Press Release
A day after the world’s leaders adopted a new set of ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) peoples’ organizations of peasants, workers, migrants, and frontline climate-impacted communities from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe held coordinated country launches of Global Peoples’ Surge (GPS) on 28 September 2015.
The new 2030 agenda for Sustainable Development will supposedly usher in a new era of development that takes into account economic, social and environmental well-being of people and planet. But an agenda that fails to challenge existing relations of power and wealth between and among societies, and between men and women, an agenda that fails to transcend the logic of neoliberalism and capitalist accumulation will only serve to perpetuate the existing order that wages war on the people and planet.
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Various actions were held in the Philippines, Belgium, Bolivia, France, Kenya, and New York to mark the launch of the GPS, a broad alliance of peoples’ organizations and movements to promote, support, and develop the peoples’ struggles for climate justice and social transformation, and fight for solutions that secure justice and democratic rights for the people.
The GPS is an alliance that aims to set clear what ‘system change, not climate change’ really means, by going to the roots of the climate crisis and challenging and transforming global systems founded on the exploitation of the people and planet beyond the needs of society and beyond the carrying capacity of nature, to benefit a few. While those most responsible for the crises scramble for ‘solutions’ to save the system, the task ahead for civil society and social movements is to move towards a new model of sustainable development that delivers on social and gender justice, equity, democracy, and respect for peoples’ economic, social, and cultural rights, and of the environment.
The GPS will be actively organizing and mobilizing communities to amplify the calls for climate justice and system change through Paris COP 21 and beyond. #
Reference Person:
Maria Theresa N. Lauron
+63 2 9276981
