Latin America and Caribbean WGC Feminist Vision and Demands for COP30

COP30 takes place in a region that spans from the mountains that embrace our Indigenous Peoples to the coasts, where the sea whispers stories of resistance, from the neighborhoods that rise with community kitchens to the fields where both corn and hope germinate. COP30 occurs in a context of climate emergency and increasingly violent, coordinated, and financed anti-rights actions by white supremacy against the bodily autonomy of women and gender-diverse people, particularly racialized ones from the South, while anti-immigration policies spread, undermining the integrity of migrants, refugees, and displaced people.

We recognize, from Haiti’s leadership in abolishing slavery in the region to Palestinian resistance against apartheid and genocide, the same cry for freedom that resonates in our mountains, the same thirst for self-determination that we defend when we say that our bodies and territories are not for sale. The liberation of our peoples is part of the same struggle against a system that feeds on criminalization, occupation, and militarization to continue concentrating power and wealth.

At a crucial moment in planetary history, feminists from the Latin America and Caribbean region raise their voices for system change, because we know that the climate emergency is not neutral: it is not a product of one crisis and to understand it one has to embrace the intersectionality of our struggles, you have to appreciate and factor in gender, race, indigeneity,  and class, among others.

Our region, wrapped in the greatest biodiversity on the planet, has become a racial sacrifice zone for a capitalism that does not speak the language of dignity when it comes to extracting, exploiting, and devastating. The hands that plundered our rubber, our bananas and our oil are the same ones that today impose projects on us in the name of corporate transition that only benefit a few, while condemning our territories and our bodies to be bargaining chips in the global carbon market. Our ancestral lands become toxic dumps, craters of reddish soils bathed in mercury, carbon sinks so that the Global North can continue consuming without limits. 

Across the region, we are seeing the faces of the Afro-descendant woman who sees how drought destroys her crops, the gaze of Indigenous children who observe how mining poisons the body of water, and the pain of the peasant woman who must migrate from her dreams because of agrochemicals that poison the seeds of life. 

The imperialist chains of dependence condemn us to be the eternal pantry of raw materials. At the same time, they destroy the planet and suck every resource we have as part of the debt traps forced on our countries and territories. The global cartel of exploitation of labor puts a cheap price on our time, skills, and knowledge, exhausting us in the artificial race to a ”success” – a nicely packaged imported idea of progress, and prosperity underneath it, fuelling greed and destruction of the planet. 

Understanding this exploitative reality is a step towards bolstering our collective power. We are the guardian force of knowledge that has kept forests alive when machines sought to cut them down; we are those who have practiced agroecology when it still had no name, and we are those who weave networks of community care while the system renders us invisible. Our grandmothers knew what science confirms today: that there is no possible future without justice, that there is no sustainability without ecosystem interdependence, that there is no planet B for those beings who already live on the margins of the planet we now inhabit.

This regional vision reflects the collective work of leaders who unite to defend life in all its forms. At COP 30, we carry the voices of our territories nourished by our resistances. We speak from the territories, communities, and islands of the global South countries, calling for international solidarity to build a world where life is the center and not opulence; where buen vivir replaces capitalism’s version of success at the expense of our communities and sister species.

This is our cry, this is our voice in resistance!

Download our Demands

Demands are also available in Spanish and Portuguese.