Renouncing green extractivism in Europe’s Energy Transition
Arrangør:
31. maj 14.00-15.30 - Audi 4 - 23.0.49
Talk and debate
The extraction of raw materials is already having an impact on communities’ access to land and water resources, in particular in places in Africa and Latin America. The expected boom in extraction illuminates how current EU climate mitigation pathways uphold a predatory appropriation of land and resources, perpetuating and reinforcing neo-colonial dynamics within Europe’s energy transition. A true just transition calls for a deeper transformative shift within the global economic order. It requires a profound change within global finance and trade arrangements to enable southern countries to mobilise their labour and resources around domestic development needs. It also requires high-income nations to scale down Northern aggregate demand for energy and resources by reorganising their economies around meeting human needs rather than GDP growth. This session will unpack what’s going wrong with today’s transition model and dive into both these pathways to usher in a truly just transition.
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Speakers​
associate professor of economics at Denison University (on leave), and the president of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. He is also a member of the Independent Expert Group on Just Transition and Development, an expert group member with the International Tax Task Force, and serves as senior advisor with Power Shift Africa.
Tonny Nowshin, economist, climate justice and degrowth activist from Bangladesh where she mobilized to save the world’s largest Mangrove forest, the Sundarbans. She has worked for German and international climate NGOs before and now her work focuses on fossil fuel finance within the Sunrise Project, an international NGO. In her activist work, she focuses on centering the concept of climate justice at the core of the climate movement by putting forward antiracist and decolonial perspectives and networks.
Mariana Walter, researcher and assistant professor at the IBEI and member of the direction group of the Environmental Justice Atlas.
She works in the fields of political ecology and ecological economics. Her research addresses extractive conflicts in the Global South, currently, in the context of green growth agendas and their energy and digital transitions. She also studies the role of social movements in societal transformations.
Diego Marin,
Policy Officer European Environmental Bureau, The Raw Materials Coalition
Winne van Woerden has an academic background in Global Health and in Heterodox Economics. She currently works as Human Economy Lead at Oxfam Novib including at global level. She is also an Affiliate at the Post Growth Institute and a Fellow at Commons Network. She is lead author of Living Well on a Finite Planet and recently gave a TedX talk named “Abolishing growthism to heal the world”.