Crucial Santa Marta conference will include voices of communities long opposed to the exploitation of fossil fuels.
Thirty years ago, Colombia’s U’wa people were ready to commit mass suicide by jumping off a 500-meter cliff. The close-knit indigenous community would rather die with dignity than succumb to oil exploration on their ancestral land.
The U’wa announced their dilemma in 1995 in an open letter that ricocheted around the world. It was no empty threat: 400 years before their ancestors had jumped from the Alto de los Infieles (Cliff of the Infidels) rather than submit to the Spanish colonial yoke.
“The U’wa were the first to call oil the ‘blood of the earth’,” explains Kevin Koenig, director of climate and energy at Amazon Watch, a U.S.-based non-profit. “The U’wa were the first to say that oil needs to stay in the ground. They warned against its extraction and its impact on the world.”
Amazon Watch has supported the U’wa to resist extractive industries over the same three decades, along with dozens of other at-risk communities in Latin America.
This week, in a ground-breaking conference in Santa Marta, some of those efforts will come full circle at the first global summit on “Transitioning away from Fossil Fuels”.
The six-day conference, starting April 24, will host 50 country delegations plus dozens of civil society organizations.
This “road map towards renewable energy” is backed by the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative, an alliance of nation states, technical bodies, communities and individuals working to secure a “global just transition from coal, oil and gas”.
For the organizers the timing is critical with climate upset, fuel shortages, war in the Middle East and big oil’s sticky grip on geopolitics more exposed than ever. There’s never been a better moment to move to renewable energy.
A key part of the conference will be representation from indigenous communities; the U’wa, along with many others, will have a voice at the table.
Glacier gone
For Koenig, it is also significant that the inaugural meeting is in Colombia, one of the world’s most biodiverse countries, but also an oil producer moving to curb fossil fuels and embrace renewables.
There is further symmetry in the location: the small coastal city of Santa Marta is “just over the hill” from the U’wa territory which straddles the tropical glaciers of the El Cocuy mountain range, Koenig tells The Bogotá Post.
A hiking route over the same mountains is known as Colombia’s climate change trail – see the ice before it melts.
Prophetically, just three weeks before the conference’s kick-off, the IDEAM climate agency reported that a glacier in the heart of U’wa territory had melted for good.
“Satellite monitoring confirms that Los Cerros de la Plaza glacier coverage is today at zero square kilometers,” it announced matter-of-factly.
Living these realities gives indigenous communities such as the U’wa, wedded to nature and geography, a powerful voice in the transition from fossil fuels.
This experience has often come at a high cost, says Koenig. In countries like Colombia, particularly in the Amazon, oil companies are an existential threat to both the natural environment and the communities it supports. Drilling is invariably a catalyst for violence.
“Some countries use oil extraction as a reason to open areas, saying ‘we can militarize it and it will be safer’. In fact, oil and energy infrastructures are a magnet for armed groups, for political attacks or blackmail,” he explains.
Amazon Watch has supported many indigenous communities to resist oil companies in the Amazon regions of southern Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, often through practical means such as providing solar power and communications equipment, trainings and legal resources, but also by raising their voices to the outside world.
The organization’s latest report, The Amazon Under Siege, highlights how extractive industries and the armed groups that trail in their wake are putting Amazon communities in the crossfire.
Oil addiction
Colombia might have turned a corner with its oil moratorium in Amazon regions but neighboring countries are on a different path, one that might be summed up by U.S. president Donald Trump’s call to “drill, baby, drill”.
“Ecuador is going in the opposite direction with new oil auctions, and two new exploration blocks in remote rainforest,” says Koenig. Peru is following suit in jungle areas hitherto untouched. Perhaps not surprisingly, neither of the Andean countries is attending the Santa Marta transition conference.
According to Koenig, Peru and Ecuador are already in the throes of social violence but now risk replicating Colombia’s conflict with its rural oil pipelines that are constantly attacked or bombed, or oil lines tapped by fuel thieves, creating spills in biodiverse hotspots.
Added to that, drilling new wells makes little economic sense, he says. Current markets are signalling peak oil demand by 2030 even while wind and solar are taking a bigger share of energy output.
By doubling down on oil extraction both countries are “gambling with their future.” Aside from the moral and ethical issues of drilling in remote rainforest with indigenous peoples, getting banks to fund these ventures against the headwinds of renewables is not guaranteed.
“This is the moment where we are seeing both wars linked to fossil fuels politics and dependencies, but also for the first time renewables energies are not just theoretical, they are real, and decision-makers know they are scalable,” notes Koenig.
Fresh air
This seismic shift is reflected in the sassy subtext of the Santa Marta conference: climate deniers not invited. Meetings are reserved for a “coalition of the willing”, Colombian environment minister Irene Vélez, a key organizer of the event, told the Guardian this week..
For campaigners like Kevin Koenig this attitude is a breath of fresh air. Previous climate change conferences, run by the UN, have failed to pin global warming on big oil, he says.
“We know that fossil fuels are the number one source of carbon emissions but that’s nowhere to be found in the Paris [climate change] agreement. That’s due largely to the influence of the oil industry and lobbyists,” says Koenig.
Changing the narrative requires an alignment between traditional knowledge and science, he says. Indigenous communities, the original resisters, are now part of that with their wealth of experience.