We need you to act now. This petition contains a statement on water and climate that is important for our collective work on these issues.

The reason we are asking you to sign this now is that This week in Bonn, the Climate meetings are preparing for COP 16 in Cancun Mexico.

Oslo - Governments must confront risks that the UN's Kyoto Protocol for fighting climate change will collapse because of splits about a successor treaty, the UN's top climate official said on Monday.

Koenigswinter - Outgoing UN climate chief Yvo de Boer shot down expectations of a climate treaty this year, saying on Monday that a major UN conference in December would yield only a "first answer" on curbing greenhouse gases.

Climate change has already claimed millions of victims. Not where we live, but in the South. Farmers, cattle breeders and fishermen are complaining that seasons seem to have a mind of their own, downpours and cyclones that destroy everything, drought that scorches the earth and a lack of sweet water. Ever-increasing poverty is making many leave in search of a nice, pleasant place to live…

Climate Chaos in the South/Caos climatico en el Sur is a documentary film which is available in four languages (Dutch, English, French and Spanish). This project is an initiative of NGOs which aims to provide voice of the victims of climate change in the South.

Please visit www.caosclimatico.be to watch the trailer and to find other information on this film.

26 APRIL 2010

We, the representatives of the Governments of Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, Member States of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America  Peoples Trade Treaty (ALBA  PTT), in the Caracas Bicentennial Manifesto, signed on April 19, 2010, welcomed the initiative of the President of the Pluri-national State of Bolivia, Evo Morales, to call the First People's World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, held in Cochabamba, on April 19-22, 2010.

COP-15 was a failure waiting to happen.

Hardly any of the disagreements between countries on major issues that the two-year Bali Roadmap intended to resolve were bridged, in time to conclude with a full set of agreements in Copenhagen. Coming into the summit, almost everyone knew that a final deal could not be reached. As the deadline closed in, leaders downgraded expectations for the summit’s presumed outcome to a “political agreement”, something that can at least provide a framework for details to be filled in as negotiations extend for another six to twelve months. This, despite the science pointing to the need for urgent and drastic action, particularly as emissions continue to climb and as changes in the climate continue to overshoot earlier projections.

From 7-18 December 2009, the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was held in Copenhagen, Denmark. In this event, 192 nations with 115 heads of government gathered to work on a framework for climate change mitigation beyond 2012.

Bolivia’s president says developing nations must not be shut out
of international negotiations for combating the greatest
environmental issue of our time.

Evo Morales

April 23, 2010

From Thirty Thousand Feet Above Mother Earth
by Jeff Conant

En route to Bolivia - that is, somewhere 30,000 feet above Mother  Earth -
I crossed paths with Alberto Saldamando, the legal council  for the
International Indian Treaty Council, and a member of the
Indigenous Environmental Network delegation to the Cochabamba climate
summit. As we stood in the aisle of the airplane, raising the hackles  of
the flight crew, I asked him his vision of the week ahead. Alberto  is a
friend, someone I've worked with in the past, so he may have  been more
candid with me than he might be in public; when I asked his  opinion on
the state of the climate negotiations and his hopes for  Cochabamba, he
said, "I'm pessimistic. You know, greed has no bounds."

This primer traces the roots of the climate crisis as well as other social crises

to the dominant economic paradigm and the prevailing socio-economic system in the world today -- a system that has proven capable of generating unprecedented wealth for some at the same time impoverishing the majority of the people and devastating the planet. It shows the limits and adverse implications of profit-oriented technological fixes and market-based solutions being promoted by corporate and elite interests who are determined to maintain the status quo.  It points to the need for a radical change in the distribution of wealth and power within societies and between countries in order to arrest climate change and shift towards sustainable human development.  The primer concludes by identifying urgent tasks for social movements fighting for a just and sustainable future.

Download here