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The Put People First G20 Counter Conference was one of two alternative G20 conferences held simultaneously in London and St Andrews on November 7th 2009 to coincide with the G20 finance ministers meeting on 7th-8th November. Over three plenary sessions academics, activists, campaigners, unions and policy makers debated alternative policies to promote jobs, justice and a safe climate. Lidy Nacpil, from Jubilee South, participated in the first pannel, called "The failure of a paradigm but... has anything really changed?" and talked about climate debt.

"Good morning everyone. I have been asked to talk about climate change, but more specifically climate debt, which is one of the issues we have been working on for the last several years, and which we believe is a very important starting point for the call for climate justice.

The situation is very different today as compared to a few years ago, because today climate change seems to be the topic on everyone’s conversation, i.e. all the politicians from Manila to London and other parts of the world that have been discussing climate change. Corporations also have been trying to compete with each other talking about how they were responsible as corporations and in helping clean up the planet. In many quarters, the other topic that can compete with the attention that climate change has been getting is the economic and financial crisis, which the world, specially the North, - the world of developed countries – has experienced in the last several months (or almost a year now) but which the world of South countries has been experiencing for decades. Both issues, of course, point very clearly to the need for a systemic change. We cannot just simply improve the system. We have a global economic system that articulates with national economic systems and expect to solve the problems that have been revealed by these two crises. And this changing of the system must equally address these two crises and other crises that we have been experiencing.

But unfortunately, I guess, in some conversations that we have been part of there seems to be a disconnect between the alternatives or the prescriptions for the financial and economic crisis, like more consumption so that we can stimulate the economy, and changes that we need in order to solve the problem of global warming, which is to actually power down the planet, cut consumption, cut over production. So, the economists and environmentalists and the movements working on these two issues really need to get together so that we can come up with a coherent response.

In any case, I am here to talk about climate debt, which we believe is a very important starting point as I said for prescriptions for change, because we cannot change the system unless we start by redressing the injustices caused by the current system, and one of that is climate injustice. Climate debt, which is not just any more an issue of social movements, in fact, several governments have included this in their proposals to the climate negotiations in the UNFCCC talks, specially led by Bolivia and supported now by not just five countries, which supported it in June, but more than 50 developing countries, is going to be a major topic, we hope, or we will make sure, in these coming discussions in Copenhagen.

Climate debt is part of a broader concept actually or a broader issue we have been raising for more than a decade, and that is ecological debt. Ecological debt may not be new for some of you or most of you because in fact I have read a few articles from the UK talking about ecological debt; but some of the articles have been referring to an ecological debt that is slightly different, and I think in some important ways different, from the ecological debt that we have been talking about. We have come across discussion of ecological debt as a notion that refers to total global consumption, as compared to global biocapacity. So, it speaks about how human civilization has been consuming more than the earth’s capacity and therefore we owe the earth this ecological debt. This is somewhat different from what we have been talking about because the ecological debt from the vantage point of South movements talks about political economy, about history and historical processes, about the debt owed by the North to the South, and about the debt owed by the elites to the rest of the people. So, we are not just talking about human civilization as if we were just one group of people all together, nor just generalizing about how we have been consuming way past the earth’s capacity. We have to deal with it in more detailed terms, in terms of historical development, in terms of political economy, in terms of social relations among and between people and groups of people.

But going back to climate debt... In that same vein we are talking about the climate debt that is owed by the North to the South, a climate debt that is owed by the elites to the rest of the people, it refers to the historical fact that the rich industrialized countries abused more than their fair share of the earth’s capacity. It refers to the fact, for instance, that if we were to divide the earth’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases equally among all people, rich industrialized countries would only be roughly entitled to about one fourth of the earth’s capacity, but have in fact for the last two hundred years consumed more than three fourths of that capacity. It is not just a matter of consuming more than your share. It is a matter of denying the rest of us our share of that capacity, because what that means for developing countries is that while we are roughly entitled to three fourths of the earth’s capacity, we have been only consuming about one fourth of that capacity.

So, climate debt is not just about excessive consumption of that capacity; it is also denial of our rights, of our entitlement to that space. What we have been talking about is also very concretely expressed in terms of what is now being discussed by several movements and governments in terms of a two-pronged or two-fold climate debt. On the one hand, there is the emissions debt that can be computed in terms of gigatons of carbon or greenhouse gases, which is owed to the rest of the South by the North. And when we say North, of course, we refer to Northern governments, to multinational corporations and to the other institutions and entities that in fact have been consuming this and which within their own countries have been denying that space to people in Northern countries. But we also have to talk about country-to-country relationships because that also exists in those terms. So, we can actually compute how much gigatons of greenhouse gases have been consumed and overconsumed and therefore are owed to the rest of the people of the South.

But there is also another aspect to this and that is what this means in terms of impacts. So, it is not only the carbon or the greenhouse gases that is owed; what is owed is also the impacts of this excessive consumption or this excessive use of carbon. When we explain this to our movements, especially at the grassroots level, one of the analogies I use is: when you steal one hundred pesos – pesos is our currency – from a poor family, you are not only causing the loss of the one hundred pesos but you are also causing the impacts of the loss of the one hundred pesos. That one hundred pesos can mean they cannot buy food for the week so their children go hungry or that they cannot buy medicines so their sick children get worse or that they do not have the transportation for their children to go to school. So, whatever is the impact that was caused by the loss of the one hundred pesos is part of what you owe to that family. And that is what is happening to the South. It is not only that we have been deprived of that space – the earth’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases – and that also means in economic terms what that means for development. It also means that what we are owed is all the impacts of global warming, which of course you also feel in the North, but we are affected several times fold in the South, not because we are in the South but because poverty makes a world of difference in terms of impacts of global warming. If you have solid houses and you have typhoons, then maybe your house can get flooded as many houses in the Philippines got flooded when in Metro Manila a few weeks ago – I guess you probably heard from the news – we suffered an unprecedented flood. Metro Manila was like rivers and lakes. Cars and trucks and buses were flowing through the streets. We had never seen anything like that before. Of course there are many factors to that, but the single biggest factor is the fact that we had rain for six hours which we would normally have for thirty days. And that is what caused the flood and all the impacts of that is part of what is owed.

So, concretely, what does that mean in terms of our demands in the Copenhagen talks? That reparations must be made and reparations must come in the form of: first, cutting of greenhouse gas emissions, so that the cutting of greenhouse gas emissions should not only be seen in terms of people’s responsibility in the North to contribute to the solution to global warming, but must be seen as reparation for what is owed to the rest of the world; and secondly, that there has to be finance and technology provided so that we can deal with the impacts of climate change. So, in UNFCCC language: to address the need for climate adaptation. And this is a major call we are raising now especially in the face of discussions when it seems to appear that helping the South is a matter of charity, when it is not. And that is the word we want to leave with you today: that it is a matter of justice. And that is one of the major demands we are going to make in Copenhagen."

This conference was organized by "Put People First", a coalition of development charities, trade unions, faith groups, environmentalists and other organisations, formed in response to call for a fair, sustainable route out of recession, based in the UK.

Related Information:

* The failure of a paradigm but... has anything really changed? (II), by Poul Nyrup Rasmussen (PES)

* Put People First G20 Counter Conference report and audio

* Expanding global cooperation on climate justice, by Bretton Woods Project

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