Final Report Summary - EJOLT (Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities and Trade)
Executive Summary:
The EJOLT project brought together a consortium of activist and academic organizations across a range of fields to promote mutual learning among stakeholders who researched or used sustainability sciences, particularly on aspects of ecological distribution.EJOLT's starting question was, is there a Global Movement for Environmental Justice that (together with appropriate technologies and public policies) is helping to push society and economy towards environmental sustainability? How could we support research showing the many facets of this Global Movement for Environmental Justice born of resistance to the damages caused by the increased social metabolism? We opted for a methodology of mutual teaching and learning between activists and academics. EJOLT (2011-15) was a project that through six workshops (in different countries) and other activities, supported collaborative or cooperative research between 23 academic organizations, think tanks and activist EJOs from 20 different countries. It was coordinated by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA UAB). It aimed to collect cases of environmental conflict, corresponding to resource extraction and waste disposal in many countries, as part of WP2, the objective of which was to create an Environmental Justice Atlas. This inventory has reached 1500 cases in 2015. The EJATLAS is an online interactive map that catalogues localized stories of resistance against damaging projects, from mining to oil extraction to plantation forestry. It allows searching and filtering across 100 fields, including information on commodities and actors, forms of mobilization, outcomes and sources. The database has been carefully crafted by a team of over 100 scientists and activists all over the world. It is a reference for scientists, journalists, teachers and activists, and a virtual space for information, networking and knowledge sharing among activists, communities and concerned citizens. The EJATLAS highlights the structural impacts of economic activities on the most vulnerable populations and has fostered increased understanding of the material determinants of conflicts within a global context. What is now needed is expansion (more even coverage, thematically and geographically) and analysis (e.g. of the 18% of cases classified as "successes" of EJ often leading to alternatives).
Apart from the EJAtlas, 23 reports (of between 60 and 220 pages), one textbook and 15 main scientific papers have been published related to the thematic work packages, nuclear energy (WP3), oil, gas and climate justice (WP4), biomass and land conflicts (WP5), mining, shipbreaking and other industrial waste (WP6), and also to the 'transversal' WPs on environmental health and risk (WP7), liabilities and valuation (WP8), law and institutions (WP9), consumption, ecologically unequal trade and ecological debt (WP10). A thematic objective was added, with publications on the Political Ecology of Water Conflicts. Some of the Reports are very directly focused on the needs of EJOs, with titles such as Legal tools for EJOs and Economic valuation tools for EJOs (including multi-criteria assessments). One Report published in 2013 that was very well received was on Yasunization, Ogonization and other initiatives to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Some reports have been published also in languages other than English (e.g. on "Tree Plantations are not Forests"). Main contributions have been one article on the Ecological Debt in the journal Global Environmental Change, an article on The Vocabulary of Environmental Justice in the J. of Political Ecology, a forthcoming special issue also in JPE on Ecologically Unequal Exchange, and a forthcoming special issue on resistance to mining in Geoforum.
Two other important WPs were training and policy advice (WP11) and dissemination (WP12). This was carried out by public events, talks, presence at academic conferences but also at civil society events, and 5 Documentary films, 12 Policy Briefs and 3 on line courses with a total of about 100 students. A Glossary was updated and increased. The EJOLT blog carried an average of 10 entries per month from 2011 to 2015. Apart from the EJOLT website, www.ejolt,org a new website was created for the EJAtlas, www.ejatlas.org
Project Context and Objectives:
EJOLT (Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities and Trade) 2011-15 is a project that supports collaborative or cooperative research between 23 academic organizations, think-tanks and activist organizations (EJOs). It is coordinated by ICTA-UAB (Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona). It aims to collect cases of environmental conflict (resource extraction and waste disposal) in many countries (WP2), and to publish an inventory and Atlas of environmental injustices and conflicts related to Nuclear Energy WP3; Oil, Gas and Climate Justice WP4; Biomass and Land Conflicts WP5; Mining and Shipbreaking (and other industrial waste) WP6. The “transversal” work packages are on Environmental Health and Risk (WP7), Liabilities and Valuation (WP8), Law and Institutions (WP9), and Consumption, Ecologically Unequal Trade and Ecological Debt (WP10).
EJOLT brings together a consortium of international actors across a range of fields to promote collaboration and mutual learning among stakeholders who research or use Sustainability Sciences, particularly on aspects of Ecological Distribution. One main goal is to empower civil society organizations (CSOs) active in Environmental Justice issues (the EJOs), and the communities they support that receive an unfair share of environmental burdens to defend or reclaim their rights. This is done through a process of two-way knowledge transfer, encouraging Participatory Action Research and the transfer of methodologies with which Environmental Justice Organizations, communities and citizen movements can monitor and describe the state of their environment, and document its degradation, learning from other experiences and from academic research how to argue in order to avoid the growth of environmental liabilities or ecological debts. Economic and legal perspectives are very much included. Thus EJOLT increases EJOs’ capacity in using scientific concepts and methods for the description and quantification of environmental and health impacts, increasing their knowledge of environmental risks and of legal mechanisms of redress. On the other hand, EJOLT greatly enriches research in the Sustainability Sciences through mobilising the accumulated “activist knowledge” of the EJOs and making it available to the sustainability research community. Finally, EJOLT helps to translate the findings of this mutual learning process into published reports and scientific papers, and also into the policy arena by means of policy briefs. Dissemination objectives are also achieved by Documentary films and Online courses.
The main objective of the EJOLT project has been therefore to support research on environmental conflicts and environmental justice. The idea behind it, is that there is a growing global movement for environmental justice, which is a main force for moving the economy and society towards sustainability (together with changes in technologies, environmental public policies and other forces). We focus on the proposals and actions of civil society organizations that we call EJOs, environmental justice organizations.The EJOLT project brought together 23 partners from 20 different countries in four continents, of which about half were EJOs and the rest academic groups or think tanks. One main research technique was workshops, of which we held six, in different countries, bringing together the knowledge of EJOLT partners as activists and academics, and other invited participants.
The EJOLT project has had in the period 2011-15 several kinds of results that have fulfilled the objectives, and in some cases have gone beyond the initial objectives. First, the Reports (about 25 reports, all the scheduled ones in the DoW plus a few other ones). Second, some Documentary films. Third, the Policy Briefs. Fourth, the three online courses. Fifth, the Environmental Justice Atlas, which at the end of the project had collected about 1500 environmental conflicts worldwide, and will continue beyond the project. Sixth, the published academic articles and forthcoming books, coming from the Reports or from the EJAtlas. Seventh. the EJOLT blog, with about ten entries per month between 2011 and 2015. All the materials produced are available at two websites, www.ejolt.or and www.ejatlas.org and most publications are in open access, as foreseen in the initial objectives.
The 23 Reports fall into the following general categories, fitting with the different WP:
1. Studies on the Ecological Debt, including the Climate Debt.
2. Studies on Ecologically Unequal Trade
3. "Activist Mobilising Science" in uranium mining and gold mining - case studies
4. The Vocabulary of Environmental Justice
5. "Unburnable Fuels": Ogonization and Yasunization
6. Valuation and Liabilities: approaches from Ecological Economics and International Law
7. Studies on Waste Disposal
8.- Resistance to Mining
9.- Biomass Conflicts, Land Grabbing
10. Health Risks
11. Water Conflicts and Water Justice (a new objective, nor foreseen initially).
The Documentary films have been on Land Grabbing in Ethiopia; Delhi Wastepickers; Thee Yasuni ITT initiative and the Sarayaku cases in Ecuador; "Aquí nos vamos a quedar" (We are here to stay) on environmental conflicts in Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Tibet, Italy, Kenya; a forthcoming film on the Unist'ot'en blockade in Canada.
The objectives included producing Policy Briefs, doing OnLine Courses, and finally publishing some academic publications, all of which has been achieved.
The EJAtlas required to develop a Database Form (based on a commodity approach) and have a suitable platform. At the end of the project in 2015, we have nearly 1500 conflict cases. We have a new objective, to collect more cases, aiming at thematic and geographical even coverage. Nobody had ever constituted such a data base for the study of environmental conflicts. Multivariate analysis and other methods (superposition of maps, with physical indicators on extraction of material flows, population density...) will be applied later. There are already published articles on the large inventories of cases for Ecuador and Colombia. We call this "statistical political ecology". An outside, unsolicited opinion from the Nelson Centre on Political Ecology of the University of Wisconsin, stated: "“The sheer amount of mapped conflicts is impressive, but what stands out about this tool is the extensive filter and search functionality. Struggles, which are already color coded by toxin or resource, can be parsed at a large level by country, commodity, or company. Once at this level, there are over 50 more filters ranging from mobilizing forms to outcomes. As a preliminary research tool, a teaching aid, or an activist resource, the Environmental Justice Atlas should be of interest to those concerned with environmental justice struggles and innovative ways to make these struggles visible”.
Project Results:
A description of the main S&T results/foregrounds
This will be divided into the following sections: A) the published Reports and scientific papers and special issues of journals; B) the Environmental Justice Atlas; C) the Documentaries, the on-line courses, the policy briefs, and other materials.
A) The Reports and scientific papers. Here we leave aside the division by Working Packages, and focus on main results, thematic or transversal.
1.- The Ecological Debt, including the Climate Debt. This is still a barely established scientific concept, with origin in the demands from EJOs in South America from 1991 onwards , also taken up in 2000 by the Christian Jubilee South Campaigns. It plays a central role in EJOLT. In the Climate Change COPs one hears often from some presidents or heads of government from Southern countries claims for the repayment of the Climate Debt, because of “loss and damage”. This is a third position, beyond adaptation and mitigation. It is a claim for liability. Supporting this third position, one main result of EJOLT is the article by Rikard Warlenius et al in Global Environmental Change in 2014. This article is an outcome of, and it is complemented by EJOLT Report 18. The ecological debt concept emerged in the early 1990s from within social movements driven by rising environmental awareness, emerging consciousness of Western responsibility for past colonial subjugations, and a general sense of injustice during the third world debt crisis. The South was a financial debtor but it was an ecological creditor. The concept of ecological debt required further elucidation and elaboration in EJOLT in light of its interconnection with environmental justice. In this Report, the development of the concept of ecological debt in both activist and academic circles is described, theoretical building blocks for its operationalisation are discussed and three brief cases illustrating its recent use are presented. The concept of ecological debt has been used as a biophysical measure, a legal instrument and a distributional principle. In theory and in practice, it has much to offer to the global environmental justice movement. The Report was coordinated by Rikard Warlenius (Lund University) with contributions from Gregory Pierce, Vasna Ramasar, Eva Quistorp, Joan Martínez-Alier, Leida Rijnhout, Ivonne Yanez, and was edited (as so many others) by Beatriz Rodriguez Labajos.
2.- A special issue on ecologically unequal trade. As foreseen in EJOLT’s DoW, a symposium took place in Lund University in the spring of 2014 under Prof. Alf Hornbog’s direction. Hornborg is a well-known author in the economics of ecologically unequal exchange since his first major article in 1998. Here, a concept developed in academia (“ecologically unequal trade”), and empirical work on how to measure it in different metrics, is shared with academics, public opinion and environmental activists. A special issue will be published in the Journal of Political Ecology (open access) with the outcome of this EJOLT symposium, with the following articles.
- Introduction: Ecologically Unequal Exchange and Ecological Debt, Joan Martinez-Alier and Alf Hornborg
- Linking Ecological Debt and Ecologically Unequal Exchange through Stock-Flows and Unequal Sink Appropriation, Rikard Warlenius (Lund Univ)
- The Sociology of Ecologically Unequal Exchange, Foreign Investment Dependence and Environmental Load Displacement: Summary of the Literature and Implications for Sustainability, Andrew K. Jorgenson
- South America’s Biophysical Involvement in International Trade: The Physical Trade Balances of Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil in the Light of Ecologically Unequal Exchange, Christian Dorninger and Nina Eisenmenger (ISÖ, Vienna)
- The Unequal Exchange of Dutch Cheese and Kenyan Roses: Introducing and Testing an LCA-Based Methodology for Estimating Ecologically Unequal Exchange, Martin Oulu (Lund Univ)
- The Role of Voluntary Certification in Maintaining the Ecologically Unequal Exchange of Wood Pulp: The Case of the Forest Stewardship Council’s Certification of Industrial Tree Plantations in Brazil, Jutta Kill (WRM)
- Measuring Environmental Injustice: How Ecological Debt Defines a Radical Change in the International Law System, Jordi Jaria i Manzano, Antonio Cardesa-Salzmann, Antoni Pigrau, and Susana Borràs (CEDAT-URV)
- Who Gets the HANPP (Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production)? Biomass Distribution and ‘Sugar Economy’ in Tana Delta, Kenya, Leah Temper ICTA UAB)
- Hindering Public Health Protection as Institutional Success: How the Corporate Organizational Form Promotes and Maintains the Unequal Spreading of Health Hazards, Jair Stern
- Commercial Deficits and Physical Trade Deficits in South America – an economic argument for post-extractivism, Pablo Samaniego, M.C. Vallejo, and Joan Martinez-Alier (ICTA UAB)
- Moving from Counting to Paying the Climate Debt: How a Movement Emerged, Faltered, and Can Regain Momentum, Patrick Bond, Melissa Hansen, Faith kaManzi, Gcina Makoba, and Ivonne Yanez (CCS Durban and Accion Ecologica-OCMAL)
3.- Activists mobilizing scientists
Arising from the EJOLT work on nuclear energy in Namibia, Malawi, Bulgaria and Brazil but also from research on Niger, and with the cooperation with EJOLT partner CRIIRAD (Bruno Chayeron), several reports and an article in Ecological Economics, 105, 2014, were published. The article, by Marta Conde of ICTA UAB, is titled “Activism mobilizing Science”. The article sheds light on a process where unequal power relations are contested through the co-production of scientific and local knowledge. Lay citizens, communities and local grassroots organisations immersed in socio-environmental conflicts are engaging with professional scientists to understand the impacts a polluting project is causing to their environment and themselves. Together with scientists they co-produce new and alternative knowledge that gives the local organizations visibility and legitimacy, information on how to protect themselves from the impacts from nuclear radiation, and allows them to engage in practical activism, challenging the manufactured uncertainty and other information produced by the state or companies running the projects. This process is locally driven by activists who have built related capacities and is generally based on voluntary work.
The Reports in a “science in-and-for society” framework for nuclear conflicts are:
- EJOLT Report 22, Evaluation of Nuclear Legislation: The issue of rehabilitation of uranium mine sites in Namibia
- EJOLT Report 21, Impact of the Kayelekera uranium mine, Malawi
- EJOLT Report 15: Uranium mining, unveiling the impacts of the nuclear industry drawing from on-site studies performed in Bulgaria, Brazil, Namibia and Malawi and from previous studies performed by CRIIRAD in France and Africa over the last twenty years. It gives examples of the various impacts of uranium mining and milling activities on the environment (air, soil, water) and provides recommendations for limiting these impacts. This report aims to contribute towards the development of the critical capacities of communities, so that they might have more information with which to face conflicts with states or companies in relation to uranium mining projects.
- EJOLT Report 12: Expanded nuclear power capacity in Europe, impact of uranium mining and alternatives. We explore the situation in Bulgaria and Slovenia (with partners Za Zemiata and Focus). Despite many particularities, there are common traits that are also shared in the rest of Europe, notably, the debate over whether to maintain and/or increase a powerful and relatively autonomous source of energy in the face of the high costs of construction and environmental and health risks nuclear energy and radiation entail. The report describes the expansion of nuclear energy – two new planned power plants in Bulgaria and the prolongation of one plant and the construction of a second one in Slovenia. We also look at the often forgotten first stage of nuclear energy production: uranium mining. We describe the current status and main problems of the closed mines of Bulgaria and Slovenia. With the objective of envisioning a sustainable energy future, we analyze the costs and benefits, and thus the potential for Renewable Energy Sources (RES) as an alternative to nuclear expansion.
In a similar vein, Marta Conde and Mariana Walter (ICTA UAB) conducted in 2014 a long interview with hydrogeologist Robert Moran, who had accompanied an EJOLT mission in Bulgaria to Krumovgrad in 2011. He came also to EJOLT meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 2002 and to the EJOLT panel at the ISEE conference. Here again, Activists mobilize Scientists (i.e. one hydrogeologist) in mining issues, particularly gold mining. The interview and the forthcoming article will explain Moran’s interventions in well-known gold mining conflicts in Latin America, South East Europe, and Central Asia.
4.- The vocabulary of Environmental Justice coming from the EJOs
In an article produced collectively by most EJOLT partners after the Abuja meeting in 2013, and published in 2014 in the Journal of Political Ecology (open access), we argued that there are an increasing number of ecological distribution conflicts around the world ultimately caused from the increase in the metabolism of the economy in terms of flows of energy and materials. There are resource extraction conflicts, transport conflicts and also waste disposal conflicts. Therefore, there are many local complaints. Since the 1980s and 1990s there has been a globalizing environmental justice movement that in its strategy meetings and practices has developed a set of concepts and slogans to describe and intervene in such conflicts. They include “environmental racism”, “popular epidemiology”, “the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous”, “biopiracy”, “tree plantations are not forests”, “the ecological debt”, “climate justice”, “food sovereignty”, “water justice”… These notions have been born from socio-environmental activism but they have been taken up also by academic political ecologists and used in their analyses.
The following list of terms (The Vocabulary of Environmental Justice) has been prepared later for a chapter by Martinez-Alier for an Oxford Handbook of Environmental Politics edited by David Schlosberg, 2015. It is still under construction. For instance, in Report. n. 23 on Climate Justice in 2015, we use the new concept of “energy sovereignty” (coming from grassroots organizations). Short definitions and the dates of origin of the concepts in the Vocabulary of the Global Environmental Justice Movement are provided below. While there are some concepts of academic origin (such as “ecologically unequal exchange” or “strong sustainability”) that are also used by the global environmental justice movement, we focus here on concepts of non-academic origin. This is, we think, a very important contribution from EJOLT.
THE VOCABULARY OF THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT
- Environmental Justice (EJ) USA Civil Rights Movement, North Carolina 1982 against environmental injustices (Bullard 1990; 1999). “People of color” and low-income populations suffer disproportionate harm from waste sites, refineries and incinerators, transport infrastructures.
- Environmental racism Rev Benjamin Chavis, c. 1982 The fight for EJ, against pollution in Black, Hispanic, Indigenous areas, was seen as a fight against environmental racism.
- Ecological debt Instituto Ecología Política, Chile, 1992, Acción Ecológica 1997 Rich countries’ liability for resource plunder and disproportionate use of space for waste dumping (e.g. GHG).
- Popular epidemiology Brown, P. , 1992, 1997 “Lay” local knowledge of illnesses from pollution may be more valid than official knowledge (sometimes absent).
- Environmentalism of the poor A.Agarwal/S. Narain (CSE, Delhi) c. 1989; Hugo Blanco, 1991. Struggles by poor/ indigenous peoples against deforestation, dams, mining… ; proactive collective projects for water harvesting, and forest conservation
- Food sovereignty Via Campesina, c. 1996 People’s right to healthy, culturally appropriate, sustainably produced food. Right to define own food and agriculture systems.
