Faced with the commodification, financialization, and the indebting of Life and Nature: Our resistance and alternatives!
The climate and social crisis is hitting the peoples, bodies, and territories of our Latin America and the Caribbean, the global South, indeed the entire world, with increasing force. Floods and droughts, violent storms, the occupation, exploitation, and devastation of forests, glaciers, rivers, plains, coasts, and seas, as well as urban centers rendered uninhabitable, are irrefutable evidence of its advance.
Of course, this is not a new crisis, nor can it be addressed, much less resolved, without understanding it as an integral expression of a longstanding process of colonial, capitalist, racist, and patriarchal domination and control of our Common Home. Since the beginning of the colonial era, the global North—through its governments, financial institutions, corporations, and cultural and media outlets—has exploited and plundered the wealth, natural resources, knowledge, labor, and lives of the peoples of the South, leaving a trail of misery, devastation, repression, and debt, not to mention its local circles of accomplices and collaborators.
But this process is increasingly accelerating, with the proliferation of new forms of extraction and exploitation and false solutions to the very crises it generates. In addition, there is the enormous deployment of an ideological and discursive umbrella that has evolved from “development” and “sustainable development” to “energy transition” and the “green economy.”
Since its establishment in 1999, the Jubilee South network has sought to contribute to the strengthening of resistance and the building of alternatives to this crisis. Our action, together with various peoples, networks, and movements, has contributed to a deepening of the structural link between the domination exercised by the illegitimate financial debt claimed from our countries and the accumulation of the historical, social, and ecological debts of which we, the peoples and nature, are the creditors. In this course, the recognition of the Ecological and Climate Debt and the demand for its reparation has taken on a critical importance.
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Ecological debt, climate debt, and climate negotiations
The concept of Ecological Debt was first explored in depth with the observation of the historical responsibility of the countries of the North for environmental degradation at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio ’92). And then, with specific reference to Climate Debt, with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, 1994), which sought to recognize and respond to the asymmetries of power and of climate consequences consolidated since the industrial revolution with the disproportionate use, by the North, of the environment and greenhouse gas emissions.
However, this principle remained on paper, while the main drivers of Ecological and Climate Debt continue to evade their historical and current responsibilities. The Kyoto Protocol itself (2005), which established the obligation to reduce emissions in accordance with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, enabled carbon trading as a “compensatory” alternative.
Since then, the related international negotiation processes, including the Conferences of the Parties (COP), have exposed the financial and corporate capture of these multilateral spaces and the commercialization of their results, confirming the power of the market and large geopolitical interests over the decisions of the vast majority of the more peripheral countries.
They disregard both the science that points to the causes of global warming and the democratic right of peoples to express themselves and be taken into account when decisions are made that directly affect them, such as oil-dependent policies and projects at the national and international levels or debt and market solutions that have been promoted since the beginning of the climate negotiations.
Among other alternatives presented, they have ignored the Cochabamba Peoples’ Agreements, the result of the Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (2010), in which more than 35,000 representatives of social movements and organizations from 140 countries participated. There, and in many other instances, concrete alternatives have been proposed, including: the legal recognition of the Rights of Nature; the establishment of an International Climate Justice Tribunal; the cancellation and non-payment of illegitimate and odious financial debt; and the implementation of climate reparations, instead of more debt, fossil fuel exploitation, and “green” deals.
The Paris Agreements (COP21) further undermined the mandatory nature of emissions reductions, downgrading climate action by states to the category of “voluntary” and advancing its surrender to financial speculation and carbon markets. As a result, not only was the peak and initial decline in greenhouse gas emissions – which was aimed to be achieved between 2020 and 2025 in order to limit global warming to less than 1.5 degrees – not reached, but global emissions continue to rise.
There is no reason to believe that COP30 in Belém will change the current direction of the negotiations, which are focused on commodification, neglecting the real causes of global warming, backtracking on the establishment of sufficient and binding emissions reduction obligations, and failing to address socio-ecological and climate debt. On the contrary, the human rights of peoples and nature are in a state of great defenselessness and vulnerability in the face of the agreements that are expected to be reached and implemented.
