Corporate Accountability And Global Climate Justice Groups Issue Statement On Breakdown Of UN Climate Talks In Bonn

Scoop

20-06-2025

The following statement was delivered today by Rachel Rose Jackson, Corporate Accountability's Director of Climate Research and Policy, on June 19th, 2025 in Bonn, Germany at a UNFCCC press conference. For the full press conference alongside partners, see webcast here: https://unfccc.int/event/dcj-daily-press-conference-2
As the saying goes, 'It takes two to tango,' and this is certainly true when it comes to international collaboration, whether on climate action or anything else. But let's be absolutely clear. The United States has always been a very dreadful dance partner. From day one.
Nothing has changed in this regard here at Bonn,, apart from their physical absence from the dance floor, which sends a very clear message to the world that, truly, the United States cares for no one and nothing but itself. Now, at least the only thing that's different, is that it's clear for all the world to see what those of us who have spent many years in these halls have always witnessed—that the US never was and never has been serious about international collaboration of any kind. That the US throws its neocolonial and capitalist weight around to bully, block, and stall progress on any issue that would require it to act meaningfully. And that the US never has and never will care about saving lives, protecting the planet, or avoiding an entire societal collapse that it has played a direct hand in orchestrating for decades, if not centuries.
But, at the same time, if you're not going to bother to show up to the dance floor to tango, then simply put, maybe don't bother to show up on the dance floor at all.
Yet, rather than than simply abandoning their dance partners,, they have turned off the lights, broken the music player, put oil across the floor, tied everybody's shoe laces together and smashed the windows on the way out of the disco — all to ensure that with or without them here, the dance cannot proceed, and this process is rigged to fail.
The US is acting in a way that is way more than bad faith. This is backhanded. It's manipulative. It's reckless. And it's also senseless and illogical, because the US. cannot seem to understand that an inadequate global response to climate change will not only condemn millions around the world to death and destruction, it will also condemn millions of its own. Especially those people of color, Indigenous communities, and low-income workers and communities.
A dance that could have led to beautiful climate action decades ago has now become, to put it very simply, a dance of death. Because, the US doesn't care, and neither does the European Union or the Umbrella Group of countries, or the supposed Environmental integrity Group. The Global North has always been partnering with the United States in the toxic tango of poisoning international collaboration.
Here in Bonn, we see only moves that will bring us closer to societal collapse and planetary destruction. And in the agenda fight over the opening days, the EU and others not only refused to come to the dance floor, they refused even to discuss the dance song or the choreography when all the Global South wanted to do and all they were asking for was the chance to discuss - * discuss *, not even deliver - meaningful climate finance and the climate debt owed to the Global South.
The Global North has absolutely no intention of delivering this debt. They have already orchestrated their get out of jail free cards. Here, they will not even allow the pretense of a discussion about finance, and at COP last year in Bakù, they helped ram through the rules on carbon markets that provide the key to their great escape and their final destructive dance. Here and at home, they are also embedding these carbon markets into their pretend NDCs, to be seen to be taking action without really doing anything to do so.
We are told time and time again that there is no money, that carbon markets are the only way for Global South communities and countries to receive any support to address climate change. All of this while they spend billions and trillions on military support to Israel, on their industrial military complexes, and now threatening the same in relation to the very disastrous developments unraveling in Iran.
These countries have all the money in the world. They have amassed infinite wealth off the backs of frontline and Global South communities who they are now indebted to. Carbon markets are their way to shift all responsibility for the climate crisis to the very same communities that are already shouldering the greatest impacts, and to ensure that these Global North countries and Big Polluters can continue to pollute with impunity.
But carbon markets don't work. Though they have been existing in some form for as long as the UNFCCC has, they have never, not once, correlated with a global decrease in greenhouse gas emissions. They harm communities, they destroy ecosystems, and they allow the fossil fuel industry, Big Ag, and other polluters to continue to pollute unchecked. They have been shown, time and time again, not to work, and are proven to fail. And they are not climate finance or climate action.