- Biopiracy RAFI (Pat Mooney) 1993, popularized by Vandana Shiva Appropriation of genetic resources (in medicinal or agricultural plants) without recognition of knowledge and property rights of indigenous peoples
- Climate justice CES (Delhi), 1991, Durban Alliance, CorpWatch 1999-2002 Radically reduce excessive per capita emissions of carbon dioxide and other GHG. “Subsistence emissions vs. luxury emissions”,
- Water justice, hydric justice Rutgerd Boelens, EJOs in Latin America (e.g. CENSAT). 2011. Water should not run towards money, or towards power. It should go to those needing it for livelihood.
- Water as human right Pablo Solon (Bolivian envoy to UN), Maud Barlow (Council of Canadians), 2001 Human Right to Water recognized at UN level in 2011, as an independent human right.
- “Green Deserts” Brazil, network against eucalyptus plantations, Rede Alerta contra o Deserto Verde, 1999 Brazilian local term for eucalyptus plantations, used by networked CSO and communities, also by researchers and activists for any tree plantation.
- Tree Plantations are not Forests Pulping the South, 1996 by R. Carrere, L. Lohman, World Rainforest Movement The WRM collects and spreads information on tree plantation conflicts. It proposes a change in the FAO definition of forest, to exclude tree monocultures.
- Land grabbing GRAIN ( small pro-peasant EJO), 2008 The wave of land acquisitions in Southern countries for plantations for exports, leading to first statistics on land-grabbing
- Resource caps. Resource Cap Coalition, RCC Europe, c. 2010 It advocates reduction in global resource use and in poverty. It calls for a European energy quota scheme and the ratification of the Rimini protocol.
- To Ogonize / Yasunize ERA Nigeria, Acción Ecológica, Oilwatch, 1997-2007 Leave oil in the soil to prevent damage to human rights and biodiversity, and against climate change. Adopted by anti shale gas fracking, tar sands and open cast coal mining movements.
- Rights of Nature Ecuador, Constitutional Assembly, 2008 In Constitution of Ecuador 2008, art 71, pushed by Acción Ecológica and Alberto Acosta. Actionable in court.
- Corporate accountability Friends of the Earth International, 1992-2002 At UN Johannesburg summit in 2002, FoE proposed the adoption of a Corporate Accountability Convention, against lukewarm CSR principles.
- “Critical mass”, cyclists rights San Francisco 1992 (Chris Carlsson) International movement reclaiming the streets with cyclists marching to impose cyclists rights.
- Urban waste-recyclers movements c. 2005, GAIA against incineration and “energy valorization” of urban waste. Unions or cooperatives of urban waste gatherers, emphasizing positive environmental impact, including climate change (in Delhi, Pune, Bogota…).
- Urban “guerrilla food gardening” c. 2000, started by “food justice” networks Vacant lot food growing, permaculture, community gardening movements in cities around the world.
- Toxic colonialism, toxic imperialism BAN, Basel Action Network, c. 2000, Greenpeace Fighting the long-distance export of waste from rich to poor countries, forbidden by the Basel Treaty. E.g. ship-breaking in India or Bangladesh, chemical residues or nuclear waste, electronic waste.
- Post-extractivism Latin America, 2007, Eduardo Gudynas (CLAES), Alberto Acosta, Maristella Svampa Against the reprimarization of LA economies. Transition to a sustainable economy based on solar energy and renewable materials. Impose quotas and taxes on raw materials exports.
- Buen Vivir, Sumak Kawsay Ecuador and Bolivia 2008/2009 Adopted in Constitutions of both countries, inspired by indigenous traditions and by the “post-development” approach.
- Indigenous territorial rights, and prior consultation. Convention 169 of ILO, 1989; adivasi forest rights in India… In conflicts on mining, oil exploitation, dams… communities ask for applying legislation defending indigenous rights.
- “Sand mafias” Name given c. 2005 by environmental movement, journalists. The illegal “mining” of sand and gravel in India in many rivers, driven by the growing building and public works industry.
- “Cancer villages” In China, popular name adopted by academics and officials (Lora-Wainright, 2013) Rural villages where industry has caused pollution (e.g. heavy metals), where lay knowledge of illness is relevant, and subdued protests take place.
5.- Unburnable fuels
Two of EJOLT reports deal main with oil extraction in Nigeria, Ecuador and elsewhere. Two of the main partners in EJOLT have been ERA from Nigeria and Acción Ecológica (from Ecuador, together with OCMAL). ERA and Acción Ecológica were founding members of Oilwatch in 1995, in the aftermath of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s and his companions’ deaths. These are EJOLT Report 9, Digging deep Corporate Liability. Environmental Justice strategies in the world of oil and EJOLT Report 6, Towards a Post-Oil Civilization. Yasunization and other initiatives to leave fossil fuels in the soil, the publication of which in May 2013 coincided with an article in The Economist explaining that avoidance of climate change required to leave a large proportion of the fossil fuels in the ground.
In EJOLT we have been following the Chevron-Texaco case, and analyzing the three courts decisions against Chevron in the courts of Ecuador since 2011. We invited the plaintiffs’ lawyer Pablo Fajardo to some of our meetings. Report 9, mainly written by EJOLT partners CDCA (Italy) and ERA (Nigeria), and edited as most other Reports by Beatriz Rodriguez Labajos of ICTA UAB, focuses on the liability for the impacts provoked by the expanding oil industry, environmental destruction, health impacts and violations of human rights. Local communities, feeling that they are simply sacrificed to the oil industry, see themselves involved in social conflict. They are experiencing forms of environmental discrimination and might even face criminalization of the protest when they stand up to defend their rights promoting a chilly effect on others who need and want to defend themselves and the environment. The number of lawsuits demanding justice for environmental, social, economic and cultural damages provoked by oil companies are increasing as well as their media visibility. Yet most outcomes are not satisfactory in tackling impacted communities claims for justice. The Report describes the most recent trends regarding oil corporations’ responsibilities and use of procedural justice by civil society through the review of emblematic legal cases.
Report 6, perhaps the most successful of the EJOLT report to date, traces the birth and growth of the idea of leaving oil in the ground. This arose after many decades of cruel conflicts caused by major oil companies, Shell and Chevron (Texaco) in the Niger Delta (involving the Ogoni and Ijaw peoples) and in the Amazon of Ecuador. EJOs and networks (Oilwatch) put forward the proposal to leave fossil fuels in the ground since 1997, if not before. This proposal makes sense because of the need to combat climate change and, in many places, also to preserve biodiversity and to safeguard the livelihoods and survival of local populations. Such proposals are known around the world as Yasunization, from the name of the national park in Ecuador, Yasuní, where the government agreed in 2007 to leave 850 million barrels of heavy oil in the soil. The Report analyses in detail the history of the activist-led initiatives to leave oil in the soil in Nigeria and Ecuador. It shows how the idea of Yasunization has reached other areas in Latin America (in the San Andrés and Providencia islands, in the Peten, and in the Amazon of Bolivia), and describes several examples of current local struggles against shale gas fracking in Quebec, Europe and South Africa, some of which are inspired by Yasunization. In Nigeria, “Ogonisation” is seen as the appropriate term. It explains how attempts are being made to resist coal mining in New Zealand, tar sand extraction in several African countries including again Nigeria, and offshore oil extraction in the Canary Islands, in Ghana and in the Lofoten islands in Norway. The last chapter analyses the links between Yasunization (leave fossil fuels in the ground) and the world movement in defense of indigenous peoples, and also the difficult collaboration between Yasunization and the Conservation movement. The relevance of this Report has increased with the many struggles around the world on shale gas fracking. This Report is frequently quoted by Naomi Klein in her 2014 book on climate change. The issue of “unburnable fuels” is taken up again in Report n. 23 in 2015 of WP4 with a view to the COP in Paris at the end of 2015.
Another EJOLT Report argued indirectly also for “leaving fossil fuels in the ground” by debunking or criticizing in detail many of the CDM projects in Africa. This is a Report also quoted in Naomi Klein’s bestseller. The EJOLT Report 2 is titled The CDM Cannot Deliver the Money to Africa. Why the carbon trading gamble won’t save the planet from climate change, and how African civil society is resisting. Written largely by EJOLT partner CCS at the University of Durban, the Report gives critical policy analysis and case documentation about the role of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in Africa. Instead of providing an appropriate flow of climate finance for projects related to greenhouse gas mitigation, the CDM has benefited large corporations (both South and North) and the governments they influence and often control. South Africa is a case in point, as both a victim and villain in relation to catastrophic climate change. Many sites of emissions in Africa – e.g. methane from rotting rubbish in landfills, flaring of gas from oil extraction, coal-burning electricity generation, coal-to-liquid and gas-to-liquid petroleum refining, deforestation, decomposed vegetation in tropical dams – require urgent attention, as do the proliferation of ‘false solutions’ to the climate crisis such as mega-hydro power, tree plantations and biofuels. But because communities, workers and local environments have been harmed in the process, various kinds of social resistances have emerged, and in some cases met with repression or cooptation through ‘divide-and-rule’ strategies. The Report dissects six case studies from eight African countries: the DRC, Ehiopia, Kenya; Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa. They consider the fraud of a landfill methane to electricity project; CDM corruption of local governance from gas-flaring-related subsidies; the emergence of trees, plantations and forests within CDM financing debates; failed CDM proposals involving the exploitation of gas reserves; megadams searching the CDM status; and the rise of Jatropha biofuel industries. The damage done by CDMs to date should be included in calculations of the ‘climate debt’ that the North owes the South, with the aim of having victims of CDMs compensated appropriately.
6.- Reports on Valuation and Liabilities: approaches from Ecological Economics and Law
We summarize here seven Reports on Legal issues (where CEDAT-URV contribution was very important), and on Valuation (e.g. shortcomings and uses of cost-benefit analysis, or of multi-criteria evaluation, authored mainly by REEDS-UVSQ and ICTA). What they have in common is that all of them are very much rooted on practical experience, and that are written with the clear intention to help EJOs engaged in ecological distribution conflicts. A meeting in Rome in late 2013 organized by the CDCA (with Lucie Greyl) was very helpful for the development of these “transversal” reports, as were also the meetings in Rio 2012 and Abuja in early 2013.
EJOLT Report 16: Economic tools for evaluating liabilities in environmental justice struggles. The EJOLT experience.
Collaboration to deploy economic evaluation tools is a recent form of interaction between academia and EJOs. Specifically, academics and environmental justice organisations (EJOs) conduct monetary valuations, cost-benefit analyses (CBAs) and multi-criteria analyses (MCA), in order to explore and reveal the un-sustainability of environmentally controversial projects. The effectiveness of such evaluation tools for pursuing environmental justice is still a matter of debate. In this document, we reported on the EJOLT project experience of developing evaluation processes between EJOs and academics in the context of specific environmental justice struggles. This resulted in a mutual-learning process that explored the conditions under which CBA, MCA, and economic valuation tools can be either enabling or disabling for EJOs in their struggles for environmental justice. The outcomes suggest that methods are more effectively used through carefully planned interventions supporting debates on local futures and visions, and when there are complementarities with regulatory and institutional developments. On the contrary, evaluation methods disable local mobilization when they force communities to bring their concerns into assessment schemes that do not fit their own languages and concerns, when they reproduce uneven power relations, or where public decisions have little to do with formulating and advancing ‘reasoned arguments’. One main author of this report was ecological economist Christos Zografos (ICTA UAB).
Another EJOLT Report, n. 13 is titled Socio-environmental valuation and liabilities. What strategies for environmental justice organisations?
This EJOLT report focused on two central issues: the use of evaluation methods and the notion of liabilities, as applied to socio-environmental conflicts and EJO campaigns. The report included (i) one review chapter of extra-judicial cases having a valuation dimension, (ii) six case studies from four continents involving a close collaboration between activists and academics, and (iii) one practical theoretical synthesis. Each one of the case studies examines one or more of the following key questions: How are valuation conflicts to be dealt with? How can we evaluate a given ‘development project’? Is it possible to compensate for the liabilities involved? If yes, how? More specifically, two chapters are concerned with environmental impact assessments (oil exploitation in Nigeria and water megaproject in Brazil), two chapters tackle cost/benefit approaches and their limits (forest valuation in India and nuclear power plants in Bulgaria and Turkey), one deals with multicriteria evaluations (oil exploitation in Ecuador), and one analyses a conflict of valuation languages (gold mining in Turkey). Among these case studies, two (Nigeria and India) also discuss the compensatory mechanisms involved as well as their suitability.
When dealing with environmental decision-making or conflict resolution, the approach of standard economics (even when labelled ‘environmental’) is to use a common unit – a monetary numeraire – for all the different values and then to look for a trade-off between all of them within a market context. This approach assumes the existence of value commensurability. Ecological economists and activists, in contrast, acknowledge value incommensurability. Indeed, in virtually every socio-environmental conflict, a variety of valuation languages is deployed. Their inclusion in evaluation processes is particularly important since governments and companies usually try to portray socio-environmental impacts solely as a technical problem that will be handled with the proper use of technology or monetary accounting. In fact, most of the case studies in this report show that lower-income sectors (especially indigenous people and peasants) do not simply seek a monetary compensation and do worry about local environmental matters.
More fundamentally, these valuation contests also highlight opposite visions and values about local development, between on one hand (lower-income) locals and on the other, the state and corporate sectors. In view of the differences in material interests, values and perceptions, it appears that the evolution of most socio-environmental conflicts will very much depend on the extent to which different languages of valuation are acknowledged and addressed. Generally speaking, this would require, firstly, carrying out a rigorous socio-environmental impacts assessment of the region at stake, and secondly, undertaking an in-depth deliberative multicriteria evaluation. One main author of this report was Julien-François Gerber (REEDS-UVSQ)
Complementarily, we published also a non-scheduled report (not foreseen in the DoW), this was EJOLT Report 5: Issues in the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity
After 1992 many conservation biologists thought that the use of economic instruments would be more effective to halt biodiversity loss than the policies based on setting apart some natural spaces outside the market. At the same time there was a new elaboration of the concept of ecosystem services and, since 1997, there were attempts at costing in money terms the loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity including the high profile TEEB project (2008-2011). Our discussion shows the analytical implications of three main socio-economic meanings of biodiversity loss: a) the loss of natural capital, b) the loss of ecosystems functions, c) the loss of cultural values and human rights to livelihood. We show cases where monetary valuation is relevant and other cases where it is controversial and even counterproductive, as it undermines the objectives of conservation. This Report became a published article in Conservation & Society (open access), authored by Martinez-Alier & Rodriguez Labajos.
A fourth report on issues of valuation is EJOLT Report 8: Guide to Multicriteria Evaluation for Environmental Justice Organisations
This introduction to multicriteria evaluation methods for EJOs intends to help activists to clarify whether multicriteria assessments can be useful in their struggles. In the present guide, we review three MCE methods that are arguably today the most relevant for EJOs, they are widely recognized as participative, and doable with relatively limited means. They are: Social Multicriteria Evaluation (SMCE), Multicriteria Mapping (MCM), and the Integraal framework. While only one aims at calculating a ranking of the different options – the SMCE –, the other two provide a way of comparing and analyzing the different positions involved in a multicriteria problem and may (or may not) end up with a clear final ranking. The three methods build on a number of common principles: they all (1) have a strong element of public and/or stakeholder engagement; (2) account for different types of knowledge (monetary and nonmonetary; quantitative and qualitative data); and (3) provide opportunities for learning during the appraisal process. After a description of these three different MCE methods, the guide takes the ‘leaving oil in the soil’ campaigns, with special emphasis on Ecuador and Nigeria, as possible examples for future MCEs. The Yasuni ITT proposal was indeed subject to MCE by economists at FLACSO (in an article published in Ecological Economics, 2015, by Vallejo et al), they concluded that under plausible assumptions, it was best to leave the oil in the ground. We can ask still whether EJOs are well advised or not to use MCE. Authors are Julien-François Gerber with contributions by Beatriz Rodríguez-Labajos, Ivonne Yánez and others.
We now consider three Legal reports, which are also cross-cutting, and focus on corporate accountability and liabilities, but also in the international law on liability from climate debt.
EJOLT Report 4: Legal avenues for EJOs to claim environmental liability.
This report, authored by Antoni Pigrau and other members of CEDAT-URV, considered how questions of global justice within transnational relation are often related to operations of multinational corporations (MNCs). This report appraises the different national and international (judicial and non-judicial) fora that are available to hold MNCs accountable. On the basis of recent judicial developments concerning civil liability claims by victims of the operations of MNCs in various countries, it explores the circumstances under which national, transnational and international litigation, either by itself or in interaction with each other, has proven most effective in providing redress. It concludes that transnational cluster-litigation is the most efficient strategy to tighten the meshes of judicial action upon MNCs, hence promoting the international rule of law and contributing, albeit modestly, to foster (corrective) global justice.
As an aside, in discussing this and other Legal reports, EJOLT members (including attorney Antonio Gustavo Gómez from Argentina, with CDCA) often raised the issue of whether opting for criminal court-cases instead of civil cases was a better strategy. This important topic is mentioned again below in the section on Impacts.
In EJOLT Report 11: International law and ecological debt, the main point is that global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange and climate injustice will not be corrected just by minor adaptations of existing international regimes. Nor will change come through the formal enactment of a given set of principles. Rather, correction will require a profound reconceptualisation of global governance that is able to integrate counter-hegemonic claims for environmental justice. The report has four parts. The first one is a conceptual introduction that puts in context concepts emerging from the academic or social movements, such as ecological and climate debt, against the backdrop of the legal narratives that underpin the hegemonic model of development. The second part presents a critique of the notion of sustainable development as a supposed paradigm for reconciling the needs of present and future generations with the preservation of the Earth’s ecosystems. The third part emphasizes the potential of current international law to deal with the needs of intragenerational and intergenerational justice in relation to sustainability. In this section, which echoes a growing academic debate, we argue that a reinterpretation and reconstruction of the current international order in terms of global constitutionalism and an enhanced human rights approach, offers a way to mitigate the present biases in international law. Finally, the fourth part is much more speculative in nature, outlining some ideas that may be found beyond the elements already present in current international law.
One main author was Jordi Jaria i Manzano (CEDAT-URV)
EJOLT Report 17 was published towards the end of the project, in late 2014: A legal guide for communities seeking environmental justice.
The endless increase of environmental injustice in the world is directly impacting more and more people on a daily basis. While impunity seems to be the order of the day, the need for procedural justice is growing. Making the most of the competences and knowledge brought together under the EJOLT project and its work on Law and Institutions the CDCA (Italy) compiled a manual that presents a number of legal tools and concepts already used by EJOs all over the world. These concepts and tools from the civil and criminal system at international, regional and trans-national levels are presented together with interactive links to more detailed and technical information and to useful contacts for legal strategy capacity building of EJOs
7.- Resistance to mining, information from the EJAtlas… and a special issue in Geoforum.
The EJOLT Report 7, Mining conflicts around the world. Common grounds from an Environmental Justice perspective, explored contemporary mining conflicts. This was based on 24 real case studies from 18 different countries described by local activists and scholars. This was written before the large collection of conflict cases for the EJAtlas after 2012. While 17 of the reported cases focused on conflicts related to metal mining (e.g. gold, silver, copper, zinc, and lead), four addressed uranium mining and one referred to coal mining. As an example of a new frontier in the industry, a sand mining conflict from India was also reported. First, the project and type of conflict are characterized in a nutshell, with some basic factual background that describe the companies involved, and the communities and locations affected. The roots of the conflicts are explored next, as well as relevant socioeconomic, cultural, health, and ecological impacts and related community claims. Where relevant, means of resistance are also specified with their influence on the project and/or the outcome of the conflict. The report then offers a synthesis of the described mining cases, review their commonalities, link gained insights with research needs and discuss some policy recommendations that might follow from this analysis.