No more debt
The last COP29, held in Baku (Azerbaijan) in 2024, produced, among other results, an agreement that promises to triple climate finance from public sources in the global North to the South, raising the target of $100 billion recently reached in 2022 – although with 70% in the form of new debt -, to $300 billion annually by 2035. At the same time, they committed to adding $1 trillion in private financing (i.e., triple the amount of promised public funds) by the same date. The launch in Belém of the Tropical Forest Investment Fund (TFIF/TFFF) is a flagrant example of the hypocrisy and self-promotion of financial actors and markets that seek to continue guaranteeing their profits under a new green umbrella.
There is much debate surrounding climate finance, which is not intended to address the climate problem, and indeed, more often than not, leads to greater indebtedness for countries in the global South. Furthermore, many of the proposals give central roles to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), and other Multilateral Development Banks, whose loans, conditions, advice, and demands, since their creation more than 80 years ago, continue to be a significant part of the problem rather than a solution.
At its Hearing on Water, Climate, and Energy in October 2025, the Peoples’ and Nature Tribunal on the IMF-WB heard multiple testimonies from indigenous peoples and grassroots organizations in Haiti, Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina, as well as participants from previous hearings in Ecuador and Peru. The criminal actions of these institutions were denounced, along with the complicity of governments, investment funds, and transnational corporations, through the promotion of, among other things, large-scale wind energy projects and the consolidation of carbon markets, the privatization of water and sanitation systems, debt swaps for conservation or climate action, and the continuation of colonial policies of plunder, debt, and control.
Despite growing criticism, both the IMF and the World Bank continue to emerge unscathed from climate negotiations and even see their mandates strengthened. They present themselves as having the “solution” to the crisis for which they are among the main culprits. The participation of these International Financial Institutions (IFIs) in the design or management of funds, such as those for “Loss and Damage,” or for Tropical Forest Investment Funds (TFIF) or for Sustainability and Climate Resilience, or even in the negotiations related to climate or to solving environmental problems, is unacceptable. The IMF, the World Bank, the IDB and other multilateral banks must be kept out of climate.
On top of this reality, there is a monumental process of public over-indebtedness in the countries of the global South, in part to cope with the fact that the countries, speculators, and corporations of the North are not fulfilling their obligations to reduce emissions and provide reparations for the climate crisis. While more than 3 billion people live in countries of the global South that pay more in interest on debt that is illegitimate than they invest in health or education, the costs of stopping global warming are transferred to those same peoples in the South, as are the costs of both the growth of profits in the North and its economic crises. These are crises that the peoples of the South have historically suffered and for which they have already paid several times over with their labor, wealth, and lives. It is time to stop paying debts that are not ours.
The World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group estimates that, during 2023, nearly $200 billion flowed out of countries still classified as “developing”, and into the pockets of private lenders in the global North. Furthermore, largely due to rising interest rates and the value of the US dollar, the cost of “servicing” the eternal debt of countries in the global South has doubled since 2014, reaching $1.7 trillion in 2023 – leaving little room to fulfill the basic rights of their populations, including climate action. Who helps whom, and who owes whom, remain key questions if we are to break out of the vicious cycle wherein the more we pay, the more we owe, and the less we have to tackle ever-increasing problems.
No more false “solutions” to sustain the same system
From the 1970s to the present, capitalism has sought to overcome its crises of overproduction, overvaluation of capital, economic growth, and profit rates by promoting new processes of commodification and a profound financialization of nature, where everything can be bought or sold on any stock exchange.
With this new phase of capitalism, for example, with the markets for carbon credits, the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programs, Clean Development Mechanisms, Environmental Services, and others, peoples are now providing a new type of wage labor—if not outright slavery—where their territories are transformed into commodities and Nature becomes an “environmental service.”
These “false solutions” to climate change continue to proliferate, generating major impacts on the most vulnerable communities, who are expelled from their lands or subjected to carbon ownership regimes over their forests. We are talking about the everyday lives of millions of people, both in rural and coastal areas and in urban centers, who suffer daily from the voracity of capital and see their daily lives, customs, knowledge, cultures, and beliefs affected. All so that speculators and corporations can accumulate more power and make millions in profits at the expense of the lives of the weakest and of Nature, and so that the capitalist system can continue to reproduce capital and sacrifice life.
