Carbon Tax Walk 🥾Support Climate Justice Ahead of COP26 ✊🏾 A Growing Culture 🌱

Your bi-weekly journey, discovering the intersection of climate science and social justice.

Hello lovely people,

How are we all doing on this lovely Monday? I am feeling quite tired after quite a hectic week but also feeling very content too, or more so relieved. My last deadline for the year has been completed and although I won't be taking a holiday until early September, it still feels great!

Last week I attended the Living with the Unknown: Returning to the Essential Roots of Spiritual Ecology retreat **with Emmanuel Vaughn-Lee, the founder of Emergence magazine and 40 other incredible people. It was two days of working through practices to bring us closer to the rest of nature, going back to basics through breathing, walking and listening and spending a lot of time in silence. It was a super intense experience but one that I will treasure for a long time to come. None of the practices we took were new to me, most I engage with on a weekly basis at least. But it was the act of practising consciousness and deep love for the world around you, in community, surrounded by other people who care just as much as you which was incredibly powerful. It deepened my belief in community healing as a key part of climate action; falling deeper into ways of being that work in synchronicity or in relationship with the planet we call home, in the presence of and also in relationship with others.

This time of reflection and relief from my deadlines also allowed me to take some time and think about how I engage and connect with all of you through Climate In Colour. I've always stood by my need for slowness on this platform and taking things at my own pace and I will continue to live by those values. I've also been thinking about the things that I love doing (writing!!!) and how the past year, in all its madness, has moved me off track a little in fulfilling those passions.

I say all this because I will slowly be changing some things around here and that will start with changing how this newsletter works from now! I will be making this newsletter completely free to access for everyone (rather than a paid weekly and free monthly letter), and instead of weekly, it will be bi-weekly. This is so that I can spend more time and dedicate more space in these letters to writing and exploring different concepts, feelings and ideas. You'll still receive good news and notifications of interesting events, fundraisers and platforms but there will be a bit more of a balance between more extended writing and recommendations.

Of course, as with anything, this is subject to change as I experiment with what works for me but I hope you will continue too and even enjoy more, your letters from me!

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On The Bright Side 🌞

Mexico devises revolutionary method to reverse semiarid land degradation[Mongabay]

Land degradation is impacting farmlands worldwide, affecting almost 40% of the world’s population. Reversing that process and restoring these croplands and pastures to full productivity is a huge challenge facing humanity — especially as climate change-induced drought takes greater hold on arid and semiarid lands. In Mexico, a university-educated, small-scale peasant farmer came up with an untried innovative solution that not only restores degraded land to productivity, but also greatly enhances soil carbon storage, provides a valuable new crop, and even offers a hopeful diet for diabetics. The process utilizes two plants commonly found on semiarid lands that grow well under drought conditions: agave and mesquite. The two are intercropped and then the agave is fermented and mixed with the mesquite to produce an excellent, inexpensive, and very marketable fodder for grazing animals. The new technique is achieving success in Mexico and could be applied to global degraded lands.

Nigeria to end gas flaring by 2030, under national climate plan[Climate Change News]

The Nigerian government has pledged to end the burning of gas as a by-product of oil production by 2030, under its latest climate plan submitted to the UN. Fossil fuel companies’ gas flaring account for a huge part of Nigeria’s emissions. At 75 million tonnes of Co2 equivalent a year, they outstrip the emissions from all 200 million Nigerians’ use of transport or electricity. As gas flaring has been linked to health problems, communities in oil and gas producing regions like the Niger Delta have long campaigned against it. Nigeria reduced flaring by 70% between 2000 and 2020, according to the International Energy Agency, as a result of tougher penalties and incentives to capture and sell the gas but a national ban on flaring has loopholes, and penalties are low and weakly enforced. To be successful in meeting the 2030 goal, local NGOs maintain that stakeholder engagement with local communities is necessary.

Urban Refuge: How Cities Can Help Solve the Biodiversity Crisis[Yale E360]

While the value of urban areas to wildlife conservation remains contentious, there is a growing recognition that cities are key to the future of conservation as the human footprint expands relentlessly around the globe. In fact, researchers are increasingly working with city planners, landscape architects and urban wildlife managers to make cities part of the solution to the global biodiversity crisis. Recent studies have found that animals from fishers to coyotes are appearing in force in urban areas, showing that they "can provide important habitat or resources for native biodiversity”. Despite the initial onslaught of urbanisation on the natural world, a complex mosaic of novel habitats consisting of native, non-native, and invasive plants emerged, dominated by buildings, roads and other impervious surfaces and contaminated with pollution.

