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(Scroll down to listen to audio clips from Hardi Yakubu, movement coordinator, Africans Rising, and from Bhekumuzi Dean Bhebhe, co-facilitator of Don't Gas Africa Movement.)

Industrial agriculture is not so much jumping on the “Food Systems Transformation” band wagon as trying to steal it!

Don’t fall for the UN’s new Food Systems Coordination Hub hype about “Transforming Food Systems for Planetary Health”. The current corporate agenda, championed by this new “Hub” is firmly focused on hijacking the UN’s existing food systems spaces to force through yet another phase of Industrial Agriculture – promoting its technofixes as solutions to the very problems that it itself has caused, including in relation to climate change and biodiversity loss.

Mexico City, Mexico – On Friday January 13 the Mexican government announced that it will not allow solar geoengineering experiments in Mexico. This announcement came in response to Make Sunsets’ experiments over Baja California Sur, Mexico, where the two-man startup used weather balloons to spray sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. This took place without the Free Prior and Informed consent of the Indigenous peoples whose territories were used for the experiments and without any permits or even a license to operate a business in Mexico.

Two years late – and supersized beyond any previous CBD meeting – COP 15 was always going to be a complex multidimensional chess battle. Once all sides met in Montreal’s enormous Palais des congrès, an army of corporate and philanthrocapitalist lobbyists and big delegations from biotech-friendly governments used their superior numbers to drown out (and often literally edit out) long-standing principles of precaution and justice.

MONTREAL/TIOHTIÀ:KE/UNCEDED TERRITORY OF THE KANIEN’KEHÁ:KA NATION – Climber-activists today dropped 80-foot banners reading, “Biodiversity versus Billionaires,” visible from Montreal’s Palais des Congres where world leaders are meeting at the UN’s landmark Biodiversity COP15.

December 12, 2022, Montreal, Canada – Eighty-three national and international organizations from forty countries have released an open letter calling on the parties to the United Nations Conference on Biodiversity (CBD) to say no to geoengineering and yes to protecting biodiversity, the environment, the climate, the rights of Indigenous peoples and the human rights of local communities.

COP15: An interview with Christine von Weizsäcker

by Zahra Moloo

(Click on the link below to listen to the interview.)

As preliminary meetings of the Open-Ended Working Group wrap up and official COP meetings begin, ECOROPA’s Christine von Weizsäcker talks to ETC Group about evaluating new genetic technologies and the rights of indigenous people in the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).

As newspaper headlines that warn of the increasing numbers of animal and plant life facing extinction become ever more urgent, delegates have begun to trickle into the Palais de Congres in downtown Montreal for the COP 15 global biodiversity summit under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The building is cordoned off on all sides by an astonishing number of police guarding the streets and patrolling on bike, cars and horseback.