Presentation short abstract

Over the past years, the Plataforma Latinoamericana y del Caribe por la Justicia Climática has mapped false solutions to climate change and green sacrifice zones in Abya Yala. This presentation shares results of this collaborative mapping and discusses its potential for climate justice activism.

Presentation long abstract

After years of denial and postponement, more and more governments and businesses are now jumping on the green bandwagon of the (corporate) green transition. This has led to the proliferation of what we deem false solutions. They are false because they fail to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as they claim, and far from changing the colonial and patriarchal structures that are at the root of the crisis, they reinforce the status quo. Moreover, they create places and populations of ‘green sacrifice’: they dispossess communities, degrade ecosystems, deepen social inequalities and environmental racism, while they commodify nature to the benefit of global and national economic and political elites. In the face of the worrying popularity of these false solutions and the expansion of green sacrifice zone-making across Abya Yala, the Plataforma Latinoamericana y del Caribe por la Justicia Climática (PLACJC) decided to map false solutions in the region. The PLACJC is an alliance of around 30 (grassroots) organizations from Abya Yala that aim to resist green colonialism and promote climate justice. For this mapping, its members collaboratively elaborated a bottom-up conceptualization of false (and real) solutions, built a publicly accessible map of false solutions and sacrifice zones across the region: www.mapafalsassoluciones.com. In this presentation, we will 1) present the results of this mapping and the insights they provide into the proliferation of false solutions and climate colonialism, 2) reflect on its collaborative methodology, and 3) discuss its potential for climate justice activism and the nurturing of real solutions to climate change.