Visiting Research Fellow Dulce Maria Pereira recently attended the Pre-COP30_IX National Meeting of Researchers in Environmental Law and Sustainable Development at UNAERP and presented on climate and territory. 

Based on the theory of incompleteness, mobility and conviviality, developed by Cameroonian anthropologist, professor at the University of Cape Town and writer Francis B. Nyamnjoh (2024), Dulce Maria Pereira reflects on the relevance of academia making a commitment to dedicate to the complexities of the impacts of climate injustices and territories. In this sense, she emphasizes the relevance of the various sciences establishing a non-hierarchical, but complementary dialogue in the context of the present global climate catastrophe. She highlighted that an academic alliance and Global South cooperation in this regard is essential, highlighting the importance of this PREP-COP30 seminar.

Pereira discussed climate, identifying the scientific characteristics of the impact of climate change and anthropogenic activities that result in disasters, recalling that these are the consequences above all  of human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels, interventions in water systems, agriculture and livestock, changes in land use and other technological interventions. 

She defined territory-based on the concept of geographer Milton Santos, summarizing that “territory is a social, historical and political construction”. Used territory is where life happens,  the natural environment  appropriated and transformed by society through work, technology and social relations. It is the ground -- the environment and what is built there -- the actions and interrelations that occur  where the traditions of knowledge are rooted and transformed. She reflects that climate change in general is the result of long-term transformations, which generate temperature and climate patterns. From this perspective, she approaches the intricacy of citizenship, climate and development, with no time for the human biological system to adapt to the changes produced, causing climate suffering, observed in various parts of the world. The vulnerabilization of citizenship, standardized and naturalized, is related to the climate and the choices made for unequal development, connected to historical processes of dehumanization of populations.

Pereira states that hegemony in territories is operated through ecocide, ethnocide and genocide. This is a historical pattern since the occupation of Sub-Saharan Africa to ensure development for some peoples through the occupation of territories for the use of nature, human labor and the reduction of the productive capacity of communities. She relates the price paid by communities, specifically by women, traditional groups and quilombos, for the energy transition as it occurs, defined by liberal interests, mainly by mining and agribusiness. Brazil, she states, has a legal framework that, if applied and anchored in science, could lead to the structuring of a Socio-Environmental State of Law.

However, those with the power to determine what happens in territories, use their tools of power to perpetuate injustices and weaken certain groups, as happens with Socio-Environmental Governance in Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) principles. This position of power facilitates the greenwashing of corporate images. Pereira addressed the impacts of technological choices made aiming at decarbonization and energy transition, such as aeolic and solar energy farms, which have been causing  destruction, diseases, community rupture and forced displacement in several  territories.

Anchored in field research in areas affected by dam ruptures, Pereira addresses the damage in affected areas, such as the rise in local temperature, the emergence of heat islands and the proliferation of bacterias where there is a concentration of mining waste.

She identifies opportunities of public climate, public policies and ecological technology programs offered by the new Brazilian Bioclimatic Zoning (ZBB). She draws attention, however, to the urgency of association of the ZBB with the threat posed by the intensive extraction of minerals used in AI equipment, alloys, magnets and catalysts for decarbonization and energy transition, proposed by countries in the Global North until 2040. Pereira concluded by emphasizing the importance of academic construction of the preparatory process for COP 30, articulating cooperation with partner countries, attentiveness to environmental injustice and racism, to the traditions of knowledge in the territories, and to the role of women in the preservation of the territories.

The presentation recording is available on YouTube below [starting at 30:00].