global south

GLOBAL: ‘With a wealth tax on the biggest fortunes, extreme poverty can be eradicated’
CIVICUS speaks about climate change, global inequality and the need for redistribution with Adrien Fabre, a France-based climate economistand founder of Global Redistribution Advocates (GRA).

GRA is a civil society organisation (CSO) that promotes public debate about three global redistribution policies that enjoy wide public opinion support worldwide – a global wealth tax, a global climate plan and a global climate assembly – and advocates towards political parties in several countries to incorporate these into their agendas and programmes.

What inspired you to become a climate economist and found GRA?

I started my PhD in economics with the goal of understanding humanity’s problems and proposing solutions. I always wanted to give voice to every human, so I naturally specialised in running surveys. Then, in the context of the Yellow Vests protests that began in 2018, I surveyed French people about their attitudes towards climate policies. This sparked interest at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which called on me to conduct a similar survey in other countries. I seized the opportunity to ask people questions they had never been asked before, such as whether they supported a global tax on millionaires to finance low-income countries. I was amazed by the levels of support: more than 70 per cent in every country!

I ran complementary surveys in Europe and the USA. I tried asking questions differently and tested policies in which the respondents would lose money, but the results were the same: people in western countries were willing to lose a few dozen euros per month to end climate change and global poverty. Furthermore, the support is sincere: you can read this scientific article or my Twitter thread for details.

Now, if there is such strong support for global redistribution, why doesn’t anyone propose it or defend it in public debate? To advocate for global redistributive policies to transfer resources or power from high to low-income countries I launched GRA in April 2023.

What are your proposals?

We have three main proposals to promote wealth redistribution, environmental sustainability and global cooperation to address pressing global challenges. The first is a global wealth tax on individual wealth exceeding US$5 million, with half of the tax proceeds distributed to lower-income countries.

This tax would spare 99.9 per cent of the world’s population, who have wealth below US$5 million. And if the tax were just two per cent, it would collect one per cent of the world’s GDP, which is more than the GDP of all low-income countries, home to 700 million people, combined. Our proposed tax schedule is moderate: two per cent for fortunes above US$5 million, six per cent for those above US$100 million and 10 per cent for those above US$1 billion. A tax of two per cent is far lower than the interests, rents and dividends such a fortune generates.

Our second proposal is a global climate plan aimed at combatting climate change through a worldwide carbon emissions cap, implemented by a system of global emissions trading, and financing a global basic income.

This plan would enter into force as soon as signatory countries cover 60 per cent of global carbon emissions. Participating countries would enforce a cap on carbon emissions, decreasing each year and down to net zero emissions after three decades, in line with the temperature target. Each year, emissions permits would be auctioned to firms that extract fossil fuels or import them from non-participating countries, making polluters pay. To cover the cost of emissions permits, firms would increase fossil fuel prices, which would in turn encourage individuals and businesses to change their equipment or adjust their habits, eventually reducing carbon emissions. The revenues from carbon pricing would fund a global basic income estimated at US$50 per month for each person over 15.

This plan would bring a massive redistribution from countries with a carbon footprint higher than the global average – like OECD countries – to those with a lower-than-average carbon footprint, including most of Africa, South and Southeast Asia and Latin America. It includes mechanisms to encourage participation by all countries, such as a tariff on goods imported from non-participating countries in proportion to their carbon content, a provision allowing middle-income countries such as China to opt out from the mutualisation of revenues to guarantee that it would not lose from the plan while ensuring that it decarbonises with the same carbon price, and a provision facilitating the participation of subnational entities like California or the state of New York even if the federal level does not participate.

The wealth tax and the climate plan would each redistribute one per cent of the world’s GDP from high to low-income countries every year. Extreme poverty can be eradicated. The average income in a country like the Democratic Republic of the Congo would double following the transfers.

