Opening Statement for the 30th Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC (COP30)

We are communities and peoples rising from the frontlines of climate and social crises.

For generations, we have endured the harshest blows of a crisis we did not create. Our rivers well beyond their banks. Our lands sink under floods and erosion. Our farmers lose their crops to heavy rains and heat. Each disaster takes more than we can bear, uprooting communities, erasing cultures, violating rights, and taking precious lives.

As time passes, we grow more frustrated at the deliberate inaction and hypocrisy of those most responsible for these crises.

The global North talks of raising climate ambitions yet refuses to face the truth that its endless greed for profit and power fuels the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, driving our planet toward collapse. 

They preach of a ‘Just Transition’ yet cling to their profits from dirty energy while expanding into ‘green’ ventures that are actually false solutions. Through these, they continue to exploit our peoples and plunder the commons and natural resources. All the while, the Real Solutions, the ones our communities have nurtured for generations by living in balance with nature, are ignored and cast aside.

Today, the global North’s rush to extract the minerals, labour, and materials needed for their renewable energy has triggered a new wave of exploitative mining in our communities. Once again, our communities are left to bear the costs: the poisoned rivers, damaged ecosystems, deepening inequalities, and lives thrown into crisis.

This plunder is upheld through unfair trade rules imposed on us by the global North to compel us to surrender our sovereignty and penalise our countries for not meeting climate targets, even as they themselves fail to meet theirs. They deliberately designed our economies to lock us into systems that feed their insatiable thirst for profits and unsustainable cycles of consumption and production. It is a grave injustice to demand from us the sacrifices that they still refuse to make.

The global North’s refusal to fulfil its obligations blocks us from responding to climate impacts and building the just and self-determined future we deserve. For years, we have demanded that they pay up for what is rightfully owed to us, yet they have failed to deliver even their weakest promises. Instead, they drown us in debt, chaining us further to their profit interests that bleed our resources dry.

Meanwhile, governments pour vast sums into military expansion and wars, diverting resources that should be saving lives and protecting the planet. These militarised pursuits also strengthen the forces that silence and crush those who dare to resist. In our communities, armed state forces make way for large-scale mining, logging, and energy projects, resulting in harassment, imprisonment, or even killings of environmental and human rights defenders.

Nowhere is this militarised plunder more visible today than in the ongoing occupation and genocide in Palestine. Israel’s occupation opens the way for corporate control of Palestinian resources, the expansion of settlements, and profits tied to the arms trade. The resulting destruction of ecosystems and infrastructure, the denial of food, water, and healthcare, and the impunity granted by a global system run by powerful governments and corporations expose how occupation and climate injustices are bound by the same systems.

Our outrage at these injustices grows as spaces for participation and dissent continue to shrink. The upcoming COP30 in Brazil already shows how exclusion runs deep. The very peoples most affected by the climate crisis are being priced out and pushed aside. For communities like ours, the cost of simply showing up is beyond reach. And even when we find a way in, our voices are muted and our movements constrained. Yet for corporations and other big polluters, the gates are flung wide open to dictate the terms of climate action.

This is climate imperialism in full display, and we have had enough. Our time calls for systemic changes that open the path for us to shape our own futures.

We demand global North countries to honour their greater historical responsibility in the climate crisis. This should translate to concrete steps to phase out fossil fuels and meet ambitious global targets to limit warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

We reject false climate ‘solutions’ such as carbon offsets, geoengineering, carbon capture, and nature-based ‘solutions’ that provide a lifeline to fossil fuels and other extractive and polluting industries and lead to the colonisation of our lands and resources.

We call for support for our communities as we work to strengthen our ability to adapt to worsening climate impacts, ensure fair access to resources, and care for our shared environment through Real Solutions that maintain ecological balance and defend our lands, food systems, and rights.

We call for a people-powered transition where our communities are empowered to exercise democratic control over the transformation of systems, including energy, agriculture, trade, and finance, based on our own contexts and needs.

We demand that global North countries pay global South countries through new, additional, adequate, grant-based, and predictable financing for climate adaptation, ensuring a just and equitable transition, and reparations for losses and damages.

We assert that decision-making processes must be transformed to put Indigenous Peoples, farmers, urban poor, fisherfolk, rural women, children, and other marginalised groups at the heart of climate policymaking. Climate justice means ensuring their voices lead the way and placing strong safeguards to kick big polluters out of these spaces.

We demand an end to militarism, occupation, and genocide in Palestine and across the world, along with the defence of peoples’ rights. This entails dismantling military alliances, shutting down foreign bases, and protecting human rights and environmental defenders.

We are communities and peoples rising from the frontlines of climate and social crises.

We vow to fight for these demands in and out of COP30. We will continue to rise and resist with the masses of the world – from the South to the North, from the village to the city, from the river to the sea – until justice becomes our shared reality.

Delivered by:

Tirtha Prasad Saikia, North-East Affected Area Development Society
Rochelle Poras, Ecumenical Institute for Labor Education and Research
Emiliano Calcagno, Asociación Civil La Posta
Ranjana Giri, Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development
Jax Bongon, IBON International
Jiten Yumnam, Centre for Research and Advocacy – Manipur
Antonio Neto, Justiça Global
Lisa Shahin, The Arab Group for the Protection of Nature
Caroline Nyambura, Kiambu Youth Group
Inés Franceschelli, Heñói Centro de Estudios
Azra Sayeed, Roots for Equity and International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS)
Cecilia Andrea Corregidor, Coordinadora de Unidad Barrial Movimiento Teresa Rodriguez and ILPS Argentina
Nisa Amalia, Serikat Perempuan Indonesia
Sharanya Nayak, Indigenous Peoples’ Land, Life, Knowledge Collective
Jennifer del Rosario-Malonzo, IBON International
Caroline Muturi, IBON Africa
Kartika Sari, Palangkaraya Ecological and Human Rights Studies
Daniel Braza, Asia Pacific Network of Environmental Defenders
Rachelle Junsay, Youth Advocates for Climate Action Philippines