Two years later we produced the EJOLT Report 14: Towards environmental justice success in mining resistances: An empirical investigation. There is a very clear continuity with the previous Report n. 7. Here the empirical evidence covered 346 mining cases from around the world, featured on the EJAtlas, and enriched by an interactive discussion of results with activists and experts. In an effort to understand both the general patterns identified in conflicts at hand, and the factors that determine EJ ‘success’ and ‘failure’ from an activist viewpoint, the experiences of EJOs that pursue EJ in mining conflicts are analyzed by combining qualitative and quantitative methods. The report employs, first, social network analysis to study the nature of the relationships both among corporations involved in the mining activity, on the one hand, and among EJOs resisting against the mining project, on the other. Both sets of conditions and cooperation are then compared to discuss ways to develop a more resilient activist network that can trigger social change and achieve EJ success. Then, multivariate analysis methods are used to examine the defining factors in achieving EJ success and to answer the following research questions: In which case a conflict is more intense? What makes EJ served? When is a disruptive project stopped? Finally, qualitative analysis, based on descriptive statistics, is conducted to investigate factors that configure the perception of success for EJ and incorporate activist knowledge into the theory of EJ. A thorough analysis of the answers given to question “Do you consider the case as an accomplishment for the EJ?” with their respective justifications help us to understand why the resistance movements consider a particular result as an EJ success or failure in the context of a mining conflict.
Several articles on mining related to the EJOLT project have been accepted for a special issue in Geoforum edited by Beatriz Rodriguez Labajos and Begum Ozkaynak.
8.- Waste disposal
EJOLT Report 1 published in 2011 was on Industrial waste conflicts around the world. Case studies from India and Bulgaria: shipbreaking and incineration. The general framework was that of the EJOLT project itself, namely, how do struggles for environmental justice contribute to the environmental sustainability of the economy?
Rich societies use large amounts of resources. Conflicts of resource extraction and waste disposal, such as the conflict over the excessive production of carbon dioxide, arise as a consequence of this. Rich societies generate large quantities of all kinds of waste, facing rising management costs and awakening opposition to waste treatment and disposal sites, such as incinerators and landfills. This report, through in-depth case studies from India and Bulgaria, aimed to link the increased social metabolism (energy and material flows) of the economy to waste disposal conflicts. The first case study was about shipbreaking (the dismantling of obsolete ocean-going ships) in Alang-Sosiya (India), an example of how the North dumps toxic waste in the South. The second case study was about a failed attempt to build an hazardous waste incinerator in Radnevo (Bulgaria). Such ecological distribution conflicts emerge as valuation conflict where actors deploy different valuation languages to affirm their right to use a safe environment, from which their health and livelihood often depends upon. Key lessons and mutual learning from both cases are then drawn paying particular attention to the political strategies which can be adopted in environmental conflicts, including grass roots mobilization, cases in the Courts, popular epidemiology, national and international alliances.
A later outcome of work in India has been (apart from many contributions from JNU to the EJAtlas, where India is the country best represented), articles and reports on waste management in Delhi in which Federico Demaria (ICTA UAB) has taken part in collaboration with the All India Kabadi Mazdoor Mahasangh (AIKMM, meaning “All India Waste Worker Federation”), an organization of waste collectors. In 2015 the AIKMM has issued a report, “Rights for waste workers as service providers: a comprehensive valuation of Delhi’s informal recycling sector”.
9.- Reports on biomass conflicts
Three major reports have been published, with collaboration with EJOLT partners GRAIN, WRM, the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna and others. EJOLT Report 3, "An overview of industrial tree plantations in the global South. Conflicts, trends and resistance struggles", analyzed the growth of industrial tree plantations (ITPs), typically large-scale, intensively managed, even-age monoculture plantations, mostly exotic trees like fast-growing eucalyptus, pine and acacia species, but also rubber and oil palm, all destined for industrial processes to produce paper, palm oil and rubber products. They have, increased their area in the global South about fourfold in 20 years. Some of the main countries with millions of hectares include Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia while ITPs are expanding in African countries, like Mozambique, and in the Mekong region in a context of increasing land grabbing. This expansion is Northern-driven; the US and the European Union together consume most of the final products, benefiting also their banks and businesses that are key players in the different industry sectors behind ITPs, and also increasingly investment funds. In the global South where plantations are set up, local people, while having a very low consumption level, suffer severely from the negative impacts of these plantations. The social and environmental justice conflicts that result from the negative impacts of plantations are mainly about land access and tenure, but also other social, economic, environmental and cultural impacts. Human rights violations including deaths are common in many countries. In spite of the heavy negative impacts of ITPs, they continue being actively promoted as carbon sinks (as also discussed in EJOLR Report 2), or to supply energy and electricity through biofuels and burning wood in specially designed and subsidized wood-based power facilities in Europe. These new trends only aggravate the negative impacts, while the proven deforestation and land use change that results from plantation expansion undermines the supposed carbon neutrality. Although consumption reduction and paper recycling are important, a structural change in the global industrial production and consumption system, of which paper, vegetable oils and rubber are fundamental parts, is needed in order to build a truly sustainable future. Meanwhile, local communities in the South face the challenge to continue building a stronger and broader movement to halt the continuous land grabbing for industrial tree plantations. This issue has loong been the main focus of work for EJOLT partner WRM.
EJOLT Report 10 was titled The many faces of land grabbing. Cases from Africa and Latin America. EJOLT partner GRAIN used “land grabbing” for the first time when two big global crises in 2008 – the world food crisis and the broader financial crisis that the food crisis has been part of – together spawned a new and disturbing trend towards buying up land for outsourced food production. ‘Land grabbing’ as these acquisitions were then called by GRAIN, are often led by the private sector (with support from governments) that sees opportunities triggered by the global financial, food and energy crisis. Characteristics of land grabbing are large scale displacement of the rural poor and the destruction of the local ecology to make space for industrial agriculture and biofuels. Recent studies emphasize the links between land grabbing, biomass extraction, and the interests and needs of the few members of a global class of consumers distributed across an increasingly multi-centric global food system, against the vast majority of the world’s population. Thus, the fight against land grabbing currently lies at the interface of the climate debate, food sovereignty, indigenous rights, social and environmental justice. This report describes and analyzes specific cases of land grabbing around the world within various socio economic contexts and with diverse social and environmental consequences as well as reporting successful cases of resistance to land grabbing to contribute to a preliminary understanding of the forces and also the conditions (opportunity spaces) for resistance, and the different types of alliances that can be made at different scales.
EJOLT Report 20 published in 2015, authored by Andreas Mayer (ISÖ Vienna) and others, is called Patterns of global biomass trade. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, global trade in agricultural products grew more than three times faster than agricultural production. Nearly all the new land that had been put into production since 1986 was used to produce export crops. While higher volumes of agricultural production and trade increased the global availability of agricultural products, their benefits and negative impacts are not evenly distributed globally. From a regional perspective, the surge in agricultural production for export is most pronounced in Latin America and in some Southeast Asian and Eastern European countries. This export orientation is often associated with negative impacts on food self-sufficiency and a potential threat to food sovereignty in the producing countries. This report examines therefore the global evolution of food production and international food trade and identifies related drivers of socio-environmental conflicts. Evidence from case studies of two important agricultural exporters – Indonesia and Paraguay – suggests that the extraction of primary materials for export (extractivism) in the agricultural sector can be linked to rising potential for socio-environmental conflict. This evidence in turn sheds new light on the third case study on Ethiopia, a country currently modernizing its agricultural sector with the aim of becoming an exporter of agricultural products.
10.- Report on Health Risks
EJOLT Report 19, Health as Dignity. Risks, Health and Mobilization for Environmental Justice, mainly authored by Marcelo Firpo Porto and collaborators (from FIOCRUZ, Brazil) is one of the “transversal” reports scheduled in the DoW, and it has been uploaded in May 2015. This report aims to give conceptual and methodological support on environmental risks and health problems in contexts of environmental conflicts. It was written to members of affected communities, environmental justice organizations, social movements, and researchers jointly engaged in movements for environmental justice, both local / regional and global, particularly in countries of the "Global South". The report is based on problems derived from various economic sectors activities, often in cahoots with political and public institutions that prioritize "economic development" and do not meet legal and institutional roles. Conflicts reveal the exploitation of natural resources and the workforce with the systematic violation of rights related to different aspects: life, work, land, environment and health. Mobilizations for environmental justice also fight for the autonomy of communities, their cultures the right to maintain their livelihoods i.e. as indigenous or peasants. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive vision of health that relates not only to the illness and death, but with life, nature, culture and fundamental rights. We summarize this in the title of this work: "Health and Dignity", echoing voices of countless people who have been fighting for the right to life and the commons, and against the impacts of economic sectors such as mining, agribusiness and the oil industry. The report focuses on case studies involving oil exploration and uranium mining in Latin America and Africa written in collaboration with EJOLT partners. There is much new valuable information on the Caetité uranium mining in Brazil. Information is organized and knowledge is produced based on principles and practices of environmental justice, including the active role of affected populations especially on environmental health and risk issues. Within EJOLT, keywords specific to this report are environmental health, risk analysis and management, political epistemology, vulnerability, knowledge production.
11. – Political ecology of water conflicts.
No specific report on water conflicts was initially planned (i.e. included in the list of deliverables in the DoW), but there is a wealth of information on water conflict in the EJAtlas from which articles, theses and books will flow. Two main articles have been published by EJOLT members on water conflicts. One is methodologically interesting as it takes an ecosystem services approach to ecological distribution conflicts (Jordà-Capdevila & Rodriguez-Labajos in Sustainability Science, 2014). The second article is a major survey of the political ecology of water conflicts, published in 2015 in WIRES Water authored by Martinez-Alier and Rodriguez-Labajos. This is a summary: “The political ecology of water studies the conflicts on water use, whether as an input or as a vehicle for waste disposal. Both the quantity and the quality of water are relevant for conflicts on water as a commodity and also indirectly in conflicts on water from oil and gas extraction, mining, or biomass production. Water bodies and water courses provide environmental services, and conflicts arise on the trade-offs between such services. The new legal institutions of the Human Right to Water and of the Rights of Nature are brought into the discussion when focusing on agency in conflicts on dams, waterways and water transfers, and controversies on privatization of urban water supply, listing some of the social actors involved in such conflicts and the networks they form”. Keywords mentioned are water quality, ecosystem functions, dams, social metabolism, hydric justice, hydro-social cycle. Notice that hydric justice or water justice was not yet a work that we used, or indeed we knew in 2010 when we submitted the EJOLT project.
12.- Publication of the Reports and other EJOLT materials as books and articles
This is a topic still under consideration at the end of the project in the first half of 2015. Some articles and special issues are already coming from the project (and have been mentioned here, or are listed elsewhere in this final report). Some contacts with a book publisher have been established. Some of the 23 Reports have been published in the EJOLT website in languages other than English.
B) The EJAtlas (ww.ejatlas.org)
The EJOLT inventory and maps of environmental (in)justice conflicts and resistance are at the heart of the EJOLT project which is a project for supporting research. The EJOLT Atlas will indeed facilitate research in comparative and statistical political ecology. This inventory of conflicts is an ambitious undertaking, requiring vast stores of activist and academic knowledge to locate and describe the environmental justice struggles. Some senior political ecologists expressed their skepticism on this initiative, but they were wrong. The EJAtlas must continue after the end of EJOLT, to achieve better thematic and geographic coverage. The EJAtlas has consumed about one fourth of the resources available in EJOLT for the period 2011-15, and it has attracted perhaps two-thirds of public attention. We believe it is financially feasible to find support for its continuation. It already counts with many committed outside volunteer collaborators.
It took us one year to develop, test and be satisfied with the Database Form. This process has been guided by Leah Temper, with collaboration from Daniela Del Bene (ICTA UAB), and other members. Our approach is from the commodities in question to the conflicts. By March 2014 we were able (after changing the plaform) to launch the Atlas with over 900 cases, and by the end of EJOLT we are approaching 1500 approved cases. The first academic articles are starting to appear. Moreover we have abundant proof that the Atlas is used by many students, teachers, journalists, activists.
GIS experts translated the information on environmental conflicts into geographic systems and are working on spatial indicators to help explain and visualize correlations and trends emerging from data analysis. Web and programming experts built the database platform online and made it attractive and user-friendly for a wide audience and experts and activists on the ground.
The role of coordinator ICTA UAB has been to guide and oversee the process, design the structure of the database, to coordinate with the participant EJOs and academics, to obtain outside collaboration to fill in Database Forms and, importantly, to moderate and ensure the quality of the information. Most of the EJOLT partners contributed their own inventories (OCMAL, GRAIN, CDCA…), in some cases (like Fiocruz, Brazil, 400 cases) we are still digesting the information into our own EJAtlas format. Since the launch in March 2014, over 400,000 users visited the atlas webpage and have opened almost a million pages. The re-launch in March 2015 attracted many more press reviews. Hundreds of press articles have been written and many new collaborators have been added. Academic articles have been published with several in process. Further, a user survey has been carried out to assess the webpage and to guide its further development and trajectory, under the direction of Dr Leah Temper (ICTA UAB).
We have therefore achieved most of the Objectives we had when we submitted the EJOLT project in 2010: “To compile and make available a ‘Map of Environmental Injustice’ for future research and training on the relationship between material flows, land use and the incidence of conflicts, for academics, policy-makers and civil society. This map will consist on an online unique database of resource extraction and disposal conflicts hosted on the project website, geographically referenced (mapped with GIS), and linked with social metabolism and environmental indicators. It will allow increased understanding of what the determinants of conflicts are and how material demands and policies create potential hot spots for future conflicts”.
We developed a new website for the EJAtlas, www.ejatlas.org separate from www.ejolt.org. Although, beyond the inventories, we have presented also some featured maps (gas fracking conflicts, and others), we have not yet achieved the objective of trying to explain the frequency/ intensity of various types of conflicts depending on indicators of population density, HANPP, Material Flow Extraction… But the existing inventory allows many types of analyses.
The following groups from EJOLT and outside EJOLT contributed with more than 5 cases (draft or approved)
ICTA-UAB Institute for Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona
OCMAL-Observatorio de Conflictos Mineros de América Latina
FIOCRUZ - Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro
Centro Documentazione Conflitti Ambientali, Italy
Za Zemiata, Bulgaria
Mario Alejandro Perez Rincon, Universidad del Valle-CINARA Institute, Colombia
Accion Ecologica, Ecuador
CRIIRAD - Commission de Recherche et d’Information Indépendantes sur la RADioactivité, France
Centre for Civil Society, University of Kwazulu Natal, South Africa
Jawaharlal Nehru University, Cntre for Science and Technology, India
GRAIN, Genetic Resources Action International
BOG – Bogazici University
European Environmental Bureau
World Rainforest Movement, WRM
REEDS – Int. Centre for Research in Ecological Economics, Eco-Innovation and Tool Development for Sustainability, UVSQ, France
Nature Kenya
Alliance Voahary Gasy, Madagascar
Citizens For Justice, Malawi
Observatorio de Conflictos Socioambientales en el Occidente de Mexico
Grupo de trabajo paisajes mineros en Mexico
Boa Monjane, Via Campesina
Earthlife Namibia
Environmental Rights Action, Nigeria
Oil Watch International
FOCUS Association for Sustainable Development, Slovenia
ISÖ - Social Ecology Vienna
Carolina Herrmann C.S. and Vanessa Samora, Grupo de Estudos em Temáticas Ambientais da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
CEDAT, Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Gabriel Weber, Germany
Alfred Burballa Noria, Belfast
Lund University, Sweden
Carl Middleton, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand
Business and Human Rights, UK
Alejandro Colsa, Bernadette Grafton, Katy Hintzen and Sara Orvis, Prof. Paul Mohai, School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan
Sustainable Europe Research Institute, SERI, Germany
SOS Halkidiki, Greece
Gyorgy Malovics, Hungary
Professor Kenichi Matsui, Japan
Hali Healy, King’s College London
Julien-Francois Gerber, TERI University, Delhi, India
Eradicating Ecocide campaign
Dr Anna Lora-Wainwright, Associate Professor in the Human Geography of China, University of Oxford, UK
Giuseppina Siciliano, Centre for Development, Environment and Policy (CeDEP), School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), UK
Grettel Navas, Fundación Neotrópica, Costa Rica
Patrizia Heidegger, NGO Shipbreaking Platform
Anitra Nelson, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Lena Weber, Human Ecology Division, Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Sweden
Jovanka Spiric (Balkans), ICTA - Universitat Autonoma Barcelona, Spain
Vladimir Mrkajic, University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Ana Novkovic, Environmental activist, Serbia
Milica Mancic, Environmental activist, Serbia
Geography Department - Harokopio University Athens (HUA), Greece
Marianna Stori, Centro di Documentazione sui Conflitti Ambientali, CDCA, Italy
Center for Mineral Technology (CETEM/MCTI), Brazil
Center for Social Studies (CES), Portugal
SOCIUS, Portugal
CETEM, Portugal
Maria Pinzon, CENSAT Agua Viva, Colombia
Natalia Finogenova, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Sub-platform and National Map developments
Following the creation of successful country-level maps in Colombia and Ecuador, EJOLT has had several partnerships and collaborations with universities and civil society groups to create country level inventories and in some cases, sub-platforms in local languages. Here is a selection of some of the initiatives undertaken:
- United States Map & Launch
In June 2014, the map of 40 EJ conflicts in the United States was launched. EJOLT issued a press release that has gone to the press in Europe and the University of Michigan has issued a press release to the U.S. media: http://www.ejolt.org/2014/06/map-of-most-influential-environmental-justice-conflicts-in-the-us-is-released-this-week/
The research was undertaken by 4 Masters students at the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment as part of their thesis work and was co-advised by Prof. Paul Mohai and Prof. Rebecca Hardin. An academic paper is in development and they have received a small grant to continue the work and expand the number of cases, reaching nearly 60 by March 2015.
- Development of Central American Atlas
This has been done in coordination with Fundacion Neotropica of Costa Rica by Grettel Navas, who has a Master’s degree from FLACSO University, Ecuador. She has entered so far 35 cases across the region. Following the initial collaboration, Neotropica has a small new project funded by UNDP to further the work focusing on mining conflicts in Guatemala. The Atlas was publicly presented by Martinez-Alier and Navas on the 11th of February 2015 at the University of Panama. It was transmitted by www.radiotemblor.org an environmental organization.
- Development of Portuguese Atlas
The Portuguese map of conflicts was generated from a literature review and collection of over 2000 documents, within the research project "Portugal: Ambiente em Movimento"- a cooperation between the Ecology and Society Lab of the Center for Social Studies in Coimbra (Ecosoc/CES), the Center for Mineral Technology of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, Brazil (CETEM/MCTI), and the Center for Research in Economic and Organizational Sociology of the University of Lisbon (SOCIUS/ISEG). The data were collected through a public consultation within a pool of Portuguese academics, activists, politicians and environmental specialists. After the data analysis and systematization, a list of almost 130 conflicts was compiled, and 25 cases of environmental conflicts of greater intensity and relevance were selected to be appreciated by the pool of Portuguese experts, asking them to choose the 15 cases that they reputed more relevant.