Our third proposition is that of a global climate assembly, comprised of representatives elected through proportional representation in participating nations, tasked with drafting a comprehensive treaty to address climate change globally. Before even the beginning of that experiment in democratic governance at the global scale, the assembly would bring a radical change, as the election campaign would foster a global public debate on climate justice.

Please check our website for details: each policy has its own advocacy campaign, with a fully-fledged policy proposal, a petition and a video.

Who are you targeting these proposals at, and how are you working to get the message across?

We are targeting our campaigns at policymakers, scholars, civil society and lay people. Many scholars have endorsed our proposals. GRA is a member of civil society networks in each of our policy domains, and we are hoping that key CSOs will endorse our proposals. We have already met with cabinet members of various governments, including Brazil, Colombia, France, Germany and South Africa, as well as many European Union (EU) politicians. And we are sending dozens of emails every day to get more meetings. Once we get a book on our climate plan and the scientific article finished and published, we will reach out to the public. We will publish an open letter in widely read newspapers, calling on world leaders to discuss global redistributive policies at the United Nations (UN), the G20 and climate summits.

Hopefully, we will get media attention and the movement will grow. It will help if well-known personalities, including celebrities, endorse our proposals. But it will take a social movement to make change happen, perhaps a global demonstration. Our hope is that a large coalition of political parties, CSOs and labour unions throughout the world endorse some common policies towards a sustainable and fair future – ours, or similar ones. This will likely strengthen the parties of the coalition and help them win elections. Our research shows that progressive candidates would gain votes if they endorsed global redistributive policies.

What are the prospects of these proposals being implemented in the near future?

Our proposals are getting more and more endorsements every day. The African Union just called for a global carbon price and will defend this idea in international negotiations.

But our proposal that receives the largest support is the global wealth tax. The next European Parliament elections will be held in June 2024, and left-wing parties will campaign on a European wealth tax. We have proposed that one-third of this European wealth tax would be allocated to lower-income countries outside Europe, and there are good chances that some parties will take this forward. A petition in favour of a wealth tax has recently been signed by 130 members of the European Parliament, and politicians from all parties on the left and centre endorse our proposal. However, a majority in the European Parliament would not suffice, as this proposal would require unanimity at the Council of the EU, that is, the approval of each EU government.

However, three things can help. First, Brazil will chair the G20 in 2024, and we hope that President Lula, along with other leaders, will put pressure on global north states for global redistribution. Second, it would help if US President Joe Biden included wealth taxes on the agenda of his re-election campaign. Third, the campaign for the 2024 European Parliament elections could create momentum for some countries to move forward, even if the EU does not.

I am optimistic that wealth taxes will be implemented – perhaps not in 2024, but within the next decade. However, I fear negotiations might end up being overseen by the OECD, resulting in a disappointing agreement, as happened on international corporate taxation. Negotiations on international taxation must be hosted by the UN, not the OECD. And regarding the content of the negotiations, we should be vigilant of three elements: the exemption threshold, which should not exceed US$5 million; the tax rates, which should be progressive and not too low; and the distribution of revenues, a substantial part of which must go to low-income countries.

Civil society mobilisation will be key to promoting the global wealth tax, making it a central campaign issue and turning it into effective international policy. You can help by signing our petitions, donating, or volunteering for GRA. GRA is also hiring, so feel free to contact us!

What are your hopes and expectations regarding the upcoming COP28 climate summit?

COPs sometimes bring good surprises. Last year, high-income countries finally accepted the principle of a fund to compensate vulnerable countries for the loss and damage from climate change, after 30 years of demands from the developing world.

But I don’t expect any good news this year, as the upcoming COP28 in Dubai is chaired by the CEO of the United Arab Emirates’ state oil company. More generally, I do not expect much from COPs because its decisions are made by consensus, so countries like Saudi Arabia can block any meaningful proposal. This is what led to the current system of nationally determined contributions: while all countries supposedly share the common goal of limiting global warming to ‘well below 2°C’, there are no binding commitments, no harmonised policies, no agreement on burden-sharing, and the sum of countries’ voluntary pledges is inconsistent with the common goal.

