Academics, researchers and practitioners are calling for more justice and democratization of environmental agenda and preparing next parallel events to COP25 in Chile

Gloria Baigorrotegui

Thanks to the most important environmental conference in the world, the COP25 that will held in Chile at the beginning of next December, varied laws, visions, plans and environmental programs that rested on the desks, folders and offices of the administration are appearing during this year. All of these are quickly, named, referred and questioned in the public scene. One is the reform of the Environmental Impact Assessment System, which has been re-entered for processing by the government and with great urgency.

Faced with this rhythm that has been promoted by the government authority, a group of more than 140 academics and researchers, have reacted in few more than one day to show their dissatisfaction reflected in a public statement. On this it is demanded to democratize more than expedite the approval of investment projects by approving their environmental impacts. Part of this statement shows the ins and outs of the exercises of the technification of the environment and the depoliticization of its decisions through these international accountability systems.

• If public policy is not taking care of its ecosystems is already unsustainable. We cannot continue to allow projects with predatory effects on the environment. This cannot be resolved by a reform that prioritizes the speed of processing over the quality of decisions. Decisions based on assessments that do not respect the diversity of the land; and that reduces the voices of the affected actors. We need a public policy with a socio environmental approach that has strategic and systemic look to the ecosystems in all their complexity, recognizing the synergic impacts of human actions and strategically assessing how appropriate said actions are looking into the future. Upon this principle, is necessary to design a System of Environmental Impacts Assessment (SEIA) that makes effective the application of preventive principles, strategic environmental assessments, and the deepening of citizen participation and indigenous consultation (Public Statement, June, 2019, available here).

Although the Environmental Impact Assesment Systems have been emerged as responses to the citizen's concern for environmental degradation (Jasanoff, 1996, Formby, 1990), their current proposal of civil society inclusion is mainly thought in educational terms, where it is assumed that citizenship requires access to free courses on public participation. Given this, the declaration recognizes that:

• The methodologies given in the rounds of citizen participation within the SEIA are important spaces for discussion about specific projects, but completely insufficient to account for feelings of attachment, native species, indigenous ways of production, other ancient lifestyles, oral traditions, humans, animals, vegetables, and land. Citizens have shown indisputable evidence of their ability to overwhelm processes of citizen participation in the environmental assessment system. […]. Here, the SEIA cannot be immune to the political, understanding that all of the actors, public or private, who are concerned on the assessment of specific projects, cannot be called ex-post to these, nor can they be excluded to the pronouncing in production sector such as the building sector or in the planning for risks and disasters (Public Statement, June, 2019, available here).

Another aspect is the interrelation of these systems with the ownership of this knowledge, and in the generation and preservation of science and technology (Barandiarán, 2018) for the maintenance of commons.

• In the same way, the production of report of environmental assessment is another source of profit and waste of capacity for knowledge generation, where will all that knowledge go? Who are these base lines for? What environmental science is being generated and preserving the country? What are the conditions that this system creates for young professionals and researchers? (Public Statement, June, 2019, available here).

Likewise, the impacts can’t be the touchstone to solve from project to project the destiny of the territories. An upstream institutional entanglement is required to value not only the impacts, but the risks, uncertainties and indeterminations that the challenges of climate change entail.

• We call to ecologize and not only modernize the SEIA. With this we make an interpellation to the political authorities to tune in their negotiations with those corresponding to a country that will host the COP25. This is because our role as hosts of this event of global relevance, cannot be confined to manage impacts efficiently, quickly and technically, via investment projects. That is, we cannot reduce the look without considering the importance of unavoidable increase of planetary infrastructural impacts. For this, is that it is extremely urgent to broaden the spaces for discussion before and after the SEIA to remedy and repair those historically impacted communities, promote creatively more-and-not-less dialogues between scientific communities, ancestral wisdom, close technological experimentation, and common sense, which call us around the challenges of intervening with prudence caution and care (Public Statement, June, 2019, available here).

There are ethical-political aspects invoked each time that countries renounce their international agreements on climate change, ignoring criteria of justice and reparation, as in the case of Chilean exit from the Escazú agreement. This is an interesting point to consider which is left outside the environmental agreements of the countries of the Global South.

Just as the atmospheric policies were represented in the COPs thanks to the varied air conditioning machines, in the COP-25 Chilean security policies will accompany what has been called the COP-blue-citizen. With it appears the blue zone (more typical of the COP) and the green zone, announced as the “open to the public” zone. There, in turn, would be placed strict security measures, and high prices for the lease of squaremeters for any NGO or Foundation that want to present.

With all the above, the COP appears as a site of restricted access and where the possibilities of making visible groups and networks located proliferate from the alternative. The Citizens' Network for Climate Change (Sociedad Civil por el Cambio Climático (SAC) in Spanish) has been created the parallel COP-25 Summit, la Cumbre Alternativa de los Pueblos y el Foro Social are preparing their agendas too.

Finally, we would like to invite you to visit us in December and to share the parallel and alternative events to COP25. If it is possible to extend your stay another month, even better, due to in January it’s time for the 7th annual meeting of Chilean CTS community. We plan that many discussions on researches on alterities and changing worlds will be developed.

I grate a lot Francisco Fontecilla for the English version of Public Statement, available at the bottom of the text here. 

Published: 07/03/2019