SOCIAL & CLIMATE JUSTICE caravan will travel from Geneva to Copenhagen
PRESS RELEASE
Geneva, 3rd of December 2009
- Activists from the South will present their views on Climate Change and Trade Liberalisation
From 3rd to 9th December 2009 50 activists from the Global South will travel from the Trade Summit at Geneva to the Climate Summit at Copenhagen, to point to the close relation between trade politics and climate. The purpose of the caravan is it to enable voices from the South to have their say in the current debates about trade and climate. With public events, workshops and actions the representatives of movements from the South will show, how climate change and trade liberalisation will affect their life and how they struggle against it. The caravan will travel along two routes – one through France and Belgium, a second through Germany – to Copenhagen.
“In discussions about world trade and climate a lot is talked about people from the South, but rarely they themselves get a word in edgeways”, says Juergen Kraus, one of the local facilitators. The SOCIAL & CLIMATE JUSTICE caravan wants to change this: On its journey through Switzerland, France, Belgium and Germany the repre sen ta tives of global movements will present their views on trade liberalisation and climate change. At the same time the caravan serves for networking: “We want to look for alternatives to trade liberalisation and privatisation of resources and we want to connect the struggles for another world in the North and the South”, Kraus says.
Representatives of social movements from all over the world will be participating in the caravan. Some of them are affected directly by climate change like the indigenous Kuna from Panama, whose islands threaten to sink because of the rising sea level. Others are struggling against oil production in the Amazon basin, against gene tically modified food, for food sovereignty and peasant agriculture as well as their rights as indigenous communities.
The background of the caravan are two important summits: From 30th November to 2nd December 2009 the member states of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) are meeting at Geneva to debate the continuation of the world trade circle. A few days later, from 7th to 18th of December 2009, the UN Climate Summit will take place at Copenhagen. There the future of climate protection after the year 2012 is to be decided. The caravan will start at 3rd of December in Geneva. The western route will carry on to Paris and Brussels, the eastern one to Freiburg, Frankfurt and Cologne – taking in Berlin along the way. On 9th of December the activists from both routes will meet at Hamburg to cross the Danish border together.
Contact:
For clarifying questions regarding or concerning possible interviews you may contact us at:
++49 176-85205260 // press@climatecaravan.org //www.climatecaravan.org
Source: Gipfelsoli Presseverteiler