As the Paris Agreement comes into force and negotiations open at the Marrakesh climate talks, we must not ignore the people who are at the frontline of the climate crisis.

Dirty Energy system devastates lives

Our energy system—the way we produce, distribute and consume energy—is broken, wreaking havoc on our planet and its people.

When we talk about people impacted by the climate crisis, we tend to first consider those impacted by the effects of climate change as these have already devastated lives across the globe. But the crisis extends to, and is perpetuated by, a dirty energy system that is causing immense harm to people and their local environments. From air and water pollution, which cause serious health impacts, to land grabbing for more mines, plants and infrastructure, the dirty energy system generates vast negative consequences for people around the world.

“Our energy system—the way we produce, distribute and consume energy—is broken, wreaking havoc on our planet and its people.”

Worse still, when local communities and environmental defenders oppose dirty energy infrastructure they often face repression and violence: we see virgin forest destroyed in Indonesia to make way for coal mining; the threat of a devastating new frontier of tar sands exploitation in oil ravaged Nigeria; and human rights defenders like Berta Caceres murdered in Honduras over their opposition to mega-dams.

False solutions cause terrible impacts

In west Kenya in 2014, over a thousand homes were torched by the Kenyan government’s Forest Service to forcibly evict 15,000 Sengwer indigenous people from their ancestral homes in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills to make way for a carbon offsetting project. The government eviction was part of their enforcement of REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), a measure supposedly set up to tackle climate change. Not only do false solutions like REDD, carbon trading and offsetting delay the implementation of real solutions, they fail to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, they invariably lead to human rights and environmental rights violations such as those done to the Sengwer people.

Just a week ago, the International Finance Corporation, private sector arm of the World Bank, launched a bond of $152 million for REDD and carbon trading. This was developed together with mining transnational corporate giant, BHP Billiton, which has caused environmental destruction in places like Indonesia. This deal reveals why REDD is a smokescreen and a false solution.

There are threats of new false solutions that pose real and present dangers for communities around the world. The Paris Agreement opens the door to negative emissions technologies (NETs), which sequester carbon through forest restoration and reforestation leading to damaging practices such as monoculture planting, and geo-engineering techniques such as ‘Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage’ (BECCS), a risky and unproven method involving burning biomass to generate electricity, capturing the carbon and pumping it into underground geological reservoirs. This focus on NETs threatens the transition to clean energy by legitimizing continued fossil fuel expansion. NETs also lead to a rush of global land grabbing that will dwarf current environmental and social impacts of biofuels. Some estimates suggest that land use changes (pdf) would need to deliver four times the current land used for global food production in order to stabilize temperatures.