COP 23 WOMEN CLIMATE ACTION PART ONE

Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network  – WE CAN

This Bold talk is from a group of frontline, grassroots indigenous women who with their connection to the land from various countries reveal their insights & concerns to the problems being inflicted on their communities by Climate Change.    With them, they bring the pertinent small-scale solutions learnt from their indigenous origins to share with the world, their concerns too.   They gather at COP23 to meet, strategize and accelerate their efforts to Stop Climate Change,  prevent extraction of earth’s resources,  to help their families and children,  to assist with the water problems.

With their social capital, these women in their communities speak with an emotional and spiritual intelligence of what WE CAN do to arrest climate change.   And part of this is the destruction of their lifestyle, ceremonies and sacred sites which must end;  for it is because of these intrinsic values that these forests still exist,  These forests that serve us ALL.

They speak of the urgency required to make changes to our behaviour and the need to lobby our governments, politicians and authorities to take the action required,  which has been too slow.

WE CAN  calls for speaking out and demanding the political will we so desperately need to effect the changes required.  It is time to review the motives of our governments, captured by large corporations.

Thelma Hussein  United Nations Former Deputy Ambassador  Maldives – whose focus is to bring the plight of her people to Global attention (Northern hemisphere especially).   In the Maldives, Climate change is already being strongly felt and is no longer a distant threat.

Precious Piri  – of Regeneration International  & Earth Wisdom from  Zimbabwe.  Assisting a network of smallholder farmers     “Once down on the Ground we achieve more than the Paris Agreement.”

Heather Milton Lightning of Indigenous People Climate Action  Canada.    An emotional focus on predatory colonisation which promised a sharing of land and resources of land, fish, fur, etc which they sought.  She makes the link between mining and genocide (3,000 – 5,000 women missing), the increasing number of suicides, the poverty porn rhetoric, a look a decolonisation, etc    The market-based solutions have not really worked and benefitted her people, who need the right to exist, practice their ceremonies and be who they are.   “We are led by our young people and empowered by our elders”