The Atlas was launched in a public event held on March 25th 2015 in Lisbon with the participation of local stakeholders, collaborators and J. Martinez Alier.
- Development of Italian Sub-Platform
The development of the Italian atlas entailed both the research, provision, development and upload of 22 Italian cases in the international EJATLAS, the coordination and the development of the EJATLAS Italy / Italian EJATLAS platform. This included research, and development through a participative process and the upload of 90 italian cases in the Italian EJATLAS platform: CDCA developed in this last part of the project the Italian EJATLAS, a national version of the international EJATLAS with the active involvement of local committees involved in environmental conflicts in the country. The implementation of such citizens’ participatory tool provides an important result for the potential follow-up of EJOLT in Europe in the medium and long term. This Italian “Atlante” was launched on March 14th, 2015, in Rome.
- Bulgarian Map
Partner Za Zemiata created a separate map in Bulgarian of environmental conflicts and best cases from Bulgaria and all around the world (see at http://map.zazemiata.org). Until now there are nearly 100 cases uploaded. The focus of the map is the transition to best practices and big portion of the international cases are best cases translated from the Ejatlas. The map is open and anyone can add cases. Ejatlas and especially ZZ map were presented at several workshops and university debates in Bulgaria. The ZZ map is on operation since Dec 2014 and was officially launched in March 2015 at the end of the project with press-release and news in the social media.
Two main academic publications to date
- The commodification of nature and socio-environmental resistance in Ecuador: An inventory of accumulation by dispossession cases, 1980–2013 by Sara Latorre, Katharine Farrell and J. Martinez-Alier, Ecological Economics, 2015, 116: 59-69.
- Pérez Rincón M A 2014 Conflictos ambientales en Colombia: inventario, caracterización y análisis, in L. J. Garay ed Minería en Colombia: control público, memoria y justicia socio-ecológica, movimientos sociales y posconflicto Contraloría General de la República, Bogotá 253-325
C) Documentaries, on-line courses, policy briefs and other materials
As planned in the EJOLT DoW, EJOLT has produced or co-produced a number of short documentaries on environmental conflicts that complement our Reports very well. One on the Unist'ot'en blockade in Canada, by Leah Temper, is almost finished but it is not listed here.
1) Grabbing Gambela is a short video documentary about a massive takeover of agricultural lands in the Gambela Region of Ethiopia. Since 2008, the Ethiopian government has signed deals with investors from India, Saudi Arabia, China and other countries for large-scale agricultural projects in the region. The deals give foreign investors control of half of Gambela’s arable land. In this documentary, local people affected by the land deals speak about their experiences. “Grabbing Gambela” is produced by the Anywaa Survival Organisation, EJOLT, and GRAIN.
2) Delhi Waste Wars is a short video documentary directed by Leah Temper and edited by Siobhan McKeown. A battle is brewing in Delhi, India over access and control to garbage. For decades, informal wastepickers and recyclers have turned garbage into cash. They cost the government and taxpayer nothing, yet they significantly reduce the waste sent to already overflowing landfills, improve recycling rates and “cooling the earth” by reducing carbon emissions. But government plans to privatize trash collection have put the livelihoods of the wastepickers under threat. Meanwhile, new plans to build incinerators funded by carbon credits mean the resources the recyclers depend on may soon go up in smoke. This documentary takes a street-eye view, charting the wastepickers´ struggle for their rights and recognition, and gaining a local perspective on how to create a truly sustainable waste management system in one of the world´s biggest and most densely populated cities.
3) Namibia’s Uranium Rush. Marta Conde, ICTA-UAB investigates social movements and resistance to resource extraction – with a special focus on uranium mining expansion in Africa. She recorded this film that comes together with a report on the Radiological impact of the Rössing Rio Tinto Uranium Mine and a Study on Low-level radiation of Rio Tinto’s Rössing Uranium mine workers. As the reports and documentary show, there are reasons for concern. Workers at the mines are dying of illnesses they don’t understand, the water of the Khan River is being polluted in this arid country and the tourism sector could be put in jeopardy if the uranium mining expansion goes ahead. At present, there is not a structured social protest in Namibia regarding the uranium mining expansion with some communities welcoming the mines as they hope for jobs and ‘development’. Several workers from Rössing-Rio Tinto mine have complained about their illnesses and the Toopnar community is worried but the current chief is willing to talk to the mines, trying to bargain as much as possible for its people. The only active challenge to the mines is carried out by Earthlife Namibia and LaRRI, two local NGOs, who voiced some concerns during a 2008 campaign and now again through the EJOLT project reports. Credits go to Nancy Arizpe for two years of careful editing and producing, to CRIIRAD for all the measurements and to Earthlife Namibia and LaRRI for raising the issue.
4) Yasuní, good living, is a video documentary made by Arturo Hortas for EJOLT. This film shows through different lenses the origins and development of the idea of “leaving oil in the soil” (850 million barrels) in one part of the Yasuni National Park in Ecuador. It argues that in this way biodiversity would be preserved, indigenous peoples would be protected, and carbon dioxide emissions would be avoided. Esperanza Martinez of Accion Ecologica and Alberto Acosta, the former minister of Energy who launched the proposal in 2007, are interviewed. President Rafael Correa presents the plan with vigour at a United Nations speech. Local inhabitants in the heart of the Yasuni National Park are interviewed, next to oil spills. Humberto Cholango, the head of CONAIE, shows his support for the proposal and his skepticism about Correa’s motives. The film also shows how Sumak Kawsay, ¨Buen Vivir”, or the concept of The Good Life as well as the rights of Mother Nature, have been formalized in Ecaudor´s constitution. From the jungle where the Waorani reside to the offices of activists and ministers, from Ecuador to New York and Europe, the film elicits many voices that explain and appraise this sensational proposal, undreamed of a few years ago: LEAVE THE OIL IN THE SOIL!
5) Arturo Hortas made another documentary for EJOLT on the case Sarayaku vs. Ecuador. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) ruled in favor of a Kichwa community’s right to consultation prior to oil exploration projects on their land. Sarayaku is an indigenous community located in the province of Pastaza, in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Sarayaku (“River of Maize”) is inhabited by 1,200 people from the Kichwa nationality. They operate a system of direct democracy. In 2002 the company CGC Argentina (Compañía General de Combustibles), accompanied by the Ecuadorian army illegally entered the territory of Sarayaku and buried 1500 Kg of pentolite, explosives used in seismic exploration for oil. The case was brought before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, creating a historical precedent in the defense of indigenous rights. The Constitution and the ILO Convention 169 determined to have prior, free and informed consent of indigenous peoples before starting exploitation. The people from Sarayaku won the case. But as this video will show, the threats to their community are far from over. The documentary was made by Arturo Hortas with the support of the Government of Aragon and EJOLT.
6) We are here to stay! (“Aquí nos vamos a quedar”) is a LaMCA-EJOLT documentary where scholars, activists and people suffering environmental injustices provide their views and testimonies on environmental justice. LaMCA is the environmental conflicts media house from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. This documentary directed by Beatriz Rodriguez Labajos shows small communities from Argentina, Colombia, Kenya, Mexico, the Tibetan plateau, and also big cities in Italy and Colombia. With very different forms of livelihood, the people explain how their everyday realities are threatened or have ceased to exist. In their stories we find common patterns of inequity in the use of local resources, lack of recognition of their viewpoints in decision making, lack of opportunities for participation and, to sum up, the impossibility of living according to their own wishes. This story is given to the backdrop of beautiful scenery, touching music and colorful images. The narrative is divided into four parts: distribution, recognition, participation and capabilities. The documentary considers all such aspects of environmental justice drawing on statements of inhabitants of these communities, and also on words from activists who support them, civil servants and scientists of several countries. Among those interviewed are Robert D. Bullard, Julio Fierro and Tatiana Roa. Next to them, we get to know the unknown faces and names of those who not only endure threats but also confront them, mobilizing collectively and, sometimes, winning battles for environmental justice. In less than half an hour, viewers get a very good sense of what environmental justice is all about.
Online courses
In the EJOLT project three on-line courses on Ecological Economics and Environmental Justice were offered in successive years. Haly Healy (from King's College, London) was in charge delegated by ICTA UAB and SERI together with the cooperation of many other EJOLT partners. About 100 students completed one of the three courses, each of them running for 4 or 5 months. There was a synergy with the EJOLT blog, to which some students offered their entries, and also with entries into the EJAtlas. There was also a one-day presential course at the closing EJOLT event in Brussels in early March 2015. The on-line courses are well established, and there might be a continuation. Fundacion Neotrópica, Costa Rica, collaborated in the third on-line course (2014), and has shown interest in running a Spanish version.
Policy Briefs
Many of the Reports produced as a by-product, a policy-brief meant for policy-makers. We have published 12 well designed policy-briefs (see the EJOLT webpage, under Briefings). In at least one occasion, the Policy-Brief (on ship dismantling) came just in time in the policy-cycle, as the European Commission and Parliament were discussing the issue. Other policy-briefs have had or will have, we hope, delayed effects. Policy Briefs were distributed in Brussels at the final meeting of EJOLT in early March 2015, where there were some EU policy makers.
The Blog
For over three years, the EJOLT webpage published a blog, with news about EJOLT partners and the EJOLT project (new Reports, news about the EJAtlas, announcements of summer schools, on-line courses, jobs), and also about recent environmental conflicts around the world, quite often with mortal victims. We published an average of 10 blog entries per month.
The Glossary
The EJOLT webpage, under Resources, contains a large Glossary of terms from ecological economics, political ecology, environmental justice studies, with their definitions. This has been managed by SERI and used particularly for the on-line courses. It is of course in open access.
D) An internal evaluation
To summarize, we reproduce here Martinez-Alier’s words read at the final internal meeting of the EJOLT consortium in early March 2015 in Brussels, taking stock of what we have achieved so far. This could be seen as an internal evaluation, to be compared to the external evaluation by Professor Jennifer Clapp.
“Many EJOLT members have been engaged in the study and the practice of socio-environmental conflicts and in campaigns for environmental justice for a long time, and we shall continue to be so. Acción Ecológica was engaged in a campaign against Texaco called Amazonía por la Vida by 1990, ERA was fighting Shell in the Delta by 1995 and even before. Alf Hornborg from Lund University wrote in 1998 a crucial article on the theory of ecologically unequal exchange in the journal Ecological Economics. And so, for most of us. GRAIN was active defending peasant agriculture over 25 years ago and introduced the concept of "land grabbing" in 2008. We did not start in 2011 and we shall certainly not finish in 2015. EJOLT has given us some extra money, some extra strength, some new contacts, and some younger recruits for the research and the practice of environmental justice.
This project came into being not because the EC made a research call on studies on environmental justice, I do not think they have yet done this. The call was to support collaborative research on any topic, between academics and civil society (i.e. activists), in a “science-in-society” framework. Such ideas had percolated to the EC research establishment from Andy Stirling and similar authors like Funtowicz and Ravetz we have known for a long time. The coordinators and a few partners were also trained in a previous Science-in-Society project (2008-10), CEECEC, on teaching and learning ecological economics with civil society organizations.
The idea of an environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous (against Ronald Inglehart’s “post-materialist” thesis), or equivalently, as Leah Temper now puts it, the environmentalism of the dispossessed, comes from India and Latin America in the late 1980s. Then, a definition of “ecological distribution conflicts” was published in 1996 by Martin O’Connor and Joan Martinez-Alier, and through Philippe Roman it influenced very much the EJOLT project. The links between the USA movement for environmental justice and against environmental racism and the global movement for environmental justice were mentioned in articles and books already between 1995 and 1997. In EJOLT we have had voluntary collaboration from Prof. Paul Mohai (University of Michigan) whose research work against environmental racism started in the 1980s.
Therefore, in reality the beginning of EJOLT goes back 30 years. And there is no end in sight although financial help will be required to continue, particularly with the EJ Atlas but also to help publish as articles and books many of the collected materials in the Reports, about 25 Reports of various lengths. If from the CEECEC project, 2008-2010, with Hali Healy, we produced a book in 2012, with chapters already from EJOLT, called "Ecological Economics from the Ground Up", now we should perhaps publish a bigger book, “Political Ecology and Environmental Justice from the Ground Up”, apart from many other articles and books which are already coming along.
In EJOLT we had a contribution from the EC that taking off the 7% overhead, amounts to about 3.5 million €. In our work plan, the DoW, we promised to spend a little over one thousand person-months. If we would count in person-years, the EJOLT project has meant about 85 person-years, at an average of about 40.000€ per person year (which includes more than salaries – also social security, travels etc.). We know that there are very different rates depending on whether partners are from rich or poor countries, which is a shame. This aside, how have we spent the 85 person-years? – this is a length of time similar to the whole professional life of a long-lived professor together with one assistant.
The officially reported figures come of course in terms of person-months, by work-packages and by participant organization. But here we want to summarize what we have done, roughly allocating Person-Years to the different large groups of tasks. Of the 85 person-years, we consumed 1 in the book (CEECEC + EJOLT) “Ecological Economics from the Ground Up” (Routledge, 2012), and then about 6 in administration and doing the accounts (mainly at ICTA UAB and also at all organizations).
For the excellent Blog, and for running the two websites (www.ejolt.org www.ejatlas.org) we consumed about another 6 person-years.
For travel and exchanges among ourselves at the six meetings and workshops we had (BCN in April 2011, Rio + 20, Nigeria at Port Harcourt and Abuja which was so instructive, Lund, Rome and the final one in Brussels), i.e. our 6 successful scheduled meetings, about 30 people for 10 days at each meeting including travel time, preparations, some internal trips (as in Brazil)…. This amounts to 6 person-years.
Then for the documentaries (Ethiopia land grabbing, Delhi waste collectors, Sarayaku and Yasuni ITT in Ecuador, Uranium in Namibia, the excellent “Aquí nos vamos a quedar – We are here to say”, and the almost finished documentary on the Unist'ot'en Camp in Canada stopping several pipelines), they have consumed very different amounts of time each, perhaps all together about 6 person-years.
We have run 3 on-line courses on ecological economics and environmental justice, with about 30 students completing each course, which lasts in practice for nearly six months. This has involved many tutors, in summary amounting to about 2 person-years (counting only the coordinator and tutors, not the students).
Up to here, we have counted 27 Person-Years.
Now we come to the Reports, policy briefs and to the articles (and new books) published or in advanced preparation. This is the most important item in EJOLT, it comprises all the Reports in the list of official deliverables, and some extra reports. Beatriz Rodríguez Labajos who painstakingly edited the Reports, and all members who have been involved in writings parts of them, will still discuss further their impact, the plans for further publications. The length of the Reports is variable, between 50 and 220 pages, they are attractively edited. Some of them will easily become books (e.g. the ones on legal issues, from CEDAT and others, which are already published articles; or perhaps the five nuclear Reports, as a single book; or the Reports on Biomass conflicts; or the “transversal” Reports on Valuation or Health). We hope the language will be geared to EJOs. Or they will become published articles. One of them, Report n. 6, on Yasunization and other initiatives to leave oil in the ground, inspired by ERA and Acción Ecológica, is often quoted in Naomi Klein’s 2014 book on climate change that will be so influential at the end of 2015 at the COP in Paris. She also quotes other EJOLT Reports, including the one on carbon trading in Africa.
A byproduct from another Report, n. 18, on one fundamental concept for EJOLT, the Ecological Debt, has been an article by co-author Rikard Warlenius in Global Environmental Change. This article would not exist without Rikard’s industry and intelligence and without the cooperation within EJOLT. This is only one article but there are today already 10 or 12 academic articles published in journals, and there are two special issues in preparation (one in Geoforum on mining conflicts and another one in the Journal of Political Ecology as an outcome of the Lund meeting). There are also some Policy Briefs, as outcomes of the Reports. Much more could and will be said about these materials, their quality and their usefulness. They have still to be fully digested.
Writing and editing 25 Reports, plus Policy Briefs, plus preparing articles for publication, has required an average of 1.5 person-years for each Report, but with much variation depending on the length. This would amount to 36 person-years.
The remaining Person-Years, which would be 22 (which equals 85 - (27+36), we consider have been devoted to the EJAtlas, which on top of this has also enjoyed much cooperation from unpaid collaborators whose time is not included in the present accounts. Preparation of the platform, making some mistakes, preparing and testing the database form, changing the platform (from UC London to Y. C. when he came in) took no less than 2 person-years. Then, in 3 years the EJAtlas has collected, “moderated” and put publicly in the web ejatlas.org nearly 1500 cases, which means 500 per year. Leah Temper and Daniela del Bene have worked full time on EJAtlas. We have established cooperation with outside collaborators. Most other partners have supplied conflict cases for the Atlas: CDCA, Acción Ecológica with OCMAL, ERA, GRAIN, WRM, JNU, CCS Durban, FIOCRUZ, FOCUS from Slovenia, Za Zemiata, BOG in Istanbul, REEDS-UVSQ, Nature Kenya, practically all. The process from cradle through “moderation” to public website implied many people. “Moderation” alone “consumed” two full time well trained people in order to reach 500 new cases per year. We should and will now continue because collaborators are feeding in many cases but we need extra funds. As you know, some geographical areas are under-represented, and this must be corrected to make the EJAtlas credible. Some academic articles will soon appear drawing on the EJAtlas (e.g. country articles on Ecuador by Sara Latorre et al, on Colombia by Mario A. Pérez Rincón, also we hope on Turkey; and thematic articles).
We are developing a new “statistical political ecology”. We have not yet done the correlations we wanted to do between the conflicts and physical or social indicators. Nevertheless, the EJAtlas is a success. A Ph.D. student at the Nelson Centre at the University of Wisconsin (chaired by Paul Robbins, one of the best know political ecologists), Mohammed Rafi Arefin (unknown to us) wrote in a blog on 25th January 2015: “The sheer amount of mapped conflicts is impressive, but what stands out about this tool is the extensive filter and search functionality. Struggles, which are already color coded by toxin or resource, can be parsed at a large level by country, commodity, or company. Once at this level, there are over 50 more filters ranging from mobilizing forms to outcomes. As a preliminary research tool, a teaching aid, or an activist resource, the Environmental Justice Atlas should be of interest to those concerned with environmental justice struggles and innovative ways to make these struggles visible”.
Potential Impact:
We believe that the main objective of the EJOLT project is even more relevant now than it was in 2011, namely, to study and help environmental justice movements because they are a strong force for sustainability. Through our Reports, Policy Briefs, many public presentations, Documentaries, OnLine courses, the EJOLT blog, and the EJAtlas, we undoubtedly have helped to make environmental injustices more visible. In this vein, here we outline some of the main impacts of the project, through a “best practices” approach, i.e. we give some of the best examples to illustrate the impacts of the project.
1) Increased capacity of project members
EJOLT has firstly benefited the members of the network. The academics have enriched their work and capacity through collaboration with non-academic groups and many researchers have expressed that they have learnt to do research in a new way that entails undertaking research more directly guided and led by the input and needs of activists and societal stakeholders and through a participatory manner that entails processes of feedback and reflection between participants.
EJOLT offered some EJOLT academics their first chance to work with CSOs, and the variety of CSO that we called EJOs. This mutual learning will contribute to strengthening the capacity of European researchers to engage in future collaborative, trans-disciplinary research in sustainability sciences with civil society participation.