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Support Climate Justice Ahead of COP26 ✊🏾

✨ Get Latin American & Caribbean activists to COP!

• Unite for Climate Action (U4CA) is a diverse group of young people from Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe, connected through experience of direct and indirect consequences of climate change while also being part of the solutions for the crisis. They have been working together to foster access for marginalized groups in international decision making spheres, with special focus on Black, Indigenous and People Of Color (BIPOC). They represent 19 nationalities in total: Anguilla, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Cayman Islands, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Trinidad and Tobago, Honduras, Uruguay, Haiti, The Bahamas, Peru, Jamaica, Montserrat, Germany, Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

• Although the youth participation in the UNFCCC has steadily grown, it still continues to suffer widely from uneven distribution of origin and background of the participants. The majority of young people who attend the climate talks come from the Global North (GN), while participation of youth from the Global South (GS) and especially Latin America and the Caribbean is sporadic and limited.

• They have managed to secure accreditation to COP26 for their members and are now looking for funding through their crowd-funder in order to cover costs for as many of our members as possible.

• Find all the details here.

✨ Support Global South activists get to COP26

• In a similar vein, the wonderful people at COP26 Coalition are setting up a Visa Support Service to assist people from predominantly Global South countries who are applying for visas for COP26.

• They are working with a qualified immigration solicitor to support them to navigate the visa system - from sending out detailed instructions to each applicant and checking applications before submission; to preparing for in-person interviews and providing a checklist for crossing the UK border.

• This support will be critical in boosting their chances of obtaining the visit visa they need.

• The Visa Support Service will launch in late July 2021 and will prioritise Global South applicants coming to COP to fight for climate justice.

• Find all the details here.

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Carbon Tax Walk 🥾

The following piece is an incredible story of an incredibly inspirational young person, taking action for climate into their own hands. At only 11, Jude Walker from Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire has "braved hills, rain and doubts along his 210-mile trek to the British parliament in Westminster". He undertook this journey to make clear to politicians that a carbon tax is a crucial step to slowing down humanity's current path to a "dystopian world".

We now know a lot more about climate change and I think a carbon tax would be definitely one of the most useful solutions to it.

Jude's main call to action is for people to sign a petition calling for a carbon tax. Currently, just under 57,000 people have signed it. If it gets 100,000 signatures, it will be considered for debate by parliament.

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Community Spotlight: A Growing Culture 💡

A Growing Culture has been a platform that has been on my radar for a pretty long time and one that I have so much respect and admiration for. It is a farmer-centric organisation that believes the key to sustainability lies in returning small-scale farmers back to the forefront of agriculture.

They have an amazing weekly live broadcast, The Hunger For Justice Series, about how we feed everyone in a Post-Covid World. Each week, there is an hour-long, candid conversation with activists at the frontlines of the global food movement exploring themes like gender equality, farmworker rights, trade policy, seed patents, climate change, and land grabs will be explored through the lens of food sovereignty.

We are thrilled to share that 7.5% of the proceeds from the newly launched Climate In Colour original, Just Food workshop will be redistributed to @agrowingculture. Loren, the founder of AGC, is one of the guest lecturers on the course and if his impassioned, heartfelt and brilliant way of speaking and mobilising communities to action isn’t enough to make you wanna take action I don’t know what is!

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Community Opportunity: Climate and Energy Justice campaigner @ Friends Of The Earth Europe 🙌🏾

Are you passionate about intersectional, climate justice movements across Europe? Do you want to be part of the talented Friends of the Earth team working for a just energy transition? Then this job is for you!

Friends Of The Earth are looking for a campaigner who will work as a member of the climate justice and energy team with the role including contributing to FoE Europe’s work on energy poverty, part of the “Right to Energy” campaign and a focus on supporting their movement building for the “Right to Energy” campaign, ensuring their campaign is intersectional and mobilises activists for climate justice at grassroots and EU level. This role will help promote real solutions including housing renovations and renewables for low-income groups and tackle the grip of fossil fuels on our energy system.

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End Note 📝

It’s not goodbye forever (I’ll see you again next week)!

If you've enjoyed this week’s newsletter, I'd love it if you shared this platform with a friend or two. I’m working hard to make it one of the best emails you get each week, and I hope you're enjoying it.

Don’t forget to leave a comment if anything resonated with you, I’d love to hear from you and get some feedback!

If you want to support the Climate In Colour and the content I make, follow, and engage with me on Patreon, Instagram, YouTube or make a one-time donation.

And if you come across anything interesting this week, send it my way or share it in the comments! I love finding new things to read and I’m sure other subscribers do too.

Have a lovely week,
Joycelyn 💚