Present at COP16

From October 21 to November 1, Santiago de Cali, Colombia, will host the United Nations Conference on Biodiversity (COP 16). Plurales will be participating in the meeting in general and promoting two events and a campaign in particular.

As part of the Plataforma Defensoras y Defensores de la Tierra y el Territorio, we will travel to Cali to participate with 35 environmental defenders from Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala, Brazil, Bolivia, Honduras and Paraguay.

It will be the first COP on biodiversity since the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework at COP 15, held in December 2022 in Montreal, Canada. This agreement has the 30×30 objective: to stop and reverse the loss of biodiversity by protecting 30% of the land surface and 30% of the marine environment by 2030.

Environmental Defenders, our protagonists

On Tuesday, October 22, we will be part of the Film Forum: “Women on the front line: a regional agenda for biodiversity and land rights”. During this event, two documentaries will be screened that portray the struggles and stories of defense and resistance from the territories in Colombia and Argentina.

On the one hand, the documentary “Reflejos” (Colombia, 2024) will be presented by Weisny Yireth Velaides, member of Fundación Mujer, Amazonía y Paz (Funmapaz), from Caquetá. On the other hand, Débora Sajama, from the Coalición Nacional por la Tierra ENI – Argentina and from the Aboriginal Community of Casa Grande, Vizcarra and El Portillo, from El Aguilar, Jujuy, will present “Litio, qué hay detrás de la Reforma” (Argentina, 2023).

• When: Tuesday 10/22, 2:00 p.m. (Colombia time)
• Where: Banco de Bogotá – Auditorium (CRA 4 #7 – 61, San Pedro, Cali)
• Previous registration required

On Wednesday 23rd, together with Fundación Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (FARN), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN – IUCN SUR – IUCN NL – ORMACC), the Peruvian Society of Environmental Law (SPDA), the CBD Women’s Caucus (CBD WC), ECO Maxei and the Encuentro de Juventudes por Escazú (ENJUVES), we organized the event “Empowering women environmental defenders: territorial strategies with a gender perspective from Latin America relevant to monitoring the Global Biodiversity Framework”.

When: Wednesday 23/10, 18 (Colombia time)
Where: Cano Cristales – CEE – Plaza Uno meeting room – Cali, Colombia and also online live
Interpretation into Spanish and English.

“Women have a central role in the conservation of biodiversity”, with this premise and with the help of UN Women, environmental defenders from Argentina, Guatemala and Ecuador and coordinator of the CBD Women’s Caucus, “we will explore what strategies can be implemented to monitor compliance with the Global Biodiversity Framework from a gender perspective”.

On the 24th we will participate in “Guardians of the Rights of Mother Nature”. Nicolás Avellaneda, member of Plurales, will be with Erick Pajares, Executive Director of CIMA – Cordillera Azul (Peru), Ketty Marcelo, President of ONAMIAP (Peru), Simón Crisóstomo, Citizen Observatory (Chile) and Josefina Tunki, TICCA Network (Chile).

• When: Thursday 24/10, 16 (Colombia time)
• Where Zona Verde: ECCI UNIVERSITY – ROOM 3, 7TH FLOOR

The objective of this activity is “to make known and reflect on the struggle for the recognition of the rights of Mother Nature as a position that allows the integral conservation of ecosystems, cultures and the interdependent relationships between them, through the presentation of cases where this has already occurred and the discussion of its limitations and scope”.

We will also be part of the Women and Gender Constituent (WGC), one of the nine official stakeholder groups of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It was created in 2009 and is currently made up of more than 50 civil society organizations and networks of women and environmentalists.

“The objective of the LAC-WGC will be to amplify the voice, concerns, contexts and demands of women’s organizations and collectives in all their diversity, non-binary people, feminists and activists who come together for gender justice and who are articulated for the region, working at the intersection with climate change. This regional node also aims to strengthen political advocacy, particularly in the multilateral space of the UNFCCC and climate-related processes in Latin America and the Caribbean, to develop, reflect on and promote common positions that are part of the Women and Gender Constituent (WGC)”.

In the meantime, you can find us at the stand of the Socio-Environmental Alliance Funds of the South, in the Green Zone and at the International Land Coalition (ILC) stand in the Blue Zone.

Jujuy’s environmental defense at COP 16

In the context of this event, we want to make visible, raise awareness and influence the process of land dispossession through extractivism, the energy transition and the use of constitutional reform in Jujuy, Argentina.

Thus, through the campaign “Let’s defend Jujuy: no to energy transition without rights” we will be making visible the case of Jujuy with lithium and the unconstitutional reform of the province to increase extraction. We will spread the word about the energy transition and what it means to put it into practice through the increase of violent extractivism in local and indigenous communities and we will position the need for land governance centered on the people who inhabit it and their role in the conservation of biodiversity.

For Plurales, it is important to participate in these types of international events, but fundamentally to promote the participation and influence of organizations from the territories with which we work. These global spaces do not always take the direction we expect. Even so, we believe that opening debates and disputes at these levels of influence is still viable and allows us to make other worlds possible and not just the one that a few try to impose on us.