To break the deadlock, states with ambitious climate goals should start negotiations in parallel with the UN framework. I think the EU and China should start bilateral negotiations. If they put forward something like the global climate plan that we propose, countries that would benefit from it would surely accept it, and more than 60 per cent of global emissions would be covered. This would put enormous pressure on other countries to join, and particularly other OECD countries such as the USA.

Get in touch with Global Redistribution Advocates through itswebsite or itsFacebook page, and follow@GlobalRedistrib and@adrien_fabre on Twitter.
SDGs: ‘Radical policy changes are our only hope of ending global poverty’
CIVICUS speaks with Andy Sumner about the prospects for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the underlying dysfunctions of the current global governance system.

Andy is Professor of International Development at King’s College London, president of the European Association of Development Research and Teaching Institutes and Senior Fellow of the United Nations (UN) University World Institute for Development Economics Research.

Why are the SDGs important?

The SDGs are a set of global objectives that are for all states to pursue collectively, as part of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. They provide a framing for developing policy and a basis for developing strategy by setting goals and targets on poverty, nutrition, education, health and many other aspects of human wellbeing and sustainability. They are the most comprehensive blueprint so far for eliminating global poverty, reducing inequality and protecting the planet.

The SDGs were agreed in 2015 and are to be achieved by 2030. They were approved by all states at the UN, which at least in principle gave them political legitimacy around the world. They are therefore a useful tool for civil society advocacy. They allow you to say to any government, ‘you said you would do this’, and chances are most governments will at least want to be seen to be trying and that means allocations of public spending and other public policies.

Of course, the SDGs have their critics too, because there are a lot of indicators and some of the targets aren’t well defined and not easily measured. Some also say it’s a very top-down agenda developed by governments rather than bubbling up from the grassroots. Nevertheless, it does provide a set of key indicators of development that have been embedded in UN global agreements from many years. And in principle, governments can be held accountable for at least making some attempt to meet the SDGs.

Are the SDGs going to be met on schedule?

The world is currently far behind on the SDGs, at least regarding a range of global poverty-related SDGs. In a recent UN University brief and working paper I published alongside three colleagues from the SDG Centre, Indonesia at Padjadjaran University, we made projections for the SDGs on extreme monetary poverty, undernutrition, stunting, child mortality, maternal mortality and access to clean water and basic sanitation. Our projections indicate that economic growth alone will not be sufficient to end global poverty, and the global poverty-related SDGs will not be met by a considerable distance.

Unfortunately, I think we are looking another lost decade for global development, not only due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit the SDGs hard, but also due to the enormous debt overhang from the pandemic and the price shocks that have come from the war in Ukraine.

Looking ahead, there is a strong case for urgent debt relief. There is a debt crisis underway, in the sense that across the global south, and particularly in many of the world’s poorest countries, social, health and education spending is being squeezed simply to pay debt servicing. So this is a crisis not for financial markets but a crisis for real people.

Much of the debt is owed to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, so they could do something about this. Of course, there’s also some debt owed to China and private capital markets, which is potentially more complicated. Still, the IMF and World Bank could be more proactive. There are signs already that the situation is being recognised, but not enough urgency as the worry is driven by concern over debt defaults rather than the ongoing austerity crisis.

Do you think failure to meet the SDGs is linked to structural flaws in the global governance system?

I think it is possible to link the catastrophic failure on the SDGs to a failing global governance system. The measures that would be needed to meet the SDGs, notably debt relief and expanded funding, would require a deep reform of the international financing architecture.

