Women with Disabilities

Women & Climate Change Tribunals - Global - Grassroots

Background

In the run up to the COP15 in Copenhagen a series of Climate Justice Hearings and Women and Climate Change Tribunals, were organised in 18 countries across the world. Climate Justice hearings were organised in Armenia, Argentina, Chile, Cameroon, Ghana, Gambia, Kenya, Peru, The Seychelles, South Africa, Zambia while Climate Change Tribunals focusing specifically on women were held in Botswana, Brazil, India, Nepal, Nigeria Pakistan and Uganda.

The aim of these hearings was to allow those who have been impacted by climate change to share their stories, voice their concerns, and to demand a space in the policy debate around climate justice. The testimonies that emerged from these hearings exposed the very real impact of climate change on the lives of millions of people.

During the COP15 in Copenhagen, GCAP convened a number of events around the climate justice hearings including an event in the Bella Centre as well as a meeting with grassroots community leaders from Africa, Asia and Latin America. The meeting led to discussions around the need to form a Coalition or a Platform of Climate Communities to ensure that their voices are part of the global debate on climate. On one hand leaders felt that they were often used merely as exhibits in events on climate change and on the other they felt that their rich ecological knowledge, passed down through the generations, must be the very foundation of a convention on climate change.

GCAP is committed to building what started as a spontaneous response to the COP15 process in Copenhagen into a dynamic and active coalition lead by grassroots community leaders from Asia, Latin America, Africa, Eurasia and the Arab region. The aim of the coalition is to bring together climate communities from these regions to share experiences, develop a unified voice and concrete policy demands and to link into the global debate on climate change in particular through civil society movements such as the Global Campaign for Climate Action (GCCA).

The GCAP Climate Justice Hearings and Women and Climate Change Tribunals organised in the run up to COP15 have provided a strong grassroots base of groups demanding action and participation in the climate debate at a local and international level.These groups have since signed on to the Declaration of Climate Communities and expressed their interest in continuing with this work. The aim is not to create a separate movement but to enable the active participation of community leaders in global debates around climate change both at government, UN and civil society levels.

The upcoming UN MDG Review summit also provides an important opportunity to discuss the links between climate change, poverty and the achievement of the MDGs. In advocacy work towards the summit, GCAP and other civil society networks will be working under the broad banner of โ€œThe World We Wantโ€

In this context, the ( http://pwccc.wordpress.com/ )Peopleโ€™s World Summit on in Cochabamba, Bolivia, which brought together civil society organizations from all over the world discussed the failure of COP15 and put forward proposals on the way forward, represented an opportunity both to formally launch the coalition and to begin to define the World We Want post Kyoto.

Source: http://www.whiteband.org/blog/archive/2010/04/10/launch-of-coalition-of-climate-communities

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When: 7/2/2014

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