Case Study Example: CEDAT- URV Experience – New Research Project on Environmental Justice
According to the CEDAT- URV, an academic centre for international environmental law based in Tarragona, Spain, this was the first time that they participated in a Project with civil society groups and this Project has had a transformational impact on how they do research, how they relate to their students and to the scientific development of their work. URV’s participation in this project contributed to significantly broadening the methodology and approaches in the research and teaching activities that it conducts, as reflected in the recently awarded four-year research project in the field of Law, “From Sustainable Development to Environmental Justice: Toward a New Paradigm for Global Governance” 2014-2016, DER2013-44009-P, financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. In addition the team is leading a H2020 proposal under call INT-03-2015, which is meant to continue some aspects of the EJOLT project with the collaboration of some of the EJOLT partners.
The abstract of the new Project DER2013-44009-P is as follows. Concepts and theories from EJOLT are clearly demonstrated.
Based on the political, economic and moral beliefs of Western modernity, the international legal order is the institutional matrix for the global social metabolism, which presents two fundamental problems. For one, it favours the unequal exchange of resources and an inequitable distribution of the negative effects on the environment as characteristic features of the social metabolism in an advanced stage of capitalist accumulation (environmental justice). In addition, it does not take at all into account the finite and vulnerable nature of resources, hence creating obvious risks of (eco)systemic collapse and wanton destruction of natural heritage. In this sense, having provided a paradigm for international (and domestic) environmental law since the 1980s, the notion of sustainable development has revealed itself as insufficient to address the two major present challenges in the relationship between society and nature. In fact, recent development such as the concept of green economy may be regarded as a step back. Coming from the periphery of the global economy, the idea of environmental justice has emerged as a conceptual matrix for imagining an alternative setting to the current status quo. Such an alternative would be based on a global governance system build on different premises. These imply the vindication the ideas of human emancipation that are inherent to constitutionalism, the finiteness and vulnerability of natural resources, as well as the accountability that humankind for its economic and technological development. Moreover, research patterns have emerged in the fields of economics and sociology that reveal significant imbalances between the centre and the periphery of the world economy in terms of unequal ecological exchange. The current system of international relations and international law contribute to these imbalances, thus highlighting the need for theoretical underpinnings for alternative conceptual matrices. The project aims to take on this challenge, focusing on the feasibility of reconceptualising global governance in terms of pluralism and constitutionalism, based on the central notion of environmental justice. On this basis, it intends to elucidate the applicability of constitutionalist notions such as ‘checks-and-balances’ to the power struggles in the contemporary world. Therefore, it will focus on relevant areas in which the lack of justice casts shadow over the hegemonic discourse on sustainable development and its role in international law. The project seeks to identify theoretical elements and legal instruments that may contribute to fostering change in the role of states in the global society, as a first step towards more specific proposals for reconceptualising global governance based on the premises of social and environmental sustainability.
2) Conceptual and Theoretical Development
Through the co-production of knowledge and joint theoretical development between activists and academics, EJOLT contributed significantly to advancing the inter-disciplinary field of environmental justice, specifically in the thematic and transversal areas covered but the project has also touched on unplanned fields at the outset such as the Political Ecology of water, Science and Technology studies and Conservation Biology.
Best Practice Example: Co-production of knowledge on Ecological Debt and Unequal Ecological Exchange
WP 10 has addressed several illusions at the foundation of the current economic world view. These include: the illusion that market prices by definition are equal and fair (the cultural representation of unequal exchange as reciprocal); the illusion that poorer nations should be grateful for wealthier nations’ consumption of their inexpensive labor and natural resources (‘the White Consumer’s burden’); and the illusion that the technological capacity of a given population is independent of that population’s position in a global system of resource flows (‘technological fetishism’). These illusions lead to a discourse on sustainable development that assumes consensus: thus, power, conflicts of interest, unequal distribution, and environmental injustices are rarely identified as scientific problems in need of analysis and research. When such questions of global ecological distribution are addressed within mainstream economics, their treatment often exposes profound moral flaws in currently hegemonic thinking, as illustrated by the infamous ‘Lawrence Summers memo.’
As the concepts of ‘ecologically unequal trade (or exchange)’ and ‘ecological debt’ are highly contested, an important aspect of the work of WP 10 has been to sharpen the analytical definitions of these concepts. In terms of this analytical work, progress has been made in distinguishing concepts of economic value from biophysical metrics commonly referred to in theories of unequal exchange. A conclusion is that materialist theories of value, such as labor and energy theories of value, tend to confuse the economical and the physical. The increase in economic value in a production process certainly entails a decrease of physical, productive potential, as Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen observed, but it is misleading to reduce the added economic value to the investment of a specified quantity of labor or energy. The notion of ‘use value’ commonly thought to be ‘underpaid’ on the market (i.e. the discrepancy between ‘use value’ and exchange value) is a misnomer, since it confuses biophysical quantities with (culturally constituted) consumer demand. Ecologically unequal exchange should be conceptualized as asymmetric transfers of embodied biophysical resources, and is generally reproduced by a disproportionality between the amount of resources embodied in commodities and their relative exchange values, but those embodied resources should not be defined as ‘use values’. The implications of these analytical clarifications are spelled out in several publications. In terms of policy, they imply that simply raising market prices of embodied resources will not make exchange ‘equal’ – because money cannot compensate for entropy – but it could discourage unequal exchange. Similarly, an ‘ecological debt’ cannot be compensated (in material terms) with money, but it can be prevented from increasing.
3) Capacity Building of Activists
For their part, activists have also benefited from their participation in EJOLT, with some differences depending on their individual capacities and needs. The conceptual development within the project and the tools are input to their work, beyond this, we have seen how scientists knowledge has been mobilized for activist purposes as described by Marta Conde, in an article published in 2015 in the journal Ecological Economics.
Case Study Example: Building Capacity on Uranium Mining in Namibia
Through two reports and a documentary, the EJOLT team working on nuclear energy shed light on the dangers of uranium mining in Namibia. Two NGOs in Namibia (Earthlife Namibia and LaRRI), a Brazilian university (FIOCRUZ), a French independent laboratory specialised in radiation (CRIIRAD) and team coordinator Marta Conde (UAB) partnered to produce this remarkable set of action oriented resources. After a public event on the 10th April 2014 in London – together with other activists from Madagascar, Papua New Guinea and the US who are also impacted by the activities of Rio Tinto – an article appeared in The Guardian. This event was organised prior to the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of Rio Tinto that took place on the 15th April 2014. In the AGM, Roger Moody from PARTIZANS presented the results of the study carried out by Earthlife and LaRRI on the impact of uranium mining on workers.
The study was based on 45 interviews with workers and ex-workers of Rössing. 39 of them have complained of health problems. Most workers stated they are not informed about their health conditions and generally don’t know whether they have been exposed to radiation or not. Some workers consult a private doctor to get a second opinion – that, however, is a measure that most workers cannot afford. Following the study published on the impact of low level radiation on mine worker health workers were empowered to demand compensation
EARTHLIFE Namibia and CRIIRAD(Commission for Independent Research and Information about Radiation) also organized visits and measurements in areas located in the vicinity of uranium mines in Namibia, especially Rössing. The CRIIRAD team (Christian Courbon and Bruno Chareyron) also conducted training activities and lectures about Radioprotection issues and the impact of uranium mining. The lectures took place in Windhoek and Swakopmund between September and October 2011. In the course of an on site mission carried out between September 22th and October 2nd 2011, scientists from the CRIIRAD laboratory took radiation measurements in situ, and collected 14 samples of top soil, 13 samples of surface sediments of the Swakop, Gawib and Khan rivers and 11 underground water samples in the alluvium of Swakop, and Khan rivers and tap water from Arandis city. Solid samples have been analysed at the CRIIRAD laboratory in France and water samples have been monitored. The CRIIRAD laboratory accuracy in radiation monitoring is acknowledged by the French Nuclear Safety Authority.
The preliminary findings – submitted to the National Radiation Protection Authority – should give reason for concern about uranium mining in Namibia. The dose rate measured by CRIIRAD on the parking of Rössing mine is about 6 times above natural background value. The finest fraction of the radioactive rocks is washed down by rain water and contaminates the sediments of the Khan river: with values 10 times above those measured in sediments collected in Khan river upstream Rössing mine.
During a meeting on 11 March 2015 called by Rossing, Earthlife and LaRRI were informed by the MD of Rossing, that Rio Tinto will soon conduct an epidemiology study on the mine workers based on the historical medical records of Rossing. This was decided because of the many “rumors” on deteriorating health conditions of miners. It is evident that this long overdue action by Rossing was triggered off by the study done by Earthlife and LaRRI.
The process in Namibia (and similar initiatives undertaken within the Project in Brazil and Malawi not described here) has been termed by Marta Conde in an article in Ecological Economics as a process of “Activism Mobilizing Science”. According to Earthlife, through EJOLT, their members gained substantial knowledge through the project, especially in the field of the nuclear industry and the energy sector in general. Subcontractors familiarized themselves with the topic. Multinational companies and managers of local uranium mines are alerted and recognize Earthlife’s role as watchdog better than ever before, especially after scientific sound data achieved with the invaluable assistance by CRIIRAD were published and discussed with relevant authorities and mine management. Potential miners have a better knowledge about the risks they are exposed to as workers in uranium mines and can make an informed decision. The Namibian public at large is more aware of the impacts caused by uranium mining.
4) Advisory support: an important indirect outcome
Best practice example. Among the connections that has been build or reinforced thanks to WP9, we can quote the collaboration developed between the team of
the Chevron-Texaco case lawyer Pablo Fajardo and the team of the Procurator Antonio Gustavo Gomez from Tucuman, Argentina. The collaboration has led to the
presentation of the demand in October 2014 at the International Criminal Court against Chevron Texaco CEO filled in by Pablo Fajardo and Eduardo Bernabé Toledo, who had met previously during EJOLT WP9 week of activities in Rome in November 2013. See Ejolt blog post and the complaint.
5) Training within EJOLT: Courses, interns and pedagogical uses
One of the most important impacts of the EJOLT project includes the direct training given –3 online courses, the workshops and the presencial course.About 100 students from all over the world participated and completed the yearly online EJOLT courses. Another 30 participated in the final presencial course in Brussels. The pedagogical tools created by the project, including the EJAtlas, the glossary, the policy-briefs, the blog entries, the factsheets and the Reports and published articles have been widely used by a much larger audience.
As envisioned at the beginning of the project the CEECEC course that had been run in 2009-10 was further developed and restructured towards the needs and interests of EJOs. A joint CEECEC-EJOLT textbook ("Ecological Economics from the Ground Up") was edited by Hali Healey et al, and published by Routledge, London in late 2012. A main project objective to build a solid and reliable platform as an information and learning resource for both EJOs and otherswas fully achieved. Within the project 23 Reports were produced, providing detailed insights into the various EJOLT topics and cross cutting issues from a theoretical perspective as well as practical examples. Some Fact Sheets in the EJOLT website allow an easy insights into conflict cases from all over the world as a supplement to the 1500 cases in EJAtlas. The 12 Policy Briefings link EJOLT issues to policy debates and formulate policy recommendations. The Glossary finally provides easy accessible condensed definitions and sources for further reading on relevant EJ terms and approaches.
The training materials co-developed by researchers and EJOs have been used directly as course materials by academic EJOLT partners. For example, in doctoral summer schools in political ecology, in online MOOCs and in multiple classes. Teaching lessons based on the EJAtlas and case studies are being developed for use in high schools and university, benefiting environmental pedadgogy.
Numerous early stage researchers acquainted with the work have been inspired to conduct further research along these lines. At least five official internships and research collaborations with Masters and Doctoral students were engaged in and of these many have been able to leverage their experience for career and personal advancement. Several doctoral and masters theses and academic articles have and will continue to be achieved with EJOLT support.
Best Practice: The EJatlas as a pedagogical tool
Based on the results of a survey administered on ejatlas.org the importance of the tool for teachers and students is clearly demonstrated. Students and teachers using the atlas for their work included those working in the following fields and areas: Political Science, Management, International Studies and Diplomacy, Geo-science, Environmental Sciences, Biodiversity Conservation, Water Resources Management and Policies, veterinany studies, community rights, human ecology, indigenous rights, human rights, geography, GIS and Mapping studies, ecosystem management, industrial ecology, environmental law, History and philosophy of ecology, environmental philosophy, environmental ethics, political ecology, corporate social responsibility, energy and natural resource studies, among others.
Students and other academic users represent approximately 50% of the 1,000+ users who access the EJAtlas daily. According to the survey they use the atlas for displaying for presentations or teaching and also as a reference for research. Further, almost 25% of users found about the atlas through an academic institution or publication, demonstrating its wide use ranging from high school through to university, as well as in less formal learning settings.
6) Sharing of best practices
EJOLT aimed to document best practices methods in (economic and multi-criteria) valuation and assessment of environmental liabilities, sometimes based on court cases, and by publishing these findings in reports to help enable a wide range of external EJOs and other CSOs to uptake these methodologies, and to apply EJOLT findings to their own work. Another expected impact was increased legal capacity and ability to undertake legal court cases. This entailed manuals and guidelines on legal strategies.
Best Practice: Two reports on Best practices in Valuation and Legal Strategies.
Case study: Ejolt report 16: Economic tools for evaluating liabilities in environmental justice struggles. The EJOLT experience
There was a demand from partner EJOLT for clarification on the use of Cost Benefit Analysis (that had been used successfully in the defence of the Tana Delta by Nature Kenya) and Multi-Criteria Analysis (which was being deployed by academics in Ecuador in the case of the Yasuni ITT initiative). In workshops and reports, questions were elucidated. Outcomes suggest that methods are more effectively used through carefully planned interventions supporting debates on local futures and visions, and when there are complementarities with regulatory and institutional developments. Oppositely, evaluation methods disable local mobilization when they force communities to bring their concerns into assessment schemes that do not fit their own languages and concerns, when they reproduce uneven power relations, or where public decisions have little to do with formulating and advancing ‘reasoned arguments’. Insights on the benefits from science-activism collaboration and recommendations on the use of evaluation tools are finally outlined.
A legal guide for communities seeking environmental justice: EJOLT Report 17
The manual provides information on who can fill a lawsuit/action before a Court or institutional bodies, how it needs to be done and links to contacts and models of demands. It is composed of 3 main parts. The first part includes information regarding civil law tools at international, regional and transnational levels. The second part is about international, regional and national criminal tools and bodies. The last part provides information on the defence of environment defenders and other instruments and strategic views based on good practices. The manual also provides information on key concepts, guidance and practical examples on lessons learned from past legal experiences.The manual translates information that is often considered as ‘too difficult’ into a language that is easy to understand and provides basic information for EJOs on how to defend criminalised or threatened environmental justice defenders.
7) Impacts on Policy and Corporate actors
EJOLT published 12 Policy Briefs throughout the project-life. Based from Reports, these briefings aimed to guide or to influence policy decisions related to environmental governance in the EU. EJOLT briefings were given to MEPs while several other events were held with the participation of policy makers. For example the final workshop of the project was held in Brussels in early March 2015, and invited policymakers from the European Union to attend. The Italian EJAtlas was also presented at an event in the European Parliament. On 26 March 2014, an EJOLT delegation (including University of Michigan members, who helped in entering cases in the EJAtlas) visited the headquarters of the European Environment Agency (EEA) in Copenhagen. David Stanners rounded up the debate by sending the EJOLT team home with some questions: “We want to know what is needed for environmental justice. Which existing EU laws can be used, which court cases should we refer to and what are the barriers for making the Aarhus convention effective?”
A few policy-briefs (as explained below) coincided in time with events in the policy-cycle in Brussels that made them more relevant.This is the list of Policy Briefs:
• An overview of industrial tree plantations in the global South: Recommendations for policy makers (EJOLT Briefing 001)
• Shipbreaking: European waste disposal causing conflicts (EJOLT Briefing 002)
• Mining conflicts around the world: the environmental justice perspective (EJOLT Briefing 003)
• Multicriteria evaluation for enhanced Environmental Justice (EJOLT Briefing 004)
• Unburnable Fuels (EJOLT Briefing 005)
• Digging for dirty oil (EJOLT Briefing 006)
• Make human rights truly universal (EJOLT Briefing 007)
• Living beyond our means (EJOLT Briefing 008)
• Use economic tools effectively for evaluating liabilities in environmental justice struggles (EJOLT Briefing 9)
• Expanding Nuclear Power Generation in Eastern Europe (EJOLT Briefing 10)
• Uranium mining. Unveiling the impacts of the nuclear industry (EJOLT Briefing 11)
• A legal guide for communities seeking environmental justice (EJOLT Briefing 12)
Best Practice: EJOLT Policy Brief on Shipbreaking
Our briefing paper with policy recommendations on shipbreaking was used in September 2012 – where policymakers from all over the world were discussing matters related to the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal. EU policymakers involved in the issue of shipbreaking were urged by a specialised NGO – Shipbreaking Platform – to stop the environmental injustices that are a result of the current legal framework and would continue to arise if the European Parliament would adopt the commission proposal made in March 2012. While the Shipbreaking Platform worked hard on dismantling the legality of the current proposal, we contributed by putting some specific case studies (in Alang, Gujarat, India) in their proper environmental justice context – showing the lack of consistency, respect and justice when it comes to dumping the ships we use. This policy briefing sums up what the problem with shipbreaking is, what the EU is doing wrong and what policymakers can actually change.
Best Practice on Corporate Actors: BHR Company response mechanism
EJOLT partner Business and Human Rights (BHR) has been the primary point of contact with external corporate actors. The BHR Resource Centre seeks company responses to allegations of misconduct and publishes these on its website and in the Weekly Updates newsletter. Since launching this service in 2005, they have invited hundreds of companies to respond to allegations; over 75% have responded. The Updates provide an impartial space in which allegations, company responses, and follow-ups to those responses are published alongside one another, helping people to see both sides of the coin and thus get closer to the truth, and encouraging change on the ground. Moreover, the Updates now reach many thousands of opinion leaders worldwide. The BHR response process has sometimes led to immediate positive changes in company policy or practice, in others, to dialogue between the company and those who raised the concerns. In all cases it has increased transparency, enhanced public accountability, and provided information to sectors that use their own means to address company abuses: NGOs, governments, the UN, procurement officers, investors, consumers.
8) Dissemination to the Public at Large
The project may be considered to have had a significant impact on public opinion and awareness. The objective of WP12 was to achieve the widest possible dissemination of project results among external CSOs and EJOs, researchers,policy-makers and the general public. Nick Meynen (EEB) has been crucial to this effort.
Over 200.000 different web users have opened nearly 500.000 pages on www.ejolt.org. The top 12 countries with the highest number of visitors (US, UK, Spain, Canada, India, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Australia, South Africa and Brazil) contain countries from all six continents, showing the global reach of EJOLT. The ECAS database contains the details of approximately 900 dissemination entries, from workshops to articles and presentations to posters. Both scientific and wider audiences were well approached through articles, speeches, social media, TV and radio reports, videos and podcasts. In addition policy makers and journalists were specifically targeted in selected events. EJOLT Documentary videos were shown as teaching tools, in environmental film festivals, world social forums, COPs, and a wide array of other events. Some of the Repots have been widely quoted. This activity is continuing after the end of the project – e.g. in April 2015, the EJAtlas was presented by EJOLT coordinator at the China Agricultural University, Beijing.
