AntiCOP 2024
FINAL PRONOUNCEMENT
‘Through mirrors as reflections of our resistances, we see similarities and differences that reveal the diversity of cultural roots in each of the geographies of the planet, where each environment transforms and transmutes us collectively.
Our mirrors project human lives with multiple identities, memories and histories in the face of historical shocks. Even in cultural differences, our history is common when dispossession and destruction take shape in territories, leaving human pain and suffering, as well as the destruction and death of mother nature.
These experiences denote challenges shared by societies, peoples and organised communities on the planet, which lead us to rethink, share and in turn unite across borders, flags and cultures. Recovering the future in adversity.
In this way, these gazes through the mirror, observe, feel and dream of the otherness of those who look at the other side of the same mirror’.
For the Defence of Land, Water, Territories, Climate Justice and Life in the Global South.
With the presence of people from the 5 continents of the planet, representatives of the Waorani, Yaqui, Purépecha, Zapotec, Chatino, Mixteco, Ngiwa, Chontal, Wayuu, Ikoot, Sami, K’Ana, Kanak, Maya Q’echi, Mundurukú and Nasa peoples, as well as from known geographies such as Colombia, Zambia, Aruba, Bonaire, West Papua, Baluchistan, Bolivia, El Salvador, Ecuador, Zimbabwe, Canada, Peru, Benin, Germany, the Netherlands, Guatemala, Switzerland, Romania, South Africa, Argentina, the USA, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, USA, New Zealand, Norway, UK, Portugal, Kenya, Western Sahara, Palestine, New Caledonia, Singapore, Euskal Herria, Samoa, Kurdistan, Italy, Bolivia, Antigua and Barbuda and Mexico, we come carrying our dead and our history to meet in Oaxaca, in unity, as peoples, communities and movements of the Global South, to raise our voices in the face of the global water crisis, militarisation, megaprojects, the forced displacement of our communities, the commodification of life, as well as the inaction of governments and international organisations in the face of the climate crisis, which marks a war against our peoples and nature.
AntiCOP emerges as an autonomous and decentralised response, as a space to articulate our struggles and propose concrete alternatives that strengthen our territories, that allow us to defend our natural resources and that dignify our ways of life.
We want to denounce the danger of Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency as a serious symptom of the civilisational crisis and a threat to climate justice and human rights, especially for racialised people. While we know that both contending parties follow logics of dispossession, discrimination and genocide, their specific politics, based on nationalism, racism and hostility towards migrants, reinforce structural violence at the borders and perpetuate a global system of inequality. This is part of the global rise of the far right, which drives an international order of exclusion, xenophobia and extractivist neo-colonialism, in which the peoples of the Global South and migrants are sacrificed for economic growth and territorial expansion.
The criminalisation of migrants, journalists, human rights defenders and the militarisation of territories restrict the self-determination of the peoples of the South. In this context, migration becomes an act of resistance to extractivist policies and climate crises. Borders, more than physical walls, become invisible barriers that limit human rights and access to dignity.
Mega-projects, promoted by far-right and even ‘progressive’ leaders and businessmen, reconfigure territories in the name of progress and development, generating unsustainable living conditions in communities affected by the extraction and overexploitation of natural resources. These initiatives deepen the effects of the climate crisis and displace people to the borders of countries that deny their right to mobility. At the same time, they intensify territorial dispossession and perpetuate the exploitation of the peoples of the Global South, using borders as tools of control to protect the interests of global elites.
Governments, corporations and criminal groups continue to perpetrate a profound war against peoples and nature to sustain this heteropatriarchal, capitalist and colonial system, which threatens to destroy the planet. This war is disguised through institutional and official processes that do not fundamentally resolve structural conflicts, nor do they respond to collective territorial needs. This war is disguised through institutional and official processes that do not fundamentally resolve structural conflicts, nor do they respond to collective territorial needs. As a result, we are heading towards a world of catastrophic global warming, moving towards a world of 2.6 to 3.1°C by the end of the century, challenging the planetary balance and the survival of humanity.
All COPs Are Bastards!
