Outraged Yet Undeterred In Our Fight For Climate Justice – Women’s Earth & Climate Action Network Responds to US Withdrawal from Paris Climate Accord

Dear Friends and Allies, 

Following the announcement by Donald Trump regarding his decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord, the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International expresses our outrage and disapproval, and commits to ever-stronger resistance, solidarity, and action across communities, issues, and borders as we rise with allies globally to protect and defend our lands, waters, climate, and children’s futures.

Our thoughts today are with frontline communities who bare the brunt of accelerating climate impacts. We stand in solidarity with our allies from the Amazon, to the Arctic, to the shores of Pacific Island Nations and countless places in between, as we continue to organize ceaselessly to end extraction of fossil fuels and the destruction of the planet for profit and power.

With seven years of engagement with the UNFCCC, WECAN maintains a strong critique of the Paris Agreement, which dangerously lacks a climate justice framework; fails to directly mention fossil fuels despite scientists telling us that 80% of all reserves must remain in the ground; promotes false solutions based on continued commodification of the Earth; and omits operative language on Indigenous and nature rights, and a full gender analysis. However despite these failures, the Paris Agreement remains an unprecedented and remarkable accomplishment in international negotiations, in recognizing that the climate crisis is real, urgent, and that governments must respond in an immediate and meaningful manner.

Trump’s decision to remove the US is self-serving, reckless, unjust and immoral – and stands in glaring opposition to the wishes of the US population, the majority of whom support US involvement in the Paris Climate Accord. It is a move that is illogical, un-strategic and deeply damaging in the diplomatic, political, economical and ecological arenas – with far reaching repercussions for international relations and global climatic health.

The Administration’s reasoning that withdrawal was needed to protect US jobs and economy from an overly demanding accord is simply false, and rather than see a strengthening in either of these spheres, we are likely to see the world forge ahead towards renewable energy and sustainable economies, while the US chokes on the stagnant and poisonous air of it’s oil-baron driven policies.

In choosing to continue down the path of economic disparity, corporate greed, environmental racism and commodification of nature, the Trump administration fails to see the stark reality of the climate crisis – a crisis that can only be addressed through confronting and transforming the systemic injustices of our political, social and economic systems from the bottom up.

Fundamentally, the withdrawal is an act of violence against not only citizens of the United States – but against all of humanity and life on Earth. In particular, it is an act of violence against Indigenous people’s, communities of color, low-income and frontline communities, and nations of the Global South, who face direct hardship and life threatening circumstances everyday from mounting climate impacts. Women worldwide, and most especially from these impacted communities, will also bear the brunt of the Trump Administrations regressive choices, as they experience first and worse the effects of spreading infectious disease, food and water insecurity and extreme weather, amongst other impacts.

The Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network finds this wholly unacceptable. In failing to deliver on already dangerously low commitments that the Paris Climate Accord calls for, the current US Administration is bucking its historic responsibility to act, and instead is showing its true face to the world in an ultimate demonstration of its perverse willingness to put profit and corporate privilege over the very lives and futures of people and planet.

However, in this reprehensible moment, the voices of peoples movements, civil society, forward thinking businesses and governments are rising louder than ever to reject climate change denial and attempts to stagnate progress on a climate agreement which, while insufficient and flawed, represents the culmination of decades of work and an unprecedented hope for committed global action on climate.

Leaders of the global movement for climate justice understand that true changes come from the grassroots up – and that it has always been, and will ultimately always be, about concerted local action and local solutions-building to topple structures of oppression and injustice to re-build a livable world for all. Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris Accord, however he will never be able to prevent the continued growth and blossoming of the stunning diversity of solutions and resistance strategies already in motion and growing stronger everyday.

Today and everyday, we the people must speak up and take action without fail. We must continue to organize, claim our community power, and actively build the world that we envision, in resistance to institutions that refuse to break with neoliberal economic agendas and worldviews based on extraction and domination.

If we are to surmount the great challenges we face, we must double down on our efforts to support the leadership of women and frontline communities, collaborate across borders, and creatively build forward with renewed urgency as we take action on all fronts – in the streets, the courtrooms, the forests, the halls of government, the classrooms and the fields.

As the histories shared with us by our Indigenous allies and allies of the Global South make clear, the United States has reneged on countless treaties and agreements. It is up to us to  be discerning, wise and strong in our action to simultaneously fight back and denounce this dangerous decision, while also turning our energy forward towards the positive solutions that cannot and will not ever be broken by the Trump Administration’s acts of violence and ignorance.

Our work, the work that will define our time and the lives of generations to come, is calling to us now. We as a people’s movement must rise up like the immune system of the Earth herself to demand just, decentralized and democratic systems, to actively building the world that we seek – and to respect and love our magnificent, life-giving planet.

Please join us in action: PARTICIPATE  in our upcoming Women for Climate Justice Trainings – WATCH our call to action video – LEARN about our work in the world.