The launch of the Atlas was a huge success. Over 130 media in 21 countries with a combined audience of at least 150 million covered the launch in March 2014. Total number of visitors to ejatlas.org are over 400,000 visitors opening almost a million pages in only slightly over a year of being online. EJOLT appeared in TIME magazine (when some EJOLT members met the Pope in Rome in November 2013), several times in The Guardian and many EJOLT resources were quoted in Naomi Klein’s groundbreaking book ‘This Changes Everything. Capitalism vs The Climate’. EJOLT team members and collaborators produced at least ten peer reviewed publications drawing from project results, while several more are pending.
Best Practice: EJOLT in the Media
In countries with ample inventories in the EJAtlas and strong involvement of local groups like Colombia and Italy, the EJAtlas was used as an instrument for bringing many groups together to collaborate on a joint effort reached the front pages of national newspapers, with potential policy impacts. Here are some selections from some of the press coverage about EJOLT and EJatlas
From India, the Live Mint of the Wall Street Journal noted that the Atlas shows how human rights scrutiny of business is increasing. “The Indian and global lists are far from comprehensive, but the information is scalable and can quickly incorporate data and critical perspectives. It’s a list that cannot be wished away by the government’s blocking of such websites, or accusations that it’s a conspiracy of Maoist rebels, of “pseudo-intellectuals” or “pseudo-secularists”…. Unless India adopts the don’t-give-a-damn approach of China, in the game of public relations truth-or-dare there is nowhere for India to cut and run. The increasing globalization of social networking, activism and accountability makes it so….. Those who manufacture spin about protests and environmental clearances being the main hold-up for businesses and economic growth in India, not massive and deliberate administrative ineptitude, impractical policies, populist fiscal payouts and rivers of corruption that flow as quick in dry summer months as they do at monsoonal spate, would need to take note. Human rights scrutiny of business is increasing. Deal with it.”
Science Magazine covered the map, noting that of the 915 conflicts listed at the time (amcth 2014) 271 involve local scientists and professionals, and 17% are described as environmental victories. Perhaps our best coverage has been from Colombia where top newspapers such as El Tiempo , La Semana and El Espectador have carried pages full of information on the EJOLT Atlas, compiled by Dr. Mario A. Perez Rincon and his collaborators at CINARA and Universidad del Valle, Cali.
In an article in El Espectador, Carlos Andrés Baquero showed the incidence of environmental conflicts in areas inhabited by indigenous and Afro-Colombian minorities. Using data from the EJAtlas, he shows that of the 72 cases already uploaded for Colombia, in 42 there was involvement of such ethnic minorities, a proportion much higher than in the population as a whole. Such statistics will become of interest, we feel, to UN Rapporteurs.
Finally the EJatlas has recently been written about twice in the Guardian. EJatlas Coordinator Leah Temper wrote about the Atlas on March 3, 2015 under the heading: Mapping the Global Battle to Protect the Planet. In the article she explains that “While statistics on strike action have been collected since the late 19th century for many countries and now globally by the International Labour Organisation, there is no one body that tracks the occurrence and frequency of mobilisations and protests related to the environment. It was this need to better understand and to track such contentious activity that motivated the Atlas of Environmental Justice project, an online interactive map that catalogues localised stories of resistance against damaging projects: from toxic waste sites to oil refining operations to areas of deforestation.” The article was shared over 1,000 times from the website and hundreds of thousands of times via social media. The Guardian later followed up on this article with another written by staff writer Jonathan Watts entitled: No battle can be fought without a map, the autor writes: “This is a positive step forward and hopefully only the start. I’d like to see a global environmental map that allows people across the world to post images and stories of dump sites, chemical spills, cancer clusters, deforestation and major sources of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It should be searchable, filterable and have a Wikipedia-like system of verification. This could be a very useful tool for policymakers and activists, as well as reminding the rest of us what we are doing to our planet.Environmental conflict is only likely to grow as populations increase, resources become scarcer and climate change takes its toll. Mitigating or fighting these problems will require a greater understanding of where they originate. No such battle can be fought without a map.”
9) Creating a network dedicated to Environmental Justice.
EJATLAS has proven to be an invaluable resource to users both within and beyond the academic community. Beneficiaries include civil society groups, local communities, policy-makers, students, the academic community, journalists, the case study communities, the public at large and all those who have a stake in Environmental Justice. EJOLT has significantly strengthened the networking among project members themselves and acts as an important platform for networking among all those committed to Environmental Justice activism and research. For example, according to a survey conducted on ejatlas.org over 17% of users make use of the atlas for networking.
Best Practice: The EJatlas Extended Community
Up to April 2015, there have been over 200 contributors both individuals and groups, from all over the world, including 70 different academic institutions and many individual activists and groups, of which at least 50 have contributed with more than 5 cases. Institutional collaborations include those with the University of Michigan and the research group of prof. Paul Mohai and Rebecca Hardin, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Oxford University (Human Geography of China), FLACSO Ecuador, Center for Social Studies in Portugal, among others. Requests for using or analysing data have come from policy-making agencies (like UN ECLAC), Asian Development Bank, the International Organization for Migration and numerous researchers.
The EJATLAS has also provided an outlet for discriminated groups to make their claims and learn from others. In the past it has brought cases to the attention of the office of the Aarhus Convention for example.The development of Featured maps as campaign tools as has been done with Friends of the Earth Europe on a featured map on Fracking that included conflicts and geo-spatial data such as one on water stressed regions and a map with GRAIN on Seed Laws. Other collaborations include with the End Ecocide Campaign, the Stop Corporate Impunity campaign, Friends of the Earth Australia, Yes to Life No To Mining, the Global Alliance Against Incineration, World Movement of Fisher-peoples, OilWatch, Latin American Observatory of Mining Conflicts, Via Campesina and others.
Sub-Platforms and Country Maps
Best Practice: The Italian Atlas in the European Parliament
The Italian Atlas has been developed as a national focus from the international atlas. Coordinated by the research team of CDCA, the full platform has been translated to Italian to ease its access and use at national level. The Italian Atlas is an open, georeferenced Web Platform built by a interdisciplinary team composed of researchers, journalists, activists and territorial committees. It gathers information on the major Environmental conflicts in Italy. From Vajont to Casal Monferrato, from Taranto to Brescia, from the “Terra dei Fuochi” to Susa Valley, from the oil exploitation area to the coal-fired power plants, from Industrial districts to agroindustry areas, from the mega-infrastructures to waste management. The Atlas of the Italian environmental emergencies also gathers the experiences of active citizenship in defence of local territories and right to health.
http://cdca.it/en/events/event/presentazione-dellatlante-italiano-dei-conflitti-ambientali-al-parlamento-europeo
On Tuesday 14th April 2015 at 15.30 pm the Documentation Centre on Environmental Conflicts (CDCA) in partnership with the association A Sud presented the Italian Atlas on Environmental Conflicts to the European Parliament. Representatives of the following local committees involved in the Atlas development participated in the public event and debate, among them:
Coordinamento Nazionale No Triv (National coordination against oil extractions) | Local committees against oil extractions: No Triv Abruzzo | No Triv Irpinia (Campania) | No Triv Calabria | No Triv-No Eni Gela (against oil extractions and petrochemical plants, Sicily) | No Elettrodotto Villanova-Gissi (against a power line project, Abruzzo) | No Muos Niscemi (Committee against Mobile User Objective System, Sicily) |Laboratorio Aprile Acerra (Local committee against incinerator, Campania) | Stop Biocidio Campania(network for environment and health) | Forum ambientalista Calabria (network of environmental committees) | Comitato regionale Calabria No discariche No inceneritori (against waste dump and incinerator) | Comitato Legamjonici – Taranto (against industrial contamination, Puglia) | Rete salute-ambiente Salerno (network for environment and health, Campania) | Comitato No Inceneritore Salerno(against an incinerator, Campania) | Coordinamento interregionale Abruzzo-Marche No Tubo (interregional network against a pipeline project) | No centrale del Mercure (against a biomass central for energy production) | No elettrodotto Calabria (against power line) | Brindisi bene comune (against industrial pollution).
After the presentation of the Atlas, A Sud, CDCA and the representatives of the committees met various MEPs members of the ENVI – Commission for environment, public health and food safety.
In conclusion, EJOLT has achieved and in many cases exceeded these strategic objectives and has had a considerable impact including upon project members and their institutions, the academic and scholarly community, to the work of civil society and social movement groups and in the wider public. Many other impacts will be felt of course after the end of the project in 2015.
Moreover, as public engagement with the project and a recent survey administered on the project website demonstrate, project results and outputs have reached different actors – from government workers, to students to activists to concerned citizens far beyond Europe and the project can be considered to have an impact globally.
Evidence of societal impact was strong according to the Project External Evaluator who notes that it may yet still be too soon to know the full societal impact of the project.
According to her interview of participants, over 70% of the participants judge the societal impact of the project to fall within either the significant category (easy to cite three or more examples of societal impact – 33.3%) or in the strong impact category (easy to cite at least two areas of impact 39.4%). In terms of the broad reflections on societal impact, many participants noted the deepening and broadening of research around themes of environmental justice and conflict.
List of Websites:
www.ejolt.org
www.ejatlas.org
The EJOLT project brought together a consortium of activist and academic organizations across a range of fields to promote mutual learning among stakeholders who researched or used sustainability sciences, particularly on aspects of ecological distribution.EJOLT's starting question was, is there a Global Movement for Environmental Justice that (together with appropriate technologies and public policies) is helping to push society and economy towards environmental sustainability? How could we support research showing the many facets of this Global Movement for Environmental Justice born of resistance to the damages caused by the increased social metabolism? We opted for a methodology of mutual teaching and learning between activists and academics. EJOLT (2011-15) was a project that through six workshops (in different countries) and other activities, supported collaborative or cooperative research between 23 academic organizations, think tanks and activist EJOs from 20 different countries. It was coordinated by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA UAB). It aimed to collect cases of environmental conflict, corresponding to resource extraction and waste disposal in many countries, as part of WP2, the objective of which was to create an Environmental Justice Atlas. This inventory has reached 1500 cases in 2015. The EJATLAS is an online interactive map that catalogues localized stories of resistance against damaging projects, from mining to oil extraction to plantation forestry. It allows searching and filtering across 100 fields, including information on commodities and actors, forms of mobilization, outcomes and sources. The database has been carefully crafted by a team of over 100 scientists and activists all over the world. It is a reference for scientists, journalists, teachers and activists, and a virtual space for information, networking and knowledge sharing among activists, communities and concerned citizens. The EJATLAS highlights the structural impacts of economic activities on the most vulnerable populations and has fostered increased understanding of the material determinants of conflicts within a global context. What is now needed is expansion (more even coverage, thematically and geographically) and analysis (e.g. of the 18% of cases classified as "successes" of EJ often leading to alternatives).
Apart from the EJAtlas, 23 reports (of between 60 and 220 pages), one textbook and 15 main scientific papers have been published related to the thematic work packages, nuclear energy (WP3), oil, gas and climate justice (WP4), biomass and land conflicts (WP5), mining, shipbreaking and other industrial waste (WP6), and also to the 'transversal' WPs on environmental health and risk (WP7), liabilities and valuation (WP8), law and institutions (WP9), consumption, ecologically unequal trade and ecological debt (WP10). A thematic objective was added, with publications on the Political Ecology of Water Conflicts. Some of the Reports are very directly focused on the needs of EJOs, with titles such as Legal tools for EJOs and Economic valuation tools for EJOs (including multi-criteria assessments). One Report published in 2013 that was very well received was on Yasunization, Ogonization and other initiatives to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Some reports have been published also in languages other than English (e.g. on "Tree Plantations are not Forests"). Main contributions have been one article on the Ecological Debt in the journal Global Environmental Change, an article on The Vocabulary of Environmental Justice in the J. of Political Ecology, a forthcoming special issue also in JPE on Ecologically Unequal Exchange, and a forthcoming special issue on resistance to mining in Geoforum.
Two other important WPs were training and policy advice (WP11) and dissemination (WP12). This was carried out by public events, talks, presence at academic conferences but also at civil society events, and 5 Documentary films, 12 Policy Briefs and 3 on line courses with a total of about 100 students. A Glossary was updated and increased. The EJOLT blog carried an average of 10 entries per month from 2011 to 2015. Apart from the EJOLT website, www.ejolt,org a new website was created for the EJAtlas, www.ejatlas.org
Project Context and Objectives:
EJOLT (Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities and Trade) 2011-15 is a project that supports collaborative or cooperative research between 23 academic organizations, think-tanks and activist organizations (EJOs). It is coordinated by ICTA-UAB (Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona). It aims to collect cases of environmental conflict (resource extraction and waste disposal) in many countries (WP2), and to publish an inventory and Atlas of environmental injustices and conflicts related to Nuclear Energy WP3; Oil, Gas and Climate Justice WP4; Biomass and Land Conflicts WP5; Mining and Shipbreaking (and other industrial waste) WP6. The “transversal” work packages are on Environmental Health and Risk (WP7), Liabilities and Valuation (WP8), Law and Institutions (WP9), and Consumption, Ecologically Unequal Trade and Ecological Debt (WP10).
EJOLT brings together a consortium of international actors across a range of fields to promote collaboration and mutual learning among stakeholders who research or use Sustainability Sciences, particularly on aspects of Ecological Distribution. One main goal is to empower civil society organizations (CSOs) active in Environmental Justice issues (the EJOs), and the communities they support that receive an unfair share of environmental burdens to defend or reclaim their rights. This is done through a process of two-way knowledge transfer, encouraging Participatory Action Research and the transfer of methodologies with which Environmental Justice Organizations, communities and citizen movements can monitor and describe the state of their environment, and document its degradation, learning from other experiences and from academic research how to argue in order to avoid the growth of environmental liabilities or ecological debts. Economic and legal perspectives are very much included. Thus EJOLT increases EJOs’ capacity in using scientific concepts and methods for the description and quantification of environmental and health impacts, increasing their knowledge of environmental risks and of legal mechanisms of redress. On the other hand, EJOLT greatly enriches research in the Sustainability Sciences through mobilising the accumulated “activist knowledge” of the EJOs and making it available to the sustainability research community. Finally, EJOLT helps to translate the findings of this mutual learning process into published reports and scientific papers, and also into the policy arena by means of policy briefs. Dissemination objectives are also achieved by Documentary films and Online courses.
The main objective of the EJOLT project has been therefore to support research on environmental conflicts and environmental justice. The idea behind it, is that there is a growing global movement for environmental justice, which is a main force for moving the economy and society towards sustainability (together with changes in technologies, environmental public policies and other forces). We focus on the proposals and actions of civil society organizations that we call EJOs, environmental justice organizations.The EJOLT project brought together 23 partners from 20 different countries in four continents, of which about half were EJOs and the rest academic groups or think tanks. One main research technique was workshops, of which we held six, in different countries, bringing together the knowledge of EJOLT partners as activists and academics, and other invited participants.
The EJOLT project has had in the period 2011-15 several kinds of results that have fulfilled the objectives, and in some cases have gone beyond the initial objectives. First, the Reports (about 25 reports, all the scheduled ones in the DoW plus a few other ones). Second, some Documentary films. Third, the Policy Briefs. Fourth, the three online courses. Fifth, the Environmental Justice Atlas, which at the end of the project had collected about 1500 environmental conflicts worldwide, and will continue beyond the project. Sixth, the published academic articles and forthcoming books, coming from the Reports or from the EJAtlas. Seventh. the EJOLT blog, with about ten entries per month between 2011 and 2015. All the materials produced are available at two websites, www.ejolt.or and www.ejatlas.org and most publications are in open access, as foreseen in the initial objectives.
The 23 Reports fall into the following general categories, fitting with the different WP:
1. Studies on the Ecological Debt, including the Climate Debt.
2. Studies on Ecologically Unequal Trade
3. "Activist Mobilising Science" in uranium mining and gold mining - case studies
4. The Vocabulary of Environmental Justice
5. "Unburnable Fuels": Ogonization and Yasunization
6. Valuation and Liabilities: approaches from Ecological Economics and International Law
7. Studies on Waste Disposal
8.- Resistance to Mining
9.- Biomass Conflicts, Land Grabbing
10. Health Risks
11. Water Conflicts and Water Justice (a new objective, nor foreseen initially).
The Documentary films have been on Land Grabbing in Ethiopia; Delhi Wastepickers; Thee Yasuni ITT initiative and the Sarayaku cases in Ecuador; "Aquí nos vamos a quedar" (We are here to stay) on environmental conflicts in Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Tibet, Italy, Kenya; a forthcoming film on the Unist'ot'en blockade in Canada.
The objectives included producing Policy Briefs, doing OnLine Courses, and finally publishing some academic publications, all of which has been achieved.
The EJAtlas required to develop a Database Form (based on a commodity approach) and have a suitable platform. At the end of the project in 2015, we have nearly 1500 conflict cases. We have a new objective, to collect more cases, aiming at thematic and geographical even coverage. Nobody had ever constituted such a data base for the study of environmental conflicts. Multivariate analysis and other methods (superposition of maps, with physical indicators on extraction of material flows, population density...) will be applied later. There are already published articles on the large inventories of cases for Ecuador and Colombia. We call this "statistical political ecology". An outside, unsolicited opinion from the Nelson Centre on Political Ecology of the University of Wisconsin, stated: "“The sheer amount of mapped conflicts is impressive, but what stands out about this tool is the extensive filter and search functionality. Struggles, which are already color coded by toxin or resource, can be parsed at a large level by country, commodity, or company. Once at this level, there are over 50 more filters ranging from mobilizing forms to outcomes. As a preliminary research tool, a teaching aid, or an activist resource, the Environmental Justice Atlas should be of interest to those concerned with environmental justice struggles and innovative ways to make these struggles visible”.
Project Results:
A description of the main S&T results/foregrounds
This will be divided into the following sections: A) the published Reports and scientific papers and special issues of journals; B) the Environmental Justice Atlas; C) the Documentaries, the on-line courses, the policy briefs, and other materials.
A) The Reports and scientific papers. Here we leave aside the division by Working Packages, and focus on main results, thematic or transversal.
1.- The Ecological Debt, including the Climate Debt. This is still a barely established scientific concept, with origin in the demands from EJOs in South America from 1991 onwards , also taken up in 2000 by the Christian Jubilee South Campaigns. It plays a central role in EJOLT. In the Climate Change COPs one hears often from some presidents or heads of government from Southern countries claims for the repayment of the Climate Debt, because of “loss and damage”. This is a third position, beyond adaptation and mitigation. It is a claim for liability. Supporting this third position, one main result of EJOLT is the article by Rikard Warlenius et al in Global Environmental Change in 2014. This article is an outcome of, and it is complemented by EJOLT Report 18. The ecological debt concept emerged in the early 1990s from within social movements driven by rising environmental awareness, emerging consciousness of Western responsibility for past colonial subjugations, and a general sense of injustice during the third world debt crisis. The South was a financial debtor but it was an ecological creditor. The concept of ecological debt required further elucidation and elaboration in EJOLT in light of its interconnection with environmental justice. In this Report, the development of the concept of ecological debt in both activist and academic circles is described, theoretical building blocks for its operationalisation are discussed and three brief cases illustrating its recent use are presented. The concept of ecological debt has been used as a biophysical measure, a legal instrument and a distributional principle. In theory and in practice, it has much to offer to the global environmental justice movement. The Report was coordinated by Rikard Warlenius (Lund University) with contributions from Gregory Pierce, Vasna Ramasar, Eva Quistorp, Joan Martínez-Alier, Leida Rijnhout, Ivonne Yanez, and was edited (as so many others) by Beatriz Rodriguez Labajos.
