Climate change

British mining giant Anglo-American will face protests at its London AGM on Friday over controversial mining projects in Colombia and South Africa, and the climate impact of its coal extraction.

Protest: Anglo-American AGM, Friday 19 April at 1pm, Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, London SW1P 3EE

Protestors in miners’ helmets and overalls will hold placards reading ‘Anglo American: Destroying lives, Destroying the climate’.

Representatives of communities devastated by Anglo-American mines will attend the AGM to demand justice. Julio Gomez will travel from Colombia to condemn the Cerrejón open pit coal mine, in which Anglo American has a one-third share. Development of the mine has led to the eviction of indigenous and Afro-Colombian people from their ancestral territories, and the destruction of vast areas of productive land.

Following local and international outcry, the Cerrejón coal company recently shelved an expansion project which would have meant diverting the region’s only major river. All of the coal mined at Cerrejón is exported, so does not...

I have spent this week at the World Social Forum in Tunis. It’s been a slightly chaotic week of overrunning schedules, last minute room changes and broken translated equipment, but in spite of some frustrations, it is undeniably an incredible feat of organisation.

Run by a group of activists, with no office or paid staff, the World Social Forum has still succeeded in brining together thousands of activists – some reports say as many as 70,000 – together from around the world to discuss where we’re at in the quest for real solutions to the poverty, inequality and injustice we see in the world today.

The main slogan of the World Social Forum ‘Another World is Possible’ – a slogan made real by movements from the host country Tunisia who overthrew a dictatorship two years ago. People have travelled from across the world to discuss what that looks like, and how to work towards it.

One of the key questions I’ve been focusing on here is around how we should move forward in the struggle with climate justice, given the deepening...

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) reported a £5.2 billion loss as it announced its annual results today The bank’s boss Stephen Hester is four years into his original five-year plan to bring RBS back on track – yet things don’t seem to be getting much better for the publicly owned bank. RBS blames a year of heavy fines. But let’s just remind ourselves of what these fines were:

PPI: The bank knowingly mis-sold its customers insurance which they neither needed nor could use, over a period of years. Fine: £2.2 billion

Libor: The bank illegally manipulated a crucial interest rate to benefit itself whilst negatively affecting mortgage payers in the UK (and elsewhere). Fine: £391 million

Oily bankers: Protest at RBS's 2011 AGM in Edinburgh 

Bankers this year have been rewarded for doing a ‘good job’. Bonus pot: £600,000 million

Some pretty significant figures that the bank should never have been in a position to pay.

If the RBS was really making headway to being sustainable and acting in the interest...

The 18th annual Conference of the Parties (COP 18) took place in Doha, Qatar between 26 November and 8 December. Like last year’s conference in Durban, the stakes were high, with the world coming ever closer to the point of no return on climate change and the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s only legally binding emissions reductions treaty, due to expire at the end of 2012.

In the event, despite an agreement to approve new extremely unambitious targets for a second commitment period for Kyoto running to 2020, the conference was characterised by inaction on emissions cuts on the part of the rich developed countries and increasing despair amongst poor countries.

For a start, big emitters Russia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand joined the USA in refusing to join the second commitment period for Kyoto at all, meaning that legally binding emissions targets will apply to the EU, Norway, Switzerland and Australia alone. But the target agreed (just a 20 per cent drop on 1990 levels) is nowhere near the 40-50 per cent cuts that developing countries were calling for and, once carbon offsets are factored in, translates to only a minimal reduction on current emissions. 

And while limits were placed on the carrying over of excess ‘hot air’ carbon permits from the first...

Guest blog by WDM ally Lidy Nacpil, from the Jubilee South Movement on Debt and Development Asia Pacific, writing from the UN climate talks in Doha, Qatar.

I arrived in Doha on 2 December for the second week of the UN climate negotiations, to find that no progress has been made on the critical issues that should be resolved at this meeting. I didn’t find this surprising. My direct experiences with the last five annual UN climate talks before Doha have shown a clear effort by many of the rich, industrialised countries – ‘developed countries’ in UN language – to evade compliance with their obligations under the Climate Convention and their legally binding agreements to take urgent and immediate action to address the climate crisis and prevent it from reaching catastrophic levels.

It is no wonder that some climate justice activists are now refusing to get involved in the battles taking place in the context of the international negotiations. The odds are heavily stacked against the rights and interests of the majority of people all over the world, especially those from the South - from the ‘developing and least developing countries’ - who are the most vulnerable to the devastating impacts of the crisis.

Many of us do still choose to fight in the...