Right now, it doesn’t make any sense. The global south may receive official development assistance and other financial flows, but a substantial share kind of evaporates in that debt servicing is sent back to the north, notably via debt service to the IMF and World Bank. Then we can consider all the global south loses, in for example, profit shifting by global companies, illicit flows to and from tax havens, payments for intellectual property for use of technology and so forth. We do see major signs that climate change and exclusion from western vaccines may be among the issues leading to a new assertiveness by global south governments. Take for just one example the recent UN vote on a global convention on tax cooperation championed by the global south.

Urgent reform of the governance of IMF and World Bank is needed that would lead to a change in their strategies around, for example, austerity conditionalities. For example, most of the agreements that more than 100 governments signed with the IMF during the pandemic included a range of austerity measures. This is totally inappropriate, especially if the goal is to meet the SDGs.

A new financing deal is also needed to address loss and damage, not only in relation to climate change – for which a fund has already been agreed, although against the wishes of the global south, it is within the World Bank for now – but also in relation to colonialism and slavery, regarding which demands for reparations remain unaddressed.

How can civil society best advocate for the SDGs?

The SDGs are very often embedded in civil society campaigning because they offer a way to hold governments to account. They require that spending is redirected towards social spending, public education and public health and other priority sectors. As a result, they require that inequalities across income, education and health are addressed.

Civil society should advocate for radical policy changes, because these are the world’s only hope of meeting the SDGs. What is needed is urgent debt relief, which would release funds for social and productive investments across developing countries, and a new focus on redistribution with growth both at the global and national levels.

To change course, we need urgent policy action on two fronts.

First, a stronger focus on inclusive growth and productive capacities. Specifically, new international financing needs to be made available through debt relief or other forms of finance to expand fiscal space across countries of the global south to allow a stronger focus on SDG 8 on decent work and economic growth. This financing should seek the expansion rather than contraction of social and productive spending.

Second, that focus should entail redistribution alongside growth, through policies that build productive capacities, introduce, or expand income transfers to meet the extreme poverty target, and ensure sufficient public investment to meet the health, water and sanitation SDGs.

In short, today’s trajectory demands a forceful, seismic shift towards redistribution, both globally and nationally. This is the pathway to follow if the world is to have any hope of achieving poverty-related SDGs.

Get in touch with Andy throughLinkedIn and follow@andypsumner on Twitter.

This interview was conducted as part of the ENSURED Horizon research project funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
UN TAX CONVENTION: ‘People power is the major weapon we bring to the fight against inequality’
CIVICUS speaks about civil society’s work to tackle inequality from the ground up and discusses the prospects of a United Nations (UN) tax convention with Jenny Ricks, Global Convenor of Fight Inequality Alliance.

Fight Inequality Alliance is a growing global coalition bringing together a wide range of social movements, grassroots and community-based organisations, civil society organisations, trade unions, artists and individual activists organising and mobilising from the ground up to find and push for solutions for the structural causes of inequality in order to rebalance power and wealth in our societies.

Is there a global consensus that inequality is wrong and needs to be addressed?

In recent years there has been quite a consensus that inequality has reached new extremes and is damaging for everybody in society as well as for the environment. We are at a time when it’s not just people on the frontlines who are most affected by inequality saying it’s wrong and grotesque and it needs to change, but even organisations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are saying it’s a problem. The Pope is saying it’s a problem. Governments have signed up to reducing inequality through one of the Sustainable Development Goals.

There is this broad consensus on the surface: it seems like everybody thinks concentration of power and wealth at the top of societies has gone too far and the gap is too extreme and affects people’s daily lives and livelihoods as a matter of life and death. And not only that: it also corrodes democracies. When oligarchs control the media, buy elections, crack down on human rights defenders and civic space and trash the environment, it affects everybody.

But underneath that superficial consensus, I think there’s still deep disagreement about what fighting inequality really means. We at the Fight Inequality Alliance are interested in dismantling the systems of oppression that drive inequality, including neoliberalism, patriarchy, racism and the legacy of colonialism. These are the deep structural roots of the inequalities that are the reason billions of people struggled to survive under a global pandemic while the richest people in the world continued to have a great time. So we have an agenda of transformation of the nature of our economies and our societies, and not just tinkering with the status quo, making minor tweaks to stop people rioting.

