Report from our friends at IPACC: Members of the IPACC management team met with Anglican Bishop Geoff Davies to discuss their shared interests in advocating for climate justice at the 17th Conference of Parties (COP17) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

IPACC’s management team, including indigenous delegates from Burundi, Kenya and South Africa are meeting in South Africa to plan their strategy for communicating key African indigenous issues at COP17 which is due to take place in Durban, South Africa from 28 November to 9 December 2011.

IPACC leaders met with retired Bishop Geoff Davies, the Director of the Southern African Faith Communities Environment Institute (SAFCEI) to explore a joint strategy for lobbying African states to take up issues of justice and equity at COP17. Both movements, faith-based and indigenous, agreed that the crisis of climate change was man-made, and was primarily a moral issue. Both leadership groups recognised that their respective movements value nature, and want a values driven approach to saving the planet and protecting poor people from greater suffering and hardship.

Indigenous leaders spoke of the crisis over ‘land-grabbing’ in Africa. Jeniffer Koinante (Yiaku from Kenya) has just returned from meeting with Karamajong pastoralists in Uganda. She was shocked by the stories of land alienation, mining and industry taking away communal grazing lands while the people sink into greater despair and poverty. Koinante’s own home in the Mukogodo Forest in Central Kenya has been battered by relentless droughts and floods, causing much hardship and threats of conflict with neighbours.

Cecil LeFleur, Chair of the IPACC Trust spoke about the sacred and spiritual relationship between indigenous peoples and their lands. “We indigenous peoples live on the land, we rely on nature, on rain, on livestock and wild plants for our well being. The Earth is our Mother, we have a deep spiritual relationship with the land and with nature.”

Bishop Geoff responded that Christians are now speaking of God’s two books: the Bible which we all know, but before it came the Earth, God’s Creation. Nature is God’s first book and we need to turn our attention back to the Creator’s generosity and teaching. Christians have strayed from God’s plan, and have allowed the Earth to be damaged. Davies sees capitalism as one of the underlying problems – the idea that economics, finances and making money matters more than a sustainable relationship with nature.

Indigenous leaders strongly agreed that the greatest threat for them is coming from mining, logging, petrol, oil, uranium and other national and multinational extractive industries. All they care about is making money, not about the poverty it causes and now the threats of war, starvation and migrations.

IPACC Chairperson welcomed the alliance between African religious leaders and Africa’s indigenous peoples’ movement. They pledged to support one another to lobby for sustainability, good governance, recognition of non-State stewardship of nature, and to call on African governments to be accountable to their citizens, including indigenous citizens and all people of faith.