BELÉM/PA — While the United Nations Palace prepares to host the Heads of State and negotiators of COP 30, social movements and grassroots communities from Brazil and around the world are organizing autonomously. The Peoples’ Summit Towards COP 30 emerges in Belém as the cry of those on the front lines of the crisis, confronting the official agenda that, historically, privileges the market and corporate interests to the detriment of life and territories.
The Summit’s diagnosis is incisive: the climate crisis is, above all, a crisis of injustice — racial, social, gender, and colonial. If COP 30 fails to incorporate the popular agenda, it will merely be another stage for the legitimization of “false solutions.” The warning is clear: the focus on market mechanisms, such as the financialization of nature, and the omission regarding the ecological debt of Global North countries and corporations, will condemn the Amazon and other biomes to the deepening of environmental racism and corporate impunity. The struggle is against unsustainable extractivism and the failure to impose an energy transition that is, in fact, just and popular.
The Power of Convergence: Six Pillars for Well-Being (Bem-Viver) with Respect for Life and the Environment
To reverse this scenario, the Peoples’ Summit — which brings together Indigenous peoples, quilombolas (descendants of runaway slaves), youth, women, and workers’ movements — organized its resistance and proposal into six strategic pillars. These pillars are the materialization of solutions that come from the grassroots:
Living Territories and “Maretories” (Coastal/Marine Territories): For land demarcation, food sovereignty, and the recognition of Nature as a subject of rights.
Historical Reparation: For combating Environmental Racism, false solutions, and demanding that the Ecological Debt be paid.
Just, Popular, and Inclusive Transition: For ending the fossil fuel era and building an energy democracy, based on popular knowledge.
Against Oppressions: For the struggle for democracy, the internationalism of peoples, and against the far-right and fundamentalisms.
Just Cities and Living Urban Peripheries: For combating environmental racism in urban areas and democratizing access to sanitation and energy.
Popular Feminism: For the leadership of women in the territories and the uncompromising defense of reproductive and sexual rights.
Final Letter: The Popular Tool for Global Pressure
The convergence point for all this mobilization and discussion will be the drafting of a Final Letter of the Peoples’ Summit.
This letter will not be just a formal document. It is conceived as a popular tool for international political pressure, which will synthesize the collective denunciations, proposals, and demands of global social movements. The text, forged in the struggle and discussions within the territories, will be a popular mandate to pressure governments, corporations, and the United Nations (UN) itself to transcend cold climate negotiations and adopt the path of Climate Justice and Well-Being (Bem-Viver).
The message is clear: the solutions will not come from the closed rooms of the COPs, but from the power and articulation of the peoples. At the closing of the Peoples’ Summit on the 16th, the Peoples’ Declaration Letter, collectively built by members of over 1,100 entities and movements from 62 countries, will be delivered to Ambassador André Corrêa do Lago, president of COP30. There is an expectation that President Lula will be present on this day.
Picture:Zé Netto/AG>Eficaz Press