How can structural inequality be tackled?

When we started forming the Fight Inequality Alliance, we were clear that the problem was not a matter of lack of policy solutions. We know what the policy solutions are to fight inequality, such as the measures needed to tackle climate change, the redistributive tax policies needed or the policies required to ensure decent work.

The problem was that the overwhelming concentration of power and wealth at the top wasn’t matched by a countervailing force from below. The richest and most powerful are organised and well-funded. They are pursuing their interests and their greed aggressively and successfully. What we have is people power. But across civil society and beyond, groups were very fragmented, very siloed and focused on their individual agendas and absorbed by the issues their constituencies most need them to respond to. There was not enough connection across struggles.

0rganising around inequality is a good way for people to understand how their struggles are interconnected: underneath the day-to-day struggles there are common roots, and therefore there are also common solutions to be fought for. That’s where we saw our role lay, and also in shifting the narratives we have about inequality. We need to change what we envisage as being necessary and possible in our societies, and build power behind the alternative visions we are striving for. When we are limited by what popular narratives deem as natural or normal, such as the false idea that billionaires are hardworking geniuses so deserve unlimited wealth, it limits our energies and our organising capacities for structural change.

People at the grassroots know their problems and their solutions. Inequality isn’t an issue for economists and technocrats to solve: it is primarily a fight that needs to be fought by people. And the voices of people living at the sharp end of these inequalities needs to be heard. They are the real experts in this struggle. So people power is the biggest weapon that we bring to the fight. Governments and international institutions want to take these debates to the technical arenas of policy-making bodies and conference hall settings, wrapping them in technical language that intentionally makes them inaccessible to most people. Many issues that require structural changes, and certainly inequality, are seen as things to be measured, reported on and talked about in economic circles.

But inequality is a human tragedy, not a technical matter. It is about power. And solutions need to be owned by the people whose lives are most affected by it. We need to shift the balance of power, in our societies and in the global arena, not wrangle over the wording of a technical paper discussed behind closed doors, and that’s done by organising on a large scale. This people power is the major weapon we bring to the fight against inequality.

Why is taxation important in the struggle against inequality?

Fighting inequality requires us to redistribute power and wealth, and taxation is a major redistribution tool.

Over the last decade or two civil society has done a lot of work to try and challenge the fact that the richest people and the biggest corporations across the world are not paying their fair share of tax. The economic model is exploitative, unjust and unsustainable, based on resource extraction, primarily from the global south, abusive labour practices, underpaid workers and great environmental damage.

But everyone can relate to this issue nationally too – when it comes to national or local budgets, governments often increase indirect taxes such as value-added tax, which is the most regressive kind of tax because it applies to anything people buy, including essentials, instead of taxing rich people or multinationals more, and they have set up whole global industry and schemes to avoid and evade tax on a massive scale.

Redistribution is happening as we speak, but it is based on extracting from the poorest and distributing towards the wealthiest people in the world – billionaires, corporate shareholders and the like. That is what we are fighting to reverse, at a local level as well as globally.

How could a UN convention on taxation help?

The current level of wealth concentration is so grotesque that it requires solutions and action at all levels. We need to fight on the local front where people are struggling while we push for systemic change in places like the UN. The discussion of global tax rules feels quite distant from the day-to-day struggles that most people, within our alliance and beyond, are campaigning for. But decisions made about them have repercussions for those struggles.

Rules on taxation have so far been set by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental organisation with 38 member states – a rich countries’ club. How can decisions over global taxation rules that affect everybody sit anywhere but the UN, which for all its faults and failings is the only multilateral body where every state has a seat at the table?

