A quick Monday morning downpour out of the humid haze obscuring the distant volcano marked the first real rain I’ve seen in Bali. A Balinese fisherman I met at a temple in Ubud this weekend told me this is supposed to be the rainy season, but no one can predict the weather anymore, which means it is difficult for him to fish. At the conference it is somewhat easier to predict: things are heating up. World leaders and Nobel laureates are arriving, security is tightening, and yesterday for the high-level plenary they literally rolled out the red carpet.
So, world leaders are here. But what about the people they represent? People of the world with no power and no money have the most at stake in the climate change debate, but they cannot come to this conference for those same reasons. Fortunately, there is a large Indonesian presence here, and a number of international NGOs have worked to bring the voices of climate change here to the conference. Putting human faces and stories to the problem of climate change makes it abundantly clear that this is not something that is going to happen someday in the future–it’s happening NOW. “Climate justice” is the word of the day, or rather, two words, with a tagline of “save our locals.”
At the youth side event last week, in which youth from around the world explained to a packed audience what we are doing about climate change in our various places of origin, we could all feel an excited, hopeful energy filling the room–more than we had felt anywhere else in the conference. But the most powerful moment for most of us came when Claire, a young woman from Kiribati, stood up tearfully and with a shaky voice thanked us for what we are doing. Claire’s home nation is only 2 meters above sea level, and she is terrified of losing it. Her testimony moved us all deeply, and really helped remind us what we’re working for.
Friends of the Earth International and Oxfam International have also both been working to put human faces to climate change. Oxfam is running a “stop climate poverty” campaign, and FOEI has compiled a booklet of climate testimonies. Both have brought speakers here to share their stories. A man from Haiti testified about the increase and increase in intensity of hurricanes. A woman from islands I’ve never heard of north of Papua New Guinea talks about the threat of rising sea levels. In Indonesia, which hits us close to home because it is where we are, there are more floods and more droughts. Dengue fever, which wasn’t here at all, is now common. Food security has become an issue because the weather is harder to predict–it is harder to find fish and to grow rice.
These international Western-based organizations have a lot of global credibility and money, but local organizations run by the people affected are in many ways more important. And one message of Indonesian organizations and other groups from the global South seems unified and clear: justice must be the guiding principle to cope with climate change. Without a focus on poverty and inequality in our work on climate change, these problems will only compound each other. While poverty remains such a problem, it will be extraordinarily difficult for developing countries to deal with climate change, which will lead to more poverty and also more climate change, which is clearly a destructive cycle. But there is great hope from these organizations that we can take on both issues at the same time and take the opportunity to create a world based in peace and justice.
So this Saturday when I joined a crowd of mostly Indonesians marching for climate justice in Denpasar, holding signs asking my US government (and Canada’s, and Japan’s) to lower emissions so they don’t have to suffer, calling for debt relief from the World Bank so that their government will have a budget to work with, I stood in solidarity with their strong, clear vision of the world they want to inhabit, a world that focuses on people rather than profit. And it was powerful to be in the streets with so many people who want to hold my government accountable for its environmental impacts on their lives, who know we need change and are working to make it happen, and we’re all around the world in this together and we’re going to change the world because we love it and because this is our home and because we cannot do otherwise.
