All posts by Esthappen

End the Siege, End the Genocide: No Climate Justice Under Occupation

For Immediate Release

Media advisory

WHEN Protest timings: June 16th, 8:00 AM (GMT+2)

Press conference timings: June 16th, 10 AM (GMT+2) 

WHERE Protest venue: World Conference Center Entrance (Metro stop: Heussallee/Museumsmeile). Press conference venue: Nairobi 4, Main building. conference in Nairobi room inside the World Conference Center

**Photo and interview opportunity**

CONTACT

  1. Esthappen S, Communications Coordinator, Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice (Whatsapp: +91 9820918910, Email: [email protected])

WHAT: A peaceful protest where local movements, Palestinian activists, international  social and climate justice groups and constituencies from around the world unite to express deep outrage about the ongoing genocide in Palestine. As Israel continues its brutal campaign of bombing, massacres and starvation against an innocent civilian population, many of the actors and states that are directly enabling crimes are currently walking the halls of the UN climate negotiations with no accountability. People from around the world are joining forces to remind them of the deep interlinkages between the intersecting crises of climate, capitalism, colonialism, militarism, violence and genocide. And that they cannot separate climate justice and the cause of Palestinian liberation. The protest will be followed by a press conference in the June Climate Meetings (SB 62) Nairobi press conference room.   

WHO Protest: Civil society groups (from across Germany and the world) and members of UNFCCC rights-based constituencies. Press conference: Mohammed Usrof (Palestine Institute for Climate Strategy), Fatma Khafagy (Women and Gender Constituency), Amiera Sawas (Climate Action Network), Hajar Al-Beltaji (ANGRY), Ana Sánchez (Global Energy Embargo for Palestine), Moderated by Rachitaa Gupta (Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice).    

VISUALS Big crowds of people from around the world with everyone wearing RED clothes and KEFFIYEHS holding banners and placards with messages of solidarity and expressing rage at the complicity of governments attending the climate negotiations with a “business as usual” mindset Coordinated movements and sloganeering    

SPOKESPEOPLE Representatives from Palestinian civil society groups and climate and social justice activists from around the world including local civil society organisations across Germany. 

RESOURCES 1. List of demands from Palestinian COP30 Coalition. 2. Photo/video library. 3. Press release on the protest and press conference. 4. Quote sheet.  5. Recording of press conference.  

Solidarity Statement:

Hold Israel’s War Crimes to Account! End the Famine in Gaza! Free Palestine!

The Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice (DCJ), joins the global call for Israel to end its illegal siege on Gaza and for the international community to deliver immediate aid.

For over 11 weeks, from 2 March to 19 May, Israel blocked all humanitarian aid from coming into Gaza, constituting the longest continuous siege Gaza had ever experienced. To this day, UNRWA, the largest aid organization in Gaza, is still disallowed from entering. The limited and insufficient aid that has been allowed after 19 May is coursed through a militarized distribution mechanism by the newly established, US/Israel-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). GHF’s centers are “death traps” and “human slaughterhouses” where insufficient aid is used as bait to kill starving Gazans, an “essential tactic of this genocide”.

Let us be clear – we are witnessing, livestreamed right before our eyes, another Israeli war crime – starvation as a weapon of war against Palestinians. With farmlands eviscerated, food completely run out, and aid disallowed amid non-stop bombardment, over two million Palestinians in Gaza are living in acute food insecurity, half of whom are children.

Despite multiple alarms sounded by UN agencies such as UNICEF, OCHA, World Food Programme, UNRWA, as well as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), Israel continues to block life-saving aid in open defiance of international humanitarian law, including legal orders from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which remain ignored over a year later.

The current siege in Gaza is not an isolated event but is deeply rooted in ongoing colonization, illegal occupation, systemic injustices, and historical oppression of Palestine by the apartheid State of Israel. As movements fighting against racist and colonial systems of domination and representing oppressed peoples across the globe, we are in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and view it as an integral part of our collective struggle for climate justice. There is #NoClimateJusticeWithoutHumanRights.