COP29 attempts to hide behind hypocritical greenwashing, the record of ecocide, genocide and atrocities committed by Azerbaijan against the Armenian People which are not only a terrible chapter of history, but an echo of how war and exploitation of natural resources and people intertwine and exacerbate the climate and social crisis we face. The omission of the Genocide of the Palestinian People during COP28 in Dubai was a case in point.
The current capitalist system has led us to a world where wildlife has declined by 73% in just 50 years. A few days ago, the COP16 on Biodiversity concluded in Cali, Colombia, in which, despite some achievements generated by indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants and peasants, in general only simulated a concern for Mother Nature, our natural assets and territories that safeguard 80% of the current Biodiversity.
Faced with this, we ask ourselves once again: will we be waiting another 30 years for the governments and companies that control the COPs for nothing to happen? It is clear to us that to save life, the people only have the people and organised rage is our horizon. With this premise and in view of the imminent COP30 (to be held in Belém, Brazil, in 2025), we make a broad, diverse, non-centralised and combative call to meet in the Amazon to continue dialogue and construction based on horizontality and political diversity.
These reflections highlight the urgency and necessity of unity between the peoples and movements of the Global South and the South of the Global North to confront the multiple crises that affect our lives and territories. Thus, after 5 days of work, the more than 250 people who participated in the Global Gathering for Climate and Life – ANTICOP 2024, want to share our collective feelings, thoughts and reflections.
Community Water Management
For the first time in human history, due to unsustainable water use and the climate crisis, the hydrological cycle is out of balance, endangering half of global food production. We reaffirm that water is a fundamental right essential for life, not a commodity. Community management of the water commons, through independent local water committees, is essential to implement community-based solutions such as rainwater harvesting or filtration systems. We also propose to adopt sustainable alternatives, such as dry toilets. We must protect water from the extractive interests of industries that prioritise profit over the human right to water.
Intercultural Environmental Education
Intercultural environmental education will be key to sensitise new generations to the importance of defending nature, water, biodiversity and water care systems from a perspective that considers both scientific and ancestral knowledge. We must empower youth in the defence of their territory, through a critical awareness of the extractive and mercantilist consumption model that has led us to the current crisis. We propose to adopt responsible production and consumption systems in our homes and communities.
Global Networks of Resistance and Articulation and Calendar of Collective Struggle
We call for the creation of a global network for climate and life ‘AntiCOP’: a digital and physical space that connects our struggles in defence of land, territory, water, climate justice and community rights. This network will allow us to share experiences, resources and coordinate actions in a synchronised way at a global level, amplifying our voices and ensuring the visibility of our demands before international authorities. In addition, we propose to articulate a calendar of collective struggle for 2025, taking advantage of key dates such as the Day of Indigenous Resistance, to strengthen our resistance and vindicate our demands.
Regional Anti-COPs and Mobilisation Towards COP30
Regional Anti-COPs will be essential to make collective decisions, make our local demands visible and connect our struggles. We propose protest caravans that will travel through different territories to the COP30 venue. In doing so, we seek to make the resistance of our peoples visible and demand climate justice.
Safe spaces and protection for activists and land defenders
Activism in defence of land, territory, water and nature in general is dangerous, and many of our comrades face stigmatisation, harassment, repression, criminalisation and even assassination. Since the signing of the Paris Agreement on climate change, more than 1,500 environmental defenders around the world have been killed, the vast majority of them in countries in the Global South. We demand safe spaces for activists, where they can heal and protect themselves physically, emotionally and legally. We also propose networks and mechanisms for legal, communication, technological, psychological, physical and digital security support for human rights, land and environmental defenders in the most vulnerable territories.
Catalogue and Repository of Effective Actions
We propose to create a catalogue of effective actions and good practices, to share experiences and proven strategies in the struggle for the defence of land, territory and water. In addition, we will launch printed and digital publications that reflect our histories, struggles and proposals from an anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal and biocentric perspective, challenging cultural extractivism and making our demands visible.
Autonomous Climate Disaster Fund
In the face of the failure of official adaptation and loss and damage funds, we call for the creation of an autonomous and collective fund to confront the climate disasters that affect our communities, without intermediaries that delegitimize our efforts.
