're going to wrap up if you enjoyed this talk we want to know what you think so that we can discuss that together in our COP of talks we're going to talk about how we can transform some of the things discussed in those sessions into policy measures the link will be based in the chat now and we hope to see you there I want to thank again Manon Oakley and Prit Paul for joining us stay tuned for our next session we'll see you at 8pm Central European time and see you next time