We therefore join the people and movements of the world in demanding the following urgent actions:

  • STATES TO BRING AID AND DISPATCH DIPLOMATIC MISSIONS: States must dispatch official diplomatic missions at the highest level possible to bring aid trucks into Gaza, and follow the lead of The Gaza Freedom Flotilla, the Sumud Convoy of volunteers from Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Egypt, and the Palestinian-led Diplomatic Humanitarian Convoy, supported by the State of Palestine and more than 1,000 civil society organizations around the world. Unhindered, safe, stable, and sustained humanitarian access must be guaranteed to deliver lifesaving, multi-sectoral assistance and services at scale. This includes food, health care, water and sanitation (WASH), essential non-food items, fuel, and cooking gas.
  • IMMEDIATE, UNCONDITIONAL, AND SUSTAINED CEASEFIRE NOW: This is critical to reducing the deaths caused by the famine and the catastrophic levels of suffering, especially of thousands of Palestinian children.
  • END IMPUNITY AND STOP WAR CRIMES: Following the ICJ’s ruling, all those responsible for war crimes, including the State of Israel, must be held to account for their actions. The US and its allies must stop their support for Israel, including a complete arms embargo. We also echo the Global Energy Embargo for Palestine’s demand for an energy embargo and all the demands of the Palestinian COP30 Coalition, especially the call to end water apartheid in Palestine by terminating all projects with Merokot and Netafim.
  • FREE PALESTINE! END APARTHEID AND OCCUPATION: We support the self-determination of the Palestinian people. We call on Israel to end its system of apartheid and to grant the right of return and reparations to Palestinian refugees. We call on the international community to finally uphold the UN resolutions for a safe, secure, and viable State of Palestine alongside a State of Israel.

Civil society calls on Brazil’s COP30 Presidency: Deliver a Just Transition in Food and Agriculture 

The UNFCCC Children and Youth, Women and Gender, and Environmental NGO constituencies—including Demand Climate Justice and Climate Action Network—have come together to demand that COP30 meaningfully include food systems and agriculture in its Just Transition agenda. 

In a joint letter to the Presidency, we demand: 

  • A full transition away from industrial, extractive agriculture 
  • Agroecology as a core climate solution 
  • Smallholders, women, youth and Indigenous Peoples must lead in creating policy solutions 
  • Finance and technology that reach the most affected: smallholders, Indigenous Peoples, women and youth 
  • Coherence between climate, biodiversity and desertification agendas 
  • Clear safeguards to prevent greenwashing and protect people, animals and the planet 

Food systems are not a side issue. They are a frontline battleground for justice.
🌍 Read our full letter and share our demands. 

Statement: Global South stands united against attempts by the Global North to derail the Financing for Development (FfD4) process and escape from historical responsibility. 

At a time when public finance is desperately needed to address the intensification of the climate crises due to Global North’s historical and continuing occupation of the world’s commons and failure to execute ambitious climate actions and deliver on climate finance obligations, the Global North continues to fraud the Global South of the climate debt owed, this time co-opting the Fourth Financing for Development (FfD4) process after Baku last year, to further realise their ‘Great Escape’ from provision of new and additional climate finance to developing countries.   

The refusal to respond to the clamor for the cancellation of public debts in the Global South and the attempt to bury climate finance in a single paragraph alongside biodiversity and ecosystems in the zero draft which was opposed by developing countries, is a calculated move by Global North governments to weaken respective mandates and cover up double and multiple counting of the same funds. 

Additionally, their failure to acknowledge “new and additional” obligations and push for insertion of deceptive language of “all sources” along with twisting voluntary South-South cooperation marks the next phase of the Global North’s dereliction of legal obligations. All this while they continue pouring trillions into fossil fuels, militarisation, and corporate bailouts—the very systems driving planetary destruction.

The FfD4 Conference (June 30th-July 3rd) taking place at the heels of June Climate Meetings (SB62) is a crucial moment for Global South governments and movements to hold the leaders of the richest, industrialised nations accountable and stop their schemes to push debt traps, market-based mechanisms and recycled loans and efforts to erase their historical responsibility and cover up for their failures.

The Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice (DCJ) along with its members rejects the attempts by the Global North to rob the communities in the Global South—least responsible for the climate crises—and stands with the G77 that is united in their fight to defend the integrity of climate finance bound by legal obligations of the UNFCCC and its Paris Agreement. We also stand against the decision to conduct the next phase of negotiations behind closed doors with no civil society observers being allowed and demand transparency and accountability from the United Nations. 

G7 LEADERS, PAY UP & PROVIDE CLIMATE FINANCE NOW! 

#TrillionsNotMillions #PayUp #ClimateJusticeNow