New International Economic Order
We propose to develop proposals to retake the economic, food and territorial autonomy of the peoples of the Global South, demanding the cancellation of colonialist debts and financing of all financial institutions that perpetuate extractivism. We also demand the return of assets plundered by the Global North. We must empower our communities by making them aware that it is the financial institutions, the rich and powerful people of the North, who are indebted to our territories, which have been plundered and fragmented to finance their development.
After these reflections, we decided to put together what we are, what we do and what we dream of, everything that went well and also what went wrong, the victories and defeats, our needs but also our capacities, tools, skills and all the commitment we carry in our hearts to build another world where many worlds fit, so we have proposed to:
- Consolidate a global network for climate and life that amplifies and supports local, community and territorial struggles at a global level.
- Map extractivist projects and identify their sources of funding in the territories, generating impact reports and local case studies. This will make it possible to document the effects of megaprojects and plan data-based resistance strategies.
- Strengthen the exercise of peoples’ self-determination by ensuring that communities receive clear and detailed information on the projects that affect them, guaranteeing respect for their decisions and local leadership, ensuring Free, Prior, Informed and Good Faith Consent. This is to add to the right to self-determination and not to legitimise state-imposed projects.
- Promote sexual education and a culture of psycho-emotional self-care through community alternatives to combat sexual and heteropatriarchal violence, exacerbated by extractivism and colonialist megaprojects that mainly affect indigenous women in defence of territory and especially trans women.
- Promote student organisation with training for youth and student mobilisation against fossil fuels and extractivist industries.
- Raise global public awareness that the climate crisis and ecocide are a war against people and nature.
- Reclaim pre-colonial lands and practices to promote initiatives to revitalise ancestral species and farming systems.
- Build strong and supportive local and international communities, with self-sufficiency initiatives outside the global market, including practices such as tequio, barter, and time banks.
- Promote research and implementation of decentralised and community-based renewable energy, as well as fighting the stigma of ‘anti-development’.
- To compile a database of good practices and successful experiences in the territorial struggle.
- Promote water care through the consolidation of community systems for rainwater harvesting, purification and reuse of grey water, as well as the use of dry toilets to properly manage human waste through composting and its subsequent reuse; as well as the use of dry toilets to properly manage human waste through composting and its subsequent reincorporation into the soil to nourish it.
We are building a common calendar to concentrate all the activities and actions that we share and have planned during the next 2025, as well as commemorative and symbolic dates that we claim throughout the year within our agendas. For now, we share the dates and agreements:
- Dislocated Global Mobilisation for Climate and Life to be held simultaneously in different geographies on 10 November 2025.
- Mesoamerican Caravan for Climate and Life to be held between 11 October and 10 November 2025.
- Meet in the Amazon in the framework of COP30, to share the progress and results of the tasks, work and commitments made in Oaxaca.
- Mediterranean Meeting against Wars and Borders to be held in North Africa (dates to be defined).
We make public the platform of the Mirrors of the Global South that will be the means by which we will follow up on the work and digital commitments, we invite you to join us to build it collectively: https://mirrorssouthglobal.org/quenes-somos/
The AntiCOP was much more than a response to the official COP, it became a space for the meeting and articulation of peoples in resistance, a movement that challenges extractivism, green colonialism and megaprojects that dispossess our communities of their resources and lands. It is also an articulation from below that remembers, imagines and builds other worlds in harmony with ecosystems, biodiversity and justice. From AntiCOP 2024, we commit to continue building together, respecting our differences and recognising our shared struggles. We are the Global South, we are the guardians of our lands and cultures. This struggle is ours and we defend it with determination and unity.
Now, we agree not to remain silent in the face of injustices, criminalisation, aggressions, threats, assassinations and disappearances of people who defend life with life itself. Our voice has become one and our word will travel through the regions of the 5 continents of the planet.
For life, for the earth, for justice and for the dignity of our peoples!
Global Meeting for Climate and Life – ANTICOP 2024, Oaxaca de Flores Magón, City of Resistance on the 11th of November 2024, yesterday COP29 started in Azerbaijan and we are one year away from COP30 in Brazil.
#ANTICOP2024 #GlobalSouth #MirrorsGlobalSouth #NovOaxMex #ClimateJustice #StopWar