Even so, as we have seen with climate negotiations, there is a huge power struggle that needs to be fought at the UN. It will still be a titanic struggle to get the kind of global tax rules we want. But if global tax rules are made within the OECD, the majority of the world doesn’t even stand a chance. Asking rich countries to please behave better is not going to yield the kind of transformation we want.

So in November 2022 we saw a first positive step as the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for more inclusive and effective international tax cooperation and urging member states to kick off negotiations on a global tax treaty. The resolution echoed a call made by the Group of 77 (G77), the largest bloc of developing countries in the UN, as well as the Africa Group, and gave the UN a mandate to monitor, evaluate and determine global tax rules and support the establishment of a global tax body.

A global tax convention would put global south states on an equal footing with global north states, so the proposal faced pushback. Global power dynamics were clearly at play. This was to be expected: this is bound to be a long-term process, and an open-ended one. There is no guarantee it will result in the strong global framework that we need. But it’s still a fight worth fighting, and the UN is the right arena for it, simply because there’s no other space to have these negotiations. Where else could the G77 or the Africa Group renegotiate global tax rules?

How are you campaigning in the light of the resolution?

We are not directly campaigning for the UN Tax Convention as much as we are trying to bring people into this agenda in a different way. We’ve been campaigning a lot on taxing the rich and abolishing billionaires, which is a more appealing way to present the issue and mobilise people around it. We can’t imagine hundreds of thousands of people taking to the street for the UN Tax Convention at this point. So instead we’ve been organising around the need to tax the rich, domestically and globally, both individuals and corporations.

This call has a lot of popular resonance because people find it easier to link it to their primary struggles, for jobs, healthcare spending, better public services or basic income, or against austerity measures, regressive tax rises or subsidy cuts. It’s become part of the campaigns of a lot more movements across the world through our organising over the last few years. This has been the way into the tax agenda for a lot of grassroots movements in the global south. It has potential to bring people’s attention to the broader tax justice agenda. You can’t start by holding a community meeting about the UN Tax Convention. You need to start from the daily inequalities people are facing.

Get in touch with Fight Inequality Alliance through itswebsite orFacebook page, and follow@jenny_ricks and@FightInequality on Twitter.
World leaders meet at COP26 but many participants from the frontlines of climate change are left out in the cold

As world leaders meet at #COP26, barriers for participation have left many participants from the frontlines of the fight against climate change out in the cold https://t.co/2dH7jLKqkx #UNmuteCOP26 #Facesfromthefrontlines pic.twitter.com/7sDCIkC0Z2
— CIVICUS (@CIVICUSalliance) November 4, 2021

The stakes are higher than ever at COP26 and the lives of many of the world’s most disadvantaged communities hang in the balance, with rising sea levels, major storms, floods and droughts all increasing due to climate change. Governments must be ambitious and deliver on their commitments to de-carbonise our economies by 2030.

The negotiations at COP need accountability as there is an inherent power imbalance within the UN talks between industrialized countries and countries of the global South.

However, the possibility for participation of community representatives from areas that are directly affected around the world has been very restricted and, in some cases, individuals have been harassed or excluded by their own governments. These communities will largely be left out of the physical negotiations which are critical in holding the high polluting member states to account.

Barriers for participation have been far higher at this COP than in previous years, in part due to travel restrictions linked to the Covid-19 pandemic. The inequality of access has been massively exacerbated by the inequities of vaccine provision. Many of the communities most affected by the climate crisis are also suffering an artificial shortage of vaccines - and the lack of solidarity shown by wealthier donor countries such as the UK and Germany in blocking the sharing of vaccine technology and thereby preventing developing countries from producing their own vaccines.

Additional challenges have come in the form of a very restrictive visa regime in the UK, which has been particularly restrictive to individuals coming from outside Europe and North America and has often led to lengthy delays for travel bookings which creates a knock-on effect of prohibitively high travel costs. In some cases, there has also been direct targeting of human rights defenders who advocate for climate and social justice.

