Pambazuka News, December 2009

(25 mins)

While world leaders and NGO delegates from around the world converged in Copenhagen for the 15th UN climate change conference, thousands of activists, writers, academics and artists gathered at Klimaforum, an alternative climate summit. Here people were given a space to meet, discuss and create radical solutions to climate change.

The following audio piece features interviews with representatives of different countries across sub-Saharan Africa who were at Klimaforum. Wahu Kaara of the Kenya Debt Relief Network provides a critique of the UN climate change conference and addresses the significance of the Copenhagen mobilisation for movements in Kenya; Demba Moussa Dembele, from the Jubilee South campaign in Senegal, talks about the need for sufficient funds to flow from the North to the South to compensate for ecological and climate debt; Julia Agwu from the University of Nigeria in Nsukka gives an analysis of gender and climate change and the impacts of climate change on women in Nigeria; and finally, Mabule Mokhine of the Greenhouse People’s Environment Centre in Johannesburg explains the process by which land dispossession in South Africa was consolidated at the end of the apartheid and the need for collaborations between global grassroots movements.