2.- A special issue on ecologically unequal trade. As foreseen in EJOLT’s DoW, a symposium took place in Lund University in the spring of 2014 under Prof. Alf Hornbog’s direction. Hornborg is a well-known author in the economics of ecologically unequal exchange since his first major article in 1998. Here, a concept developed in academia (“ecologically unequal trade”), and empirical work on how to measure it in different metrics, is shared with academics, public opinion and environmental activists. A special issue will be published in the Journal of Political Ecology (open access) with the outcome of this EJOLT symposium, with the following articles.
- Introduction: Ecologically Unequal Exchange and Ecological Debt, Joan Martinez-Alier and Alf Hornborg
- Linking Ecological Debt and Ecologically Unequal Exchange through Stock-Flows and Unequal Sink Appropriation, Rikard Warlenius (Lund Univ)
- The Sociology of Ecologically Unequal Exchange, Foreign Investment Dependence and Environmental Load Displacement: Summary of the Literature and Implications for Sustainability, Andrew K. Jorgenson
- South America’s Biophysical Involvement in International Trade: The Physical Trade Balances of Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil in the Light of Ecologically Unequal Exchange, Christian Dorninger and Nina Eisenmenger (ISÖ, Vienna)
- The Unequal Exchange of Dutch Cheese and Kenyan Roses: Introducing and Testing an LCA-Based Methodology for Estimating Ecologically Unequal Exchange, Martin Oulu (Lund Univ)
- The Role of Voluntary Certification in Maintaining the Ecologically Unequal Exchange of Wood Pulp: The Case of the Forest Stewardship Council’s Certification of Industrial Tree Plantations in Brazil, Jutta Kill (WRM)
- Measuring Environmental Injustice: How Ecological Debt Defines a Radical Change in the International Law System, Jordi Jaria i Manzano, Antonio Cardesa-Salzmann, Antoni Pigrau, and Susana Borràs (CEDAT-URV)
- Who Gets the HANPP (Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production)? Biomass Distribution and ‘Sugar Economy’ in Tana Delta, Kenya, Leah Temper ICTA UAB)
- Hindering Public Health Protection as Institutional Success: How the Corporate Organizational Form Promotes and Maintains the Unequal Spreading of Health Hazards, Jair Stern
- Commercial Deficits and Physical Trade Deficits in South America – an economic argument for post-extractivism, Pablo Samaniego, M.C. Vallejo, and Joan Martinez-Alier (ICTA UAB)
- Moving from Counting to Paying the Climate Debt: How a Movement Emerged, Faltered, and Can Regain Momentum, Patrick Bond, Melissa Hansen, Faith kaManzi, Gcina Makoba, and Ivonne Yanez (CCS Durban and Accion Ecologica-OCMAL)
3.- Activists mobilizing scientists
Arising from the EJOLT work on nuclear energy in Namibia, Malawi, Bulgaria and Brazil but also from research on Niger, and with the cooperation with EJOLT partner CRIIRAD (Bruno Chayeron), several reports and an article in Ecological Economics, 105, 2014, were published. The article, by Marta Conde of ICTA UAB, is titled “Activism mobilizing Science”. The article sheds light on a process where unequal power relations are contested through the co-production of scientific and local knowledge. Lay citizens, communities and local grassroots organisations immersed in socio-environmental conflicts are engaging with professional scientists to understand the impacts a polluting project is causing to their environment and themselves. Together with scientists they co-produce new and alternative knowledge that gives the local organizations visibility and legitimacy, information on how to protect themselves from the impacts from nuclear radiation, and allows them to engage in practical activism, challenging the manufactured uncertainty and other information produced by the state or companies running the projects. This process is locally driven by activists who have built related capacities and is generally based on voluntary work.
The Reports in a “science in-and-for society” framework for nuclear conflicts are:
- EJOLT Report 22, Evaluation of Nuclear Legislation: The issue of rehabilitation of uranium mine sites in Namibia
- EJOLT Report 21, Impact of the Kayelekera uranium mine, Malawi
- EJOLT Report 15: Uranium mining, unveiling the impacts of the nuclear industry drawing from on-site studies performed in Bulgaria, Brazil, Namibia and Malawi and from previous studies performed by CRIIRAD in France and Africa over the last twenty years. It gives examples of the various impacts of uranium mining and milling activities on the environment (air, soil, water) and provides recommendations for limiting these impacts. This report aims to contribute towards the development of the critical capacities of communities, so that they might have more information with which to face conflicts with states or companies in relation to uranium mining projects.
- EJOLT Report 12: Expanded nuclear power capacity in Europe, impact of uranium mining and alternatives. We explore the situation in Bulgaria and Slovenia (with partners Za Zemiata and Focus). Despite many particularities, there are common traits that are also shared in the rest of Europe, notably, the debate over whether to maintain and/or increase a powerful and relatively autonomous source of energy in the face of the high costs of construction and environmental and health risks nuclear energy and radiation entail. The report describes the expansion of nuclear energy – two new planned power plants in Bulgaria and the prolongation of one plant and the construction of a second one in Slovenia. We also look at the often forgotten first stage of nuclear energy production: uranium mining. We describe the current status and main problems of the closed mines of Bulgaria and Slovenia. With the objective of envisioning a sustainable energy future, we analyze the costs and benefits, and thus the potential for Renewable Energy Sources (RES) as an alternative to nuclear expansion.
In a similar vein, Marta Conde and Mariana Walter (ICTA UAB) conducted in 2014 a long interview with hydrogeologist Robert Moran, who had accompanied an EJOLT mission in Bulgaria to Krumovgrad in 2011. He came also to EJOLT meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 2002 and to the EJOLT panel at the ISEE conference. Here again, Activists mobilize Scientists (i.e. one hydrogeologist) in mining issues, particularly gold mining. The interview and the forthcoming article will explain Moran’s interventions in well-known gold mining conflicts in Latin America, South East Europe, and Central Asia.
4.- The vocabulary of Environmental Justice coming from the EJOs
In an article produced collectively by most EJOLT partners after the Abuja meeting in 2013, and published in 2014 in the Journal of Political Ecology (open access), we argued that there are an increasing number of ecological distribution conflicts around the world ultimately caused from the increase in the metabolism of the economy in terms of flows of energy and materials. There are resource extraction conflicts, transport conflicts and also waste disposal conflicts. Therefore, there are many local complaints. Since the 1980s and 1990s there has been a globalizing environmental justice movement that in its strategy meetings and practices has developed a set of concepts and slogans to describe and intervene in such conflicts. They include “environmental racism”, “popular epidemiology”, “the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous”, “biopiracy”, “tree plantations are not forests”, “the ecological debt”, “climate justice”, “food sovereignty”, “water justice”… These notions have been born from socio-environmental activism but they have been taken up also by academic political ecologists and used in their analyses.
The following list of terms (The Vocabulary of Environmental Justice) has been prepared later for a chapter by Martinez-Alier for an Oxford Handbook of Environmental Politics edited by David Schlosberg, 2015. It is still under construction. For instance, in Report. n. 23 on Climate Justice in 2015, we use the new concept of “energy sovereignty” (coming from grassroots organizations). Short definitions and the dates of origin of the concepts in the Vocabulary of the Global Environmental Justice Movement are provided below. While there are some concepts of academic origin (such as “ecologically unequal exchange” or “strong sustainability”) that are also used by the global environmental justice movement, we focus here on concepts of non-academic origin. This is, we think, a very important contribution from EJOLT.
THE VOCABULARY OF THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT
- Environmental Justice (EJ) USA Civil Rights Movement, North Carolina 1982 against environmental injustices (Bullard 1990; 1999). “People of color” and low-income populations suffer disproportionate harm from waste sites, refineries and incinerators, transport infrastructures.
- Environmental racism Rev Benjamin Chavis, c. 1982 The fight for EJ, against pollution in Black, Hispanic, Indigenous areas, was seen as a fight against environmental racism.
- Ecological debt Instituto Ecología Política, Chile, 1992, Acción Ecológica 1997 Rich countries’ liability for resource plunder and disproportionate use of space for waste dumping (e.g. GHG).
- Popular epidemiology Brown, P. , 1992, 1997 “Lay” local knowledge of illnesses from pollution may be more valid than official knowledge (sometimes absent).
- Environmentalism of the poor A.Agarwal/S. Narain (CSE, Delhi) c. 1989; Hugo Blanco, 1991. Struggles by poor/ indigenous peoples against deforestation, dams, mining… ; proactive collective projects for water harvesting, and forest conservation
- Food sovereignty Via Campesina, c. 1996 People’s right to healthy, culturally appropriate, sustainably produced food. Right to define own food and agriculture systems.
- Biopiracy RAFI (Pat Mooney) 1993, popularized by Vandana Shiva Appropriation of genetic resources (in medicinal or agricultural plants) without recognition of knowledge and property rights of indigenous peoples
- Climate justice CES (Delhi), 1991, Durban Alliance, CorpWatch 1999-2002 Radically reduce excessive per capita emissions of carbon dioxide and other GHG. “Subsistence emissions vs. luxury emissions”,
- Water justice, hydric justice Rutgerd Boelens, EJOs in Latin America (e.g. CENSAT). 2011. Water should not run towards money, or towards power. It should go to those needing it for livelihood.
- Water as human right Pablo Solon (Bolivian envoy to UN), Maud Barlow (Council of Canadians), 2001 Human Right to Water recognized at UN level in 2011, as an independent human right.
- “Green Deserts” Brazil, network against eucalyptus plantations, Rede Alerta contra o Deserto Verde, 1999 Brazilian local term for eucalyptus plantations, used by networked CSO and communities, also by researchers and activists for any tree plantation.
- Tree Plantations are not Forests Pulping the South, 1996 by R. Carrere, L. Lohman, World Rainforest Movement The WRM collects and spreads information on tree plantation conflicts. It proposes a change in the FAO definition of forest, to exclude tree monocultures.
- Land grabbing GRAIN ( small pro-peasant EJO), 2008 The wave of land acquisitions in Southern countries for plantations for exports, leading to first statistics on land-grabbing
- Resource caps. Resource Cap Coalition, RCC Europe, c. 2010 It advocates reduction in global resource use and in poverty. It calls for a European energy quota scheme and the ratification of the Rimini protocol.
- To Ogonize / Yasunize ERA Nigeria, Acción Ecológica, Oilwatch, 1997-2007 Leave oil in the soil to prevent damage to human rights and biodiversity, and against climate change. Adopted by anti shale gas fracking, tar sands and open cast coal mining movements.
- Rights of Nature Ecuador, Constitutional Assembly, 2008 In Constitution of Ecuador 2008, art 71, pushed by Acción Ecológica and Alberto Acosta. Actionable in court.
- Corporate accountability Friends of the Earth International, 1992-2002 At UN Johannesburg summit in 2002, FoE proposed the adoption of a Corporate Accountability Convention, against lukewarm CSR principles.
- “Critical mass”, cyclists rights San Francisco 1992 (Chris Carlsson) International movement reclaiming the streets with cyclists marching to impose cyclists rights.
- Urban waste-recyclers movements c. 2005, GAIA against incineration and “energy valorization” of urban waste. Unions or cooperatives of urban waste gatherers, emphasizing positive environmental impact, including climate change (in Delhi, Pune, Bogota…).
- Urban “guerrilla food gardening” c. 2000, started by “food justice” networks Vacant lot food growing, permaculture, community gardening movements in cities around the world.
- Toxic colonialism, toxic imperialism BAN, Basel Action Network, c. 2000, Greenpeace Fighting the long-distance export of waste from rich to poor countries, forbidden by the Basel Treaty. E.g. ship-breaking in India or Bangladesh, chemical residues or nuclear waste, electronic waste.
- Post-extractivism Latin America, 2007, Eduardo Gudynas (CLAES), Alberto Acosta, Maristella Svampa Against the reprimarization of LA economies. Transition to a sustainable economy based on solar energy and renewable materials. Impose quotas and taxes on raw materials exports.
- Buen Vivir, Sumak Kawsay Ecuador and Bolivia 2008/2009 Adopted in Constitutions of both countries, inspired by indigenous traditions and by the “post-development” approach.
- Indigenous territorial rights, and prior consultation. Convention 169 of ILO, 1989; adivasi forest rights in India… In conflicts on mining, oil exploitation, dams… communities ask for applying legislation defending indigenous rights.
- “Sand mafias” Name given c. 2005 by environmental movement, journalists. The illegal “mining” of sand and gravel in India in many rivers, driven by the growing building and public works industry.
- “Cancer villages” In China, popular name adopted by academics and officials (Lora-Wainright, 2013) Rural villages where industry has caused pollution (e.g. heavy metals), where lay knowledge of illness is relevant, and subdued protests take place.
5.- Unburnable fuels
Two of EJOLT reports deal main with oil extraction in Nigeria, Ecuador and elsewhere. Two of the main partners in EJOLT have been ERA from Nigeria and Acción Ecológica (from Ecuador, together with OCMAL). ERA and Acción Ecológica were founding members of Oilwatch in 1995, in the aftermath of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s and his companions’ deaths. These are EJOLT Report 9, Digging deep Corporate Liability. Environmental Justice strategies in the world of oil and EJOLT Report 6, Towards a Post-Oil Civilization. Yasunization and other initiatives to leave fossil fuels in the soil, the publication of which in May 2013 coincided with an article in The Economist explaining that avoidance of climate change required to leave a large proportion of the fossil fuels in the ground.
In EJOLT we have been following the Chevron-Texaco case, and analyzing the three courts decisions against Chevron in the courts of Ecuador since 2011. We invited the plaintiffs’ lawyer Pablo Fajardo to some of our meetings. Report 9, mainly written by EJOLT partners CDCA (Italy) and ERA (Nigeria), and edited as most other Reports by Beatriz Rodriguez Labajos of ICTA UAB, focuses on the liability for the impacts provoked by the expanding oil industry, environmental destruction, health impacts and violations of human rights. Local communities, feeling that they are simply sacrificed to the oil industry, see themselves involved in social conflict. They are experiencing forms of environmental discrimination and might even face criminalization of the protest when they stand up to defend their rights promoting a chilly effect on others who need and want to defend themselves and the environment. The number of lawsuits demanding justice for environmental, social, economic and cultural damages provoked by oil companies are increasing as well as their media visibility. Yet most outcomes are not satisfactory in tackling impacted communities claims for justice. The Report describes the most recent trends regarding oil corporations’ responsibilities and use of procedural justice by civil society through the review of emblematic legal cases.
Report 6, perhaps the most successful of the EJOLT report to date, traces the birth and growth of the idea of leaving oil in the ground. This arose after many decades of cruel conflicts caused by major oil companies, Shell and Chevron (Texaco) in the Niger Delta (involving the Ogoni and Ijaw peoples) and in the Amazon of Ecuador. EJOs and networks (Oilwatch) put forward the proposal to leave fossil fuels in the ground since 1997, if not before. This proposal makes sense because of the need to combat climate change and, in many places, also to preserve biodiversity and to safeguard the livelihoods and survival of local populations. Such proposals are known around the world as Yasunization, from the name of the national park in Ecuador, Yasuní, where the government agreed in 2007 to leave 850 million barrels of heavy oil in the soil. The Report analyses in detail the history of the activist-led initiatives to leave oil in the soil in Nigeria and Ecuador. It shows how the idea of Yasunization has reached other areas in Latin America (in the San Andrés and Providencia islands, in the Peten, and in the Amazon of Bolivia), and describes several examples of current local struggles against shale gas fracking in Quebec, Europe and South Africa, some of which are inspired by Yasunization. In Nigeria, “Ogonisation” is seen as the appropriate term. It explains how attempts are being made to resist coal mining in New Zealand, tar sand extraction in several African countries including again Nigeria, and offshore oil extraction in the Canary Islands, in Ghana and in the Lofoten islands in Norway. The last chapter analyses the links between Yasunization (leave fossil fuels in the ground) and the world movement in defense of indigenous peoples, and also the difficult collaboration between Yasunization and the Conservation movement. The relevance of this Report has increased with the many struggles around the world on shale gas fracking. This Report is frequently quoted by Naomi Klein in her 2014 book on climate change. The issue of “unburnable fuels” is taken up again in Report n. 23 in 2015 of WP4 with a view to the COP in Paris at the end of 2015.
Another EJOLT Report argued indirectly also for “leaving fossil fuels in the ground” by debunking or criticizing in detail many of the CDM projects in Africa. This is a Report also quoted in Naomi Klein’s bestseller. The EJOLT Report 2 is titled The CDM Cannot Deliver the Money to Africa. Why the carbon trading gamble won’t save the planet from climate change, and how African civil society is resisting. Written largely by EJOLT partner CCS at the University of Durban, the Report gives critical policy analysis and case documentation about the role of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in Africa. Instead of providing an appropriate flow of climate finance for projects related to greenhouse gas mitigation, the CDM has benefited large corporations (both South and North) and the governments they influence and often control. South Africa is a case in point, as both a victim and villain in relation to catastrophic climate change. Many sites of emissions in Africa – e.g. methane from rotting rubbish in landfills, flaring of gas from oil extraction, coal-burning electricity generation, coal-to-liquid and gas-to-liquid petroleum refining, deforestation, decomposed vegetation in tropical dams – require urgent attention, as do the proliferation of ‘false solutions’ to the climate crisis such as mega-hydro power, tree plantations and biofuels. But because communities, workers and local environments have been harmed in the process, various kinds of social resistances have emerged, and in some cases met with repression or cooptation through ‘divide-and-rule’ strategies. The Report dissects six case studies from eight African countries: the DRC, Ehiopia, Kenya; Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa. They consider the fraud of a landfill methane to electricity project; CDM corruption of local governance from gas-flaring-related subsidies; the emergence of trees, plantations and forests within CDM financing debates; failed CDM proposals involving the exploitation of gas reserves; megadams searching the CDM status; and the rise of Jatropha biofuel industries. The damage done by CDMs to date should be included in calculations of the ‘climate debt’ that the North owes the South, with the aim of having victims of CDMs compensated appropriately.
6.- Reports on Valuation and Liabilities: approaches from Ecological Economics and Law
We summarize here seven Reports on Legal issues (where CEDAT-URV contribution was very important), and on Valuation (e.g. shortcomings and uses of cost-benefit analysis, or of multi-criteria evaluation, authored mainly by REEDS-UVSQ and ICTA). What they have in common is that all of them are very much rooted on practical experience, and that are written with the clear intention to help EJOs engaged in ecological distribution conflicts. A meeting in Rome in late 2013 organized by the CDCA (with Lucie Greyl) was very helpful for the development of these “transversal” reports, as were also the meetings in Rio 2012 and Abuja in early 2013.
EJOLT Report 16: Economic tools for evaluating liabilities in environmental justice struggles. The EJOLT experience.