As for the hegemonic energy transition imposed—a true “energy transaction”—, in addition to renewable energies, the sector related to electrification and the ongoing energy transition is expanding: the mining of minerals called transition minerals, but which are actually sacrifice minerals. The territories where this is taking place and the populations that inhabit them are being profoundly affected in relation to the natural foundations of their lives and livelihoods. The decarbonization of the economy, essential to curb the climate crisis, multiplies the demand for strategic minerals and rare earths.
In recent decades, transnational corporations, based mostly in the global North, together with their public and private institutions, their ideologues and thinkers, have promoted market solutions as the great solution to the “environmental issue.” At the time of the Stockholm Conference in 1972, “environmental protection” was presented as an obstacle to “development.” At Rio+92, some visionaries were already suggesting that the corporate world should raise the banner of “sustainable development,” as there were opportunities to turn it into good business. At Rio+10 (2002), the concept of “corporate social responsibility” was the system’s slogan, selling the private sector as the bearer of solutions to the environmental crisis and paving the way for the current advance of “false solutions.”
COP30 and beyond
At COP30, twenty years later, this trend is deepening. They want us to believe that the same development, the same financial and technological systems and logic, the same market and the same loans, the same jobs and the same institutions that caused and continue to cause so much social and ecological injustice, now painted green, are going to solve all the problems. In the face of this, we, the peoples, our organizations and social movements, must take on a clear, forceful, and autonomous lead in order to generate greater popular organization and mobilization and coordinate strategies.
We need to articulate ideas, political practices, and transformative strategies to rise to the challenge we face. In this sense, we are determined that the Peoples’ Summit towards COP30, together with the multiplicity of related activities, will be a decisive step forward in the service of popular struggles and resistance, where the peoples and communities affected by the capitalist system, the climate crisis, the development model, and debt—the heart of the system—are the the main protagonists. It is they, together with Nature, who day after day face the barbarity of capital with dignity, and are building, through their efforts and struggles, that Other World that is Possible.
In the face of this situation, we call for unity among popular movements, for a coming together of counter-hegemonic forces to strengthen our energies, resources, ideas, and perspectives. To propose new projects for a post-capitalist, non-extractivist society, free from debt, domination, and oppression of any kind. To expose the fact that capitalism cannot be humane, that it cannot be green: green is only the color of the dollars that are accumulated at the expense of people’s lives and Nature. To coordinate efforts to fight for real alternatives, including among them:
- Total and unconditional cancellation of the illegitimate debt claimed from the countries of the South.
- Reparation of Historical, Social, Ecological, and Climate Debt by promoting structural changes in the relations between countries and within our countries.
- Effective reduction of emissions in countries of the North and rejection of false market solutions such as green or carbon bonds, Clean Development Mechanisms, REDD+, nuclear energy, agrofuels, geoengineering, corporate and large-scale renewable energies, debt swaps for conservation or climate action, among others.
- De-financialization and de-commodification of our economies and the shutting down of multilateral institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and regional banks such as the IDB. For the provision of additional, non-reimbursable public climate finance.
- Review and rejection of trade agreements, investment protection treaties, and all forms of intellectual property rights and false technological solutions such as geoengineering, nanotechnology, terminator technology, etc.
- Leave fossil fuels underground and promote a change in the production and consumption model based on harmony, complementarity, solidarity, and balance among everyone and with everything.
- Ecological restructuring of cities. Combat real estate speculation, environmental racism, gentrification, and the displacement of impoverished populations.
- Recognition and protection of the rights of populations forced to migrate due to the causes and impacts of the climate crisis.
- Guarantee of territories and prior informed consent for indigenous and traditional peoples who maintain ecosystems that protect the climate. Respect and learn from the ways of life of the peoples and communities of the South and their alternative ways of life.
- Defense of peoples’ food, energy, and financial sovereignty, with the promotion of production and consumption models that restore control to the populations involved and prevent new projects that reproduce imperial patterns.
Our world is not for sale, nor are our dignity, love for the earth, knowledge, and cultures.
Nature, Pachamama, Life: they are NOT for sale, NOR are they to be indebted! They must be defended!
Jubilee South/Americas
Brazil, Belem, November 2025
