Destructive
Even the more moderate-sounding “nature-based solution” is estimated to have 14 million hectares of destructive monoculture forests and up to 678 million hectares of land used for reforestation.
It is not clear who will own the ownership of these lands or where they come from, but we can guess based on recent announcements from fossil fuel companies.
ENI was involved in a natural gas extraction project in Mozambique and involved driving 550 families out of their land and preventing fishermen from going to sea. At the same time, ENI promised to plant 20 million hectares of forest in Africa by 2030, achieving net zero.
Agricultural ecology
For communities living on land and forests, this is essentially a double land grab-once to extract natural gas and once to offset it.
On the other hand, the governance of small-scale food producers based on ecology, autonomous management, traditional knowledge and indigenous peoples, forest peoples, their own lands and territories, such as agroecology and community forest management (CFM) decentralized climate crisis resolution Solutions already exist and are becoming more and more important.
CFM is the best way to protect forests and ecosystems that naturally store carbon. Agroecology can reduce the use of fossil fuels, increase yields and store carbon in the soil.
We only need political will to support them and expand their scale.
Decentralization
For thousands of years, many of the world’s 600 million farmers and more than 1 billion people who depend on forests for their livelihoods have practiced agroecology and CFM.
However, many of the most famous environmental plans do not envisage decentralized solutions with true local autonomy and governance or justice, but instead aim to maintain the status quo of power relations and may even enable companies to access more natural resources.
If the Green New Deal is to succeed, it must go beyond the northern way of thinking and learn from the historical movement of the global south.
It must recognize that the link between the climate crisis and land rights is not new.
responsibility
The structural reasons for the climate crisis and the violation of land rights are the same-an economic system based on an endless (new) colonial model based on the extraction and accumulation of natural resources.
Communities on the land—farmers, indigenous people, herders, fishermen, and especially women—have always been the first line of defense against extractive projects and climate change.
This is why mining companies and agribusinesses are most responsible for the recorded killings of land and environmental human rights defenders.
If we want to successfully build a climate-just world, it is our responsibility to keep people on the ground.
This author
Kirtana Chandrasekaran works for Friends of the Earth International and is based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
