We know we are in a climate catastrophe. The response coming from the United Nations and countries throughout the world is not adequate to address the problem. As Swedish activist Greta Thunberg says, “Change is not going to come from inside [the United Nations]. That is not leadership . . . . We say, ‘No more blah, blah, blah.’ ”
Yet the U.N. climate conferences are a proper forum for one thing—protests against the status quo, as I have documented through my photographs. The increased participation by civil society groups and Indigenous peoples’ organizations at the United Nations has been met by mounting repression. Any form of protest must be approved or delegates will be evicted, sometimes violently, by U.N. security.
During the 2007 U.N. climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, a woman holds a banner outside of a press conference where World Bank President and former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick announces the launch of the organization’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility.
On December 3, 2011, thousands of people march in protest of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) conference in Durban, South Africa.
As a grassroots alternative to the U.N. climate conference that was moved to Madrid, people from across Chile and around the world came together in the Cumbre de los Pueblos at the University of Santiago in December 2019 to talk about achieving the systemic changes that will be required to effectively address the climate crisis.
This is the International Tropical Timber Organization’s exhibit during the 2011 climate conference in Durban, South Africa. The organization believes that “tropical wood can be used as a renewable, low-carbon substitute for carbon-intensive materials.”
Water cannons containing a caustic liquid chase the crowd in Santiago, Chile, during a People’s Uprising in October 2019. A U.N. climate conference scheduled to take place there the following month ended up being moved to Madrid, Spain.
An Indigenous man with his mouth covered by a UNFCCC gag protests the 2007 U.N. climate conference in Bali, Indonesia. The gag symbolizes the exclusion of Indigenous delegates from a meeting with the group’s executive secretary the day before.
An activist with a water bottle is locked to logging machinery as part of a seventy-nine-day occupation of the Shawnee National Forest in 1990. Many of these same activists are now calling for the Shawnee National Forest to become the Shawnee National Park and Climate Change Preserve. It would be the first climate change preserve in the United States.