CIVICUS discusses the hopes and roles of civil society at the forthcoming COP28 climate summit with Ireen Twongirwe, a climate activist and CEO of Women for Green Economy Movement Uganda (WoGEM).
WoGEM is a community-based civil society organisation (CSO) dedicated to advocating for and promoting women’s and girls’ participation in a greener economy. It brings together vulnerable women and girls and equips them with knowledge and capacities to engage in the search for sustainable community livelihoods and climate change mitigation and resilience efforts.
What environmental issues is WoGEM working on?
We work on issues related to fossil fuels, waste management and generally speaking climate change. This involves lots of fairness issues, as global south countries have the lowest carbon emissions but are overall more vulnerable to climate change impacts. Poor waste management has added to the impacts of climate change as it has led to water pollution and food insecurity.
We advocate for the recognition of loss and damage and the inclusion of those most affected. Vulnerable women and girls are among the most affected and yet their voices are excluded from climate change negotiations and decision-making processes.
We push forward these issues by identifying problems and solutions and putting out public statements and open letters to the government and its various agencies and writing opinion articles in which we share our proposals to provide justice to local communities.
We also engage through awareness-raising and empowerment meetings with the local communities that are directly affected by climate change and fossil fuels and by development projects. We conduct open conference calls and seek other ways to integrate those in poor communities who cannot afford a smartphone.
What challenges do you experience in your line of work?
The kind of work we do has led us to clash with the powerful interests of government agencies and private companies. In Uganda there is an oil extraction and transportation project, the East African crude oil pipeline, that involves the construction of the longest heated oil pipeline in the world: a 1,443 km long, 61 cm diameter underground pipeline joining two oilfields in Uganda with a port in Tanzania. It also involves the construction of oil wells and a crude oil processing plant at Lake Albert in western Uganda, along with infrastructure for domestic oil consumption in Uganda’s Buliisa and Nwoya districts.
This is a huge project in which powerful state and private forces have a lot at stake, so we are facing a lot of restrictions coming from both of them. The project has already resulted in the violation of environmental laws and environmental and land rights of marginalised communities. It has caused the loss of biodiversity, it has cost lives and it has increased human conflict.
This has been done as a result of a top-down decision, without any real consultation with affected communities. Civil society was not given enough space to speak up on the implications of the project. Just because we tried to make ourselves and the affected communities heard regarding the environmental and human rights consequences of the pipeline, the government has smeared us and called us ‘anti-government’ and ‘anti-development’. As a result of this branding, we’ve been intimidated, threatened and arrested by the police.
Some of our biggest challenges come from state action and inaction. We receive insufficient or no support from the government. The state is often ineffective when it comes to implementing its own policies and regulations. And there’s a lot of political interference with our work. Shrinking civic space is a reality on the ground. It means that affected communities are less and less able to make their voices count on the issues that affect them.
In engaging with local communities, we also face the challenges of limited access to technology and lack of sufficient funding.
How do your struggles connect with the global climate movement?
Despite the challenges and restrictions we face as environmental human rights defenders, we have managed to join the global climate movement through both virtual and in-person advocacy, campaigning and networking. We have converged with others working on similar issues at all levels, from the grassroots to the national and international levels.
Joining the global movement and attending global events alongside development partners has increased our capacity and given us the space to speak up on behalf of the vulnerable communities in Uganda that are being affected by climate change.
What are your expectations for COP28?
We have a lot of expectations that COP28 will finally deliver the promised change we so urgently need. All previous COPs have been about modest promises that were never fully implemented. We hope to see real action to tackle climate change come out of COP28. Please let’s stop planning for a future that is always far ahead and start putting actions in place in the here and now.
We expect to see a loss and damage fund operationalised, bringing sufficient, accessible and flexible funding to the global south countries that are at the forefront of climate change impacts. For funding to reach where it is more needed, it is key to involve young people, Indigenous people, women and other marginalised groups in loss and damage-related decision-making processes, because they are most directly affected by climate change impacts.
I also expect COP28 to bridge the gap between the local and international levels by providing an opportunity for grassroots communities to give their views. It will be key to produce guidelines for the engagement of specific groups in vulnerable situations and to ensure the availability of pathways to include their voices during implementation. Recommendations should be provided to enhance community-led activities and direct access, including but not limited to the establishment of community microgrants or small grants.
Do you think that COP28 will provide sufficient space for civil society?
Even if the right spaces are created at COP28, the reality is that lack of institutional support and funding make it unlikely for many CSOs, and particularly for grassroots groups, to be able to afford travel and accommodation and secure visas and accreditation.
But I still hope many CSOs will be able to receive the support they need to get there. It is crucial for civil society to take part in climate talks to bring in evidence of climate change impacts on frontline and vulnerable communities, highlight the ways in which fossil fuel projects and other development projects are resulting in systematic violations of human rights and convey the urgency of change.
As well as highlighting the problems, civil society can also help formulate the solutions. And having the voices of the affected communities in the room is the only way those solutions are going to reflect their needs and priorities.
Civic space in Uganda is rated ‘repressed’ by the CIVICUS Monitor.
Contact WoGEM through its website and follow @TWONGIRWEIREEN1 and @WogemU on Twitter.