So in the Global North's deceptive dance of climate breakdown, the moves we are seeing on the dance floor here in Bonnare the finale. And we must be attuned to their deadly agenda, and we must resist. We must call them out and we must hold them accountable. Not only to paying their long overdue climate debt. But to finally doing their fair share of climate action.
The truth is it doesn't only 'take two to tango' when it comes to addressing the climate crisis. It actually takes everyone, together in this moment, on the dance floor dancing to the same music to have a dance of climate action. Without this,it is to become a dance of climate death and destruction..'
Quotes from other members of Demand Climate Justice (DCJ):
Meena Raman, Third World Network:
'… For many of us who come to these UN processes, we really always feel whether the UN will live up to its multilateral agreements. So what we see here is that we as the peoples of the world, and particularly from the Global South, we have to hold governments to account, particularly in the Global North. Now the United States is not in this process, and perhaps to some extent that seems to be a good thing in the sense that the halls here are a little bit more less [sic] toxic. However, the Global North, those who remain here, continue to do and take the positions that the United States had been taking.
So what you see here happening now is actually akin to a dance where you have only if you're doing the tango, you do need… two sides to tango. But what you see happening here is that the other side doesn't want to tango. It does not even want to have a discussion. So you can't have a dance like this… you need to tango together …so this is really about the multilateral regime and how we as peoples of the world have to hold governments to account and say honor, respect international law, respect human rights, respect what you have agreed to. And so this is what is really so important in terms of the overall…
…all parties are responsible. We hold our developing country governments to account. But like I said, you need two to tango, and so we have to get on and not rely on and wreck the multilateral system through unilateral measures, whether they are trade, whether they are economic, whether they are by bombs and whether they are by total impunity destroying the very fragile international regime.'
Pang Delgra, Asian People's Movement on Debt and Debt Development:
'You know as a young person from the Global South I am consistently baffled by the hypocrisy that we see in adaptation talks here at the UNFCCC. Despite ostensibly keeping adaptation in the agenda with five different negotiation streams, there has been no real progress in unlocking adaptation action on the ground, and this has been the case for years.
The Adaptation Fund in its 16 year history has only received a meager $1 Trillion in support, while the adaptation finance needs of the Global South continue to balloon every year as we come closer and closer to hard adaptation limits. And need I remind everybody in the room that the consequences of this clear inaction are very clear and devastating.
In my country, the Philippines, the lack of support for adaptation has led to loss and damages with 20 plus typhoons annually, leaving many of us homeless, bankrupt and unable to rebuild our lives. All over the Global South, agriculture is collapsing under the weight of climate extremes, threatening food sovereignty and pushing entire communities to hunger and displacement. Women around the world who are first to bear the brunt of the climate crisis are left to carry this burden on their own with little to no support even from their own governments. And the future that we're handing down to the future generations is marked with irreversible loss of homes, livelihoods and lands.
And the heart of the issue here, as Meena has already said, is, you know, justice and reparations. This is why developed countries don't want to talk. They don't want to go to the table. And they will continue to stall these adaptation negotiations because they still refuse until now to recognise their role, the historical and continuing responsibility in causing the climate catastrophe and the resulting disproportionate vulnerability of the Global South that's being caused by their actions.
We're locked into maladaptive pathways making basically adaptation action on the ground impossible because we have no finance…without urgent public grants based on adaptation finance…we are being condemned to permanent harm and we are not just being denied support, we are being sacrificed here. This is not a technical issue. This is not just all blah blah blah in those rooms. This is a political choice, as Meena said, a deliberate act of abandonment by the EU, the EIG, the umbrella group and their invisible allies in the U.S.
We need adaptation justice now, and they don't want to give that to us. But we need it not just to adapt to our new catastrophic realities in the Global South but to ensure that we actually survive through this. And this is an issue that the Global South will continue to bring to the table and we as DCJ will continue to bring it to these rooms.'