Collaboration to deploy economic evaluation tools is a recent form of interaction between academia and EJOs. Specifically, academics and environmental justice organisations (EJOs) conduct monetary valuations, cost-benefit analyses (CBAs) and multi-criteria analyses (MCA), in order to explore and reveal the un-sustainability of environmentally controversial projects. The effectiveness of such evaluation tools for pursuing environmental justice is still a matter of debate. In this document, we reported on the EJOLT project experience of developing evaluation processes between EJOs and academics in the context of specific environmental justice struggles. This resulted in a mutual-learning process that explored the conditions under which CBA, MCA, and economic valuation tools can be either enabling or disabling for EJOs in their struggles for environmental justice. The outcomes suggest that methods are more effectively used through carefully planned interventions supporting debates on local futures and visions, and when there are complementarities with regulatory and institutional developments. On the contrary, evaluation methods disable local mobilization when they force communities to bring their concerns into assessment schemes that do not fit their own languages and concerns, when they reproduce uneven power relations, or where public decisions have little to do with formulating and advancing ‘reasoned arguments’. One main author of this report was ecological economist Christos Zografos (ICTA UAB).
Another EJOLT Report, n. 13 is titled Socio-environmental valuation and liabilities. What strategies for environmental justice organisations?
This EJOLT report focused on two central issues: the use of evaluation methods and the notion of liabilities, as applied to socio-environmental conflicts and EJO campaigns. The report included (i) one review chapter of extra-judicial cases having a valuation dimension, (ii) six case studies from four continents involving a close collaboration between activists and academics, and (iii) one practical theoretical synthesis. Each one of the case studies examines one or more of the following key questions: How are valuation conflicts to be dealt with? How can we evaluate a given ‘development project’? Is it possible to compensate for the liabilities involved? If yes, how? More specifically, two chapters are concerned with environmental impact assessments (oil exploitation in Nigeria and water megaproject in Brazil), two chapters tackle cost/benefit approaches and their limits (forest valuation in India and nuclear power plants in Bulgaria and Turkey), one deals with multicriteria evaluations (oil exploitation in Ecuador), and one analyses a conflict of valuation languages (gold mining in Turkey). Among these case studies, two (Nigeria and India) also discuss the compensatory mechanisms involved as well as their suitability.
When dealing with environmental decision-making or conflict resolution, the approach of standard economics (even when labelled ‘environmental’) is to use a common unit – a monetary numeraire – for all the different values and then to look for a trade-off between all of them within a market context. This approach assumes the existence of value commensurability. Ecological economists and activists, in contrast, acknowledge value incommensurability. Indeed, in virtually every socio-environmental conflict, a variety of valuation languages is deployed. Their inclusion in evaluation processes is particularly important since governments and companies usually try to portray socio-environmental impacts solely as a technical problem that will be handled with the proper use of technology or monetary accounting. In fact, most of the case studies in this report show that lower-income sectors (especially indigenous people and peasants) do not simply seek a monetary compensation and do worry about local environmental matters.
More fundamentally, these valuation contests also highlight opposite visions and values about local development, between on one hand (lower-income) locals and on the other, the state and corporate sectors. In view of the differences in material interests, values and perceptions, it appears that the evolution of most socio-environmental conflicts will very much depend on the extent to which different languages of valuation are acknowledged and addressed. Generally speaking, this would require, firstly, carrying out a rigorous socio-environmental impacts assessment of the region at stake, and secondly, undertaking an in-depth deliberative multicriteria evaluation. One main author of this report was Julien-François Gerber (REEDS-UVSQ)
Complementarily, we published also a non-scheduled report (not foreseen in the DoW), this was EJOLT Report 5: Issues in the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity
After 1992 many conservation biologists thought that the use of economic instruments would be more effective to halt biodiversity loss than the policies based on setting apart some natural spaces outside the market. At the same time there was a new elaboration of the concept of ecosystem services and, since 1997, there were attempts at costing in money terms the loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity including the high profile TEEB project (2008-2011). Our discussion shows the analytical implications of three main socio-economic meanings of biodiversity loss: a) the loss of natural capital, b) the loss of ecosystems functions, c) the loss of cultural values and human rights to livelihood. We show cases where monetary valuation is relevant and other cases where it is controversial and even counterproductive, as it undermines the objectives of conservation. This Report became a published article in Conservation & Society (open access), authored by Martinez-Alier & Rodriguez Labajos.
A fourth report on issues of valuation is EJOLT Report 8: Guide to Multicriteria Evaluation for Environmental Justice Organisations
This introduction to multicriteria evaluation methods for EJOs intends to help activists to clarify whether multicriteria assessments can be useful in their struggles. In the present guide, we review three MCE methods that are arguably today the most relevant for EJOs, they are widely recognized as participative, and doable with relatively limited means. They are: Social Multicriteria Evaluation (SMCE), Multicriteria Mapping (MCM), and the Integraal framework. While only one aims at calculating a ranking of the different options – the SMCE –, the other two provide a way of comparing and analyzing the different positions involved in a multicriteria problem and may (or may not) end up with a clear final ranking. The three methods build on a number of common principles: they all (1) have a strong element of public and/or stakeholder engagement; (2) account for different types of knowledge (monetary and nonmonetary; quantitative and qualitative data); and (3) provide opportunities for learning during the appraisal process. After a description of these three different MCE methods, the guide takes the ‘leaving oil in the soil’ campaigns, with special emphasis on Ecuador and Nigeria, as possible examples for future MCEs. The Yasuni ITT proposal was indeed subject to MCE by economists at FLACSO (in an article published in Ecological Economics, 2015, by Vallejo et al), they concluded that under plausible assumptions, it was best to leave the oil in the ground. We can ask still whether EJOs are well advised or not to use MCE. Authors are Julien-François Gerber with contributions by Beatriz Rodríguez-Labajos, Ivonne Yánez and others.
We now consider three Legal reports, which are also cross-cutting, and focus on corporate accountability and liabilities, but also in the international law on liability from climate debt.
EJOLT Report 4: Legal avenues for EJOs to claim environmental liability.
This report, authored by Antoni Pigrau and other members of CEDAT-URV, considered how questions of global justice within transnational relation are often related to operations of multinational corporations (MNCs). This report appraises the different national and international (judicial and non-judicial) fora that are available to hold MNCs accountable. On the basis of recent judicial developments concerning civil liability claims by victims of the operations of MNCs in various countries, it explores the circumstances under which national, transnational and international litigation, either by itself or in interaction with each other, has proven most effective in providing redress. It concludes that transnational cluster-litigation is the most efficient strategy to tighten the meshes of judicial action upon MNCs, hence promoting the international rule of law and contributing, albeit modestly, to foster (corrective) global justice.
As an aside, in discussing this and other Legal reports, EJOLT members (including attorney Antonio Gustavo Gómez from Argentina, with CDCA) often raised the issue of whether opting for criminal court-cases instead of civil cases was a better strategy. This important topic is mentioned again below in the section on Impacts.
In EJOLT Report 11: International law and ecological debt, the main point is that global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange and climate injustice will not be corrected just by minor adaptations of existing international regimes. Nor will change come through the formal enactment of a given set of principles. Rather, correction will require a profound reconceptualisation of global governance that is able to integrate counter-hegemonic claims for environmental justice. The report has four parts. The first one is a conceptual introduction that puts in context concepts emerging from the academic or social movements, such as ecological and climate debt, against the backdrop of the legal narratives that underpin the hegemonic model of development. The second part presents a critique of the notion of sustainable development as a supposed paradigm for reconciling the needs of present and future generations with the preservation of the Earth’s ecosystems. The third part emphasizes the potential of current international law to deal with the needs of intragenerational and intergenerational justice in relation to sustainability. In this section, which echoes a growing academic debate, we argue that a reinterpretation and reconstruction of the current international order in terms of global constitutionalism and an enhanced human rights approach, offers a way to mitigate the present biases in international law. Finally, the fourth part is much more speculative in nature, outlining some ideas that may be found beyond the elements already present in current international law.
One main author was Jordi Jaria i Manzano (CEDAT-URV)
EJOLT Report 17 was published towards the end of the project, in late 2014: A legal guide for communities seeking environmental justice.
The endless increase of environmental injustice in the world is directly impacting more and more people on a daily basis. While impunity seems to be the order of the day, the need for procedural justice is growing. Making the most of the competences and knowledge brought together under the EJOLT project and its work on Law and Institutions the CDCA (Italy) compiled a manual that presents a number of legal tools and concepts already used by EJOs all over the world. These concepts and tools from the civil and criminal system at international, regional and trans-national levels are presented together with interactive links to more detailed and technical information and to useful contacts for legal strategy capacity building of EJOs
7.- Resistance to mining, information from the EJAtlas… and a special issue in Geoforum.
The EJOLT Report 7, Mining conflicts around the world. Common grounds from an Environmental Justice perspective, explored contemporary mining conflicts. This was based on 24 real case studies from 18 different countries described by local activists and scholars. This was written before the large collection of conflict cases for the EJAtlas after 2012. While 17 of the reported cases focused on conflicts related to metal mining (e.g. gold, silver, copper, zinc, and lead), four addressed uranium mining and one referred to coal mining. As an example of a new frontier in the industry, a sand mining conflict from India was also reported. First, the project and type of conflict are characterized in a nutshell, with some basic factual background that describe the companies involved, and the communities and locations affected. The roots of the conflicts are explored next, as well as relevant socioeconomic, cultural, health, and ecological impacts and related community claims. Where relevant, means of resistance are also specified with their influence on the project and/or the outcome of the conflict. The report then offers a synthesis of the described mining cases, review their commonalities, link gained insights with research needs and discuss some policy recommendations that might follow from this analysis.
Two years later we produced the EJOLT Report 14: Towards environmental justice success in mining resistances: An empirical investigation. There is a very clear continuity with the previous Report n. 7. Here the empirical evidence covered 346 mining cases from around the world, featured on the EJAtlas, and enriched by an interactive discussion of results with activists and experts. In an effort to understand both the general patterns identified in conflicts at hand, and the factors that determine EJ ‘success’ and ‘failure’ from an activist viewpoint, the experiences of EJOs that pursue EJ in mining conflicts are analyzed by combining qualitative and quantitative methods. The report employs, first, social network analysis to study the nature of the relationships both among corporations involved in the mining activity, on the one hand, and among EJOs resisting against the mining project, on the other. Both sets of conditions and cooperation are then compared to discuss ways to develop a more resilient activist network that can trigger social change and achieve EJ success. Then, multivariate analysis methods are used to examine the defining factors in achieving EJ success and to answer the following research questions: In which case a conflict is more intense? What makes EJ served? When is a disruptive project stopped? Finally, qualitative analysis, based on descriptive statistics, is conducted to investigate factors that configure the perception of success for EJ and incorporate activist knowledge into the theory of EJ. A thorough analysis of the answers given to question “Do you consider the case as an accomplishment for the EJ?” with their respective justifications help us to understand why the resistance movements consider a particular result as an EJ success or failure in the context of a mining conflict.
Several articles on mining related to the EJOLT project have been accepted for a special issue in Geoforum edited by Beatriz Rodriguez Labajos and Begum Ozkaynak.
8.- Waste disposal
EJOLT Report 1 published in 2011 was on Industrial waste conflicts around the world. Case studies from India and Bulgaria: shipbreaking and incineration. The general framework was that of the EJOLT project itself, namely, how do struggles for environmental justice contribute to the environmental sustainability of the economy?
Rich societies use large amounts of resources. Conflicts of resource extraction and waste disposal, such as the conflict over the excessive production of carbon dioxide, arise as a consequence of this. Rich societies generate large quantities of all kinds of waste, facing rising management costs and awakening opposition to waste treatment and disposal sites, such as incinerators and landfills. This report, through in-depth case studies from India and Bulgaria, aimed to link the increased social metabolism (energy and material flows) of the economy to waste disposal conflicts. The first case study was about shipbreaking (the dismantling of obsolete ocean-going ships) in Alang-Sosiya (India), an example of how the North dumps toxic waste in the South. The second case study was about a failed attempt to build an hazardous waste incinerator in Radnevo (Bulgaria). Such ecological distribution conflicts emerge as valuation conflict where actors deploy different valuation languages to affirm their right to use a safe environment, from which their health and livelihood often depends upon. Key lessons and mutual learning from both cases are then drawn paying particular attention to the political strategies which can be adopted in environmental conflicts, including grass roots mobilization, cases in the Courts, popular epidemiology, national and international alliances.
A later outcome of work in India has been (apart from many contributions from JNU to the EJAtlas, where India is the country best represented), articles and reports on waste management in Delhi in which Federico Demaria (ICTA UAB) has taken part in collaboration with the All India Kabadi Mazdoor Mahasangh (AIKMM, meaning “All India Waste Worker Federation”), an organization of waste collectors. In 2015 the AIKMM has issued a report, “Rights for waste workers as service providers: a comprehensive valuation of Delhi’s informal recycling sector”.
9.- Reports on biomass conflicts
Three major reports have been published, with collaboration with EJOLT partners GRAIN, WRM, the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna and others. EJOLT Report 3, "An overview of industrial tree plantations in the global South. Conflicts, trends and resistance struggles", analyzed the growth of industrial tree plantations (ITPs), typically large-scale, intensively managed, even-age monoculture plantations, mostly exotic trees like fast-growing eucalyptus, pine and acacia species, but also rubber and oil palm, all destined for industrial processes to produce paper, palm oil and rubber products. They have, increased their area in the global South about fourfold in 20 years. Some of the main countries with millions of hectares include Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia while ITPs are expanding in African countries, like Mozambique, and in the Mekong region in a context of increasing land grabbing. This expansion is Northern-driven; the US and the European Union together consume most of the final products, benefiting also their banks and businesses that are key players in the different industry sectors behind ITPs, and also increasingly investment funds. In the global South where plantations are set up, local people, while having a very low consumption level, suffer severely from the negative impacts of these plantations. The social and environmental justice conflicts that result from the negative impacts of plantations are mainly about land access and tenure, but also other social, economic, environmental and cultural impacts. Human rights violations including deaths are common in many countries. In spite of the heavy negative impacts of ITPs, they continue being actively promoted as carbon sinks (as also discussed in EJOLR Report 2), or to supply energy and electricity through biofuels and burning wood in specially designed and subsidized wood-based power facilities in Europe. These new trends only aggravate the negative impacts, while the proven deforestation and land use change that results from plantation expansion undermines the supposed carbon neutrality. Although consumption reduction and paper recycling are important, a structural change in the global industrial production and consumption system, of which paper, vegetable oils and rubber are fundamental parts, is needed in order to build a truly sustainable future. Meanwhile, local communities in the South face the challenge to continue building a stronger and broader movement to halt the continuous land grabbing for industrial tree plantations. This issue has loong been the main focus of work for EJOLT partner WRM.
EJOLT Report 10 was titled The many faces of land grabbing. Cases from Africa and Latin America. EJOLT partner GRAIN used “land grabbing” for the first time when two big global crises in 2008 – the world food crisis and the broader financial crisis that the food crisis has been part of – together spawned a new and disturbing trend towards buying up land for outsourced food production. ‘Land grabbing’ as these acquisitions were then called by GRAIN, are often led by the private sector (with support from governments) that sees opportunities triggered by the global financial, food and energy crisis. Characteristics of land grabbing are large scale displacement of the rural poor and the destruction of the local ecology to make space for industrial agriculture and biofuels. Recent studies emphasize the links between land grabbing, biomass extraction, and the interests and needs of the few members of a global class of consumers distributed across an increasingly multi-centric global food system, against the vast majority of the world’s population. Thus, the fight against land grabbing currently lies at the interface of the climate debate, food sovereignty, indigenous rights, social and environmental justice. This report describes and analyzes specific cases of land grabbing around the world within various socio economic contexts and with diverse social and environmental consequences as well as reporting successful cases of resistance to land grabbing to contribute to a preliminary understanding of the forces and also the conditions (opportunity spaces) for resistance, and the different types of alliances that can be made at different scales.
EJOLT Report 20 published in 2015, authored by Andreas Mayer (ISÖ Vienna) and others, is called Patterns of global biomass trade. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, global trade in agricultural products grew more than three times faster than agricultural production. Nearly all the new land that had been put into production since 1986 was used to produce export crops. While higher volumes of agricultural production and trade increased the global availability of agricultural products, their benefits and negative impacts are not evenly distributed globally. From a regional perspective, the surge in agricultural production for export is most pronounced in Latin America and in some Southeast Asian and Eastern European countries. This export orientation is often associated with negative impacts on food self-sufficiency and a potential threat to food sovereignty in the producing countries. This report examines therefore the global evolution of food production and international food trade and identifies related drivers of socio-environmental conflicts. Evidence from case studies of two important agricultural exporters – Indonesia and Paraguay – suggests that the extraction of primary materials for export (extractivism) in the agricultural sector can be linked to rising potential for socio-environmental conflict. This evidence in turn sheds new light on the third case study on Ethiopia, a country currently modernizing its agricultural sector with the aim of becoming an exporter of agricultural products.
10.- Report on Health Risks
EJOLT Report 19, Health as Dignity. Risks, Health and Mobilization for Environmental Justice, mainly authored by Marcelo Firpo Porto and collaborators (from FIOCRUZ, Brazil) is one of the “transversal” reports scheduled in the DoW, and it has been uploaded in May 2015. This report aims to give conceptual and methodological support on environmental risks and health problems in contexts of environmental conflicts. It was written to members of affected communities, environmental justice organizations, social movements, and researchers jointly engaged in movements for environmental justice, both local / regional and global, particularly in countries of the "Global South". The report is based on problems derived from various economic sectors activities, often in cahoots with political and public institutions that prioritize "economic development" and do not meet legal and institutional roles. Conflicts reveal the exploitation of natural resources and the workforce with the systematic violation of rights related to different aspects: life, work, land, environment and health. Mobilizations for environmental justice also fight for the autonomy of communities, their cultures the right to maintain their livelihoods i.e. as indigenous or peasants. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive vision of health that relates not only to the illness and death, but with life, nature, culture and fundamental rights. We summarize this in the title of this work: "Health and Dignity", echoing voices of countless people who have been fighting for the right to life and the commons, and against the impacts of economic sectors such as mining, agribusiness and the oil industry. The report focuses on case studies involving oil exploration and uranium mining in Latin America and Africa written in collaboration with EJOLT partners. There is much new valuable information on the Caetité uranium mining in Brazil. Information is organized and knowledge is produced based on principles and practices of environmental justice, including the active role of affected populations especially on environmental health and risk issues. Within EJOLT, keywords specific to this report are environmental health, risk analysis and management, political epistemology, vulnerability, knowledge production.
11. – Political ecology of water conflicts.
No specific report on water conflicts was initially planned (i.e. included in the list of deliverables in the DoW), but there is a wealth of information on water conflict in the EJAtlas from which articles, theses and books will flow. Two main articles have been published by EJOLT members on water conflicts. One is methodologically interesting as it takes an ecosystem services approach to ecological distribution conflicts (Jordà-Capdevila & Rodriguez-Labajos in Sustainability Science, 2014). The second article is a major survey of the political ecology of water conflicts, published in 2015 in WIRES Water authored by Martinez-Alier and Rodriguez-Labajos. This is a summary: “The political ecology of water studies the conflicts on water use, whether as an input or as a vehicle for waste disposal. Both the quantity and the quality of water are relevant for conflicts on water as a commodity and also indirectly in conflicts on water from oil and gas extraction, mining, or biomass production. Water bodies and water courses provide environmental services, and conflicts arise on the trade-offs between such services. The new legal institutions of the Human Right to Water and of the Rights of Nature are brought into the discussion when focusing on agency in conflicts on dams, waterways and water transfers, and controversies on privatization of urban water supply, listing some of the social actors involved in such conflicts and the networks they form”. Keywords mentioned are water quality, ecosystem functions, dams, social metabolism, hydric justice, hydro-social cycