Today, citizens of the world celebrate Earth Day to demonstrate their support for environmental protection. Yet, with everything happening around the world right now – from increased militarization and war, to pop stars spending $22 million for an 11 minute space ride, producing more carbon emissions than most people generate in their lifetimes in the process – our individual actions can feel rather insignificant.
While the climate crisis rages on with particularly disastrous impacts on poor communities globally, humanity continues to consume 70% more resources than our global commons can regenerate, and these resources are not being consumed equally. In just the first 10 days of 2025, the richest 1% of the global population had already consumed their CO2 emission quota for the year, as established by the Paris Agreement. Meanwhile, the poorest half would take over three years to reach the same emissions level.
Neoliberal architecture hosted by Global North nations is escalating global climate, environmental, social, and economic devastation. At the same time, the efforts led by the Global North to address the climate crisis through the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties (UNFCCC COP) have faced widespread criticism for being ineffective, elitist, and exclusionary of the Global Majority and those most affected by climate change.
It’s for this reason that the theme of Earth Day 2025 resonates so strongly: OUR POWER, OUR PLANET. It has become clear that the world’s elites are not going to save us and that serious systems change is needed to address the polycrises we face. We, as citizens of the world, must unite to shape the world we wish to live in. And lucky for us – we aren’t starting from scratch.
While the world’s elite prepared for COP29 this past November, people on the frontlines of the climate crisis – from Indigenous communities, farm workers, civil society organizations, women, youth, grassroots movements, and others across the globe – were preparing for their own counter climate conferences. In October 2024, hundreds of people from 21 African countries joined together for the first in-person African People’s Counter-COP (APCC) in Saly, Senegal. In November, just a week before COP, 250 people, many of whom were Indigenous, from 35 countries across five continents convened in Oaxaca, Mexico for the Global Meeting for Climate and Life.
The range of anti-cop conferences that took place around the world are just one example of how citizens of the world are listening, learning, and creating allied networks of solidarity and action to defend their territories and movements for climate justice. For the remainder of this blog, we’re spotlighting just one of these counter-COP movements and their calls to actions, which you can support this Earth Day.
Organized by the African Climate Justice Collective (ACJC), the African People’s Counter-COP (APCC) took place in advance of COP29 as a platform designed by Africans for Africans to discuss, strategize, identify coordinated climate solutions across Africa, and to call for new processes for international decision making that resolve the deep seeded issues with COP.
As stated in a press release by La Via Campesina, “The African People’s Counter COP is held because the COP has been co-opted by capitalism and the Global North which continues to replicate the injustices that caused the climate crisis. Therefore, we as the Global South, and Africans in particular, need to lead actions that remedy the climate crises in a manner that is just and holistic.”
As civic spaces shrink in many countries, the conference served as a vital space to exchange knowledge, chronicle community resilience and survival, discuss viable solutions, listen directly to grassroots communities and activists and to engage in activism. Themes discussed ranged from food sovereignty, just transition, zero waste systems, and climate financing.
To dismantle exploitative power and impunity, the African people assert our power to relegate false narratives by promoting African solutions through the following declarations, in opposition to market and Global North-led impositions at the forthcoming COP29 in Baku.
As a collective, APCC released a series of declarations as an open letter to global Leaders from Africans at the grassroots, which revolve around the following areas:
- Climate justice for Global South communities with climate debt funded
- End Fossil Fuel Extractions Across Africa NOW
- Climate Debt, Reparations, and Economic Reforms
- Reform Land Laws and Promote Food Sovereignty
- Energy Sovereignty and Democracy for All
- Stop Waste Colonialism
- Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) and Self Determination
- Involve the impacted and marginalized in decision-making
- Resilience building in Africa
Grassroots movements are leading, uniting, and advancing shared goals together everywhere you look. We must learn from one another’s struggles and approaches – for they are all tied – and use our power and privileges to advance the leadership and calls to action of those most affected by systems and crises we wish to dismantle.