Climate Justice for Africa: Building a Global Solidarity Movement

The online seminar took place in the background of COP27 under difficult circumstances and focused on analysing the decisions of the climate conference, climate justice, feminist alternatives and building movements to achieve more democracy and social justice.

In November 2022, heads of state, ministers, diplomats, hundreds of fossil fuel lobbyists, but above all climate justice activists from all over the world travelled to the UN Climate Change Conference in Sharm-El-Sheik, Egypt. This is the 27th of its kind. For more than a quarter of a century, international society has been meeting for these conferences – and still CO2 emissions are rising. But at least the Global South was able to win a big victory: In future, there will be a fund for Loss & Damage.

Transform europe organised a big conference in Cairo in cooperation with التحالف الشعبي الاشتراكي (the Socialist People’s Alliance in Egypt, Global Justice Now from the UK and Acción Ecológica from Ecuador.

This conference in Cairo was banned at short notice by the official state security of the Egyptian state within only one week.

Therefore, we had to reorganise the conference and shorten it to a Online-Seminar, which will be available online soon.

The four sessions first recapped what had happened in Sharm-El-Sheik. We discussed the great success of the Global South in now having a Loss & Damage fund. But we also analysed the white spots in official climate diplomacy such as women’s rights and women’s participation in international negotiations. Here we discussed issues such as the still rising CO2 emissions, the international financial system and the need for territorial approaches. In “Strengthening democracy and social justice” we focused on geopolitical issues. We discussed the militarisation of international relations, the threat of nuclear war, the historical imperial policies of Western states in the Arab region, and the policies of the EU and left political forces in the EU. The last session was about the next steps on how to strengthen the international movement for climate justice, especially in cases like Egypt or the United Arab Emirates where the state does not allow public mobilisation.

Organised by:

• • transform! europe
  • Egypt’s Socialist People’s Alliance
  • Global Justice Now
  • Acción Ecológica
  • Oil Watch