From established democracies including the United Kingdom, Australia and Austria as well as other countries like Kazakhstan, Uganda and Egypt, groups protesting for climate justice and the protection of the environment have been violently dispersed. In countries including Honduras, Philippines, Nicaragua and Columbia, human rights defenders advocating for climate justice and for the protection of indigenous rights and the rights of communities are jailed and persecuted. This direct intimidation and detaining of activists prevents the voices of essential communities from being heard in global forums.

REACTIONS FROM GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY

Tasneem Essop, Executive Director, Climate Action Network says:
”We know civil society participation is critical to get a strong outcome from COP26. Yet by pushing for a physical COP in the middle of a global pandemic, with all the restrictions on travel and exorbitant costs, we can see that real and meaningful participation is under threat. This is particularly true for those from vulnerable communities from the global South. The issues on the table at this COP pertaining to finance, loss and damage and keeping 1.5C in sight require those most impacted to have a seat at the table, to scrutinise outcomes from governments, hold polluters accountable and fight to secure a safe and just future.”

Lysa John, Secretary-General of CIVICUS says:
“The world is watching while leaders meet at COP26, real action is needed now but many of the people who can bring lived experience of climate change from around the world are being left out. Now more than ever, the perspectives of people who are most affected by the severe impacts of climate change should be heard and respected.”

Emeline Siale Ilolahia, Director of the Pacific Island Association of NGOs and board member of Action for Sustainable Development says:
“Many of the Pacific Islands are facing direct threats in terms of loss of land and livelihoods due to climate change but our voices are increasingly drowned out and major economies are not taking responsibility for the wider impacts of their inaction. We have been told that this is the moment to build back better, but we need to see world leaders opening space for a more inclusive vision for the future.”

STORIES OF KEY ACTIVISTS WHO ARE NOT ABLE TO ATTEND:

Disha A Ravi (India) is a 23 year old climate justice activist with Fridays For Future India and a writer. She became an activist after she saw her family impacted by the water crisis. She is best known for advocating for better policies and governance for the climate and environmental sector. She is passionate about ensuring that voices from most affected people and areas are represented in climate conversations and negotiations. Her passport has been withheld by authorities.

Suvendu Biswas (Bangladesh) is a young climate activist working on climate and youth issues in the coastal area of Bangladesh. He supports youth-led digital and climate actions to end climate injustice for his peers and their community people. He was prevented due to high cost of travel and visa

Nyombi Morris (Uganda) is a 23 year old climate activist from Uganda fighting to include climate change in the curriculum in schools and promoting tree planting. Nyombi has been advocating to Save Bugoma forest and Congo basin since 2019. He was arrested this year during his Fridays for future strikes in Kampala.

Aïman Atarouwa (Togo) is active in the fight against climate change, in particular: the promotion of renewable energies; supporting the global climate strikes; and leading arts activities on the environment. He could not attend due to COVID-19 travel restrictions.

Guapinol Water Defenders (Honduras) Porfirio Sorto Cedillo, José Avelino Cedillo, Orbin Naún Hernández, Kevin Alejandro Romero, Arnold Javier Aleman, Ever Alexander Cedillo, Daniel Márquez and Jeremías Martínez Díaz, Defenders of Tocoa, in the northern region of Honduras. They were protesting against the implementation of a mining project in the protected area ”Carlos Escalares” that would endanger fresh water sources in the region. They have been detained and charged with arson and unlawful deprivation of liberty.

Angela Mendes (Brazil) is the daughter of murdered environmental defender Chico Mendes. She is actively working to protect the rainforest reserves that were set up over the last 20 years in the Western Amazon which are under threat by the Bolsonaro Government. She could not travel due to COVID-19 and visa delays.

For further information contact:

Oli Henman, Action for Sustainable Development or Tel: 07803 169074
The campaign #UNmuteCOP26 #Facesfromthefrontlines is running at COP26. Check it out here: https://twitter.com/Action4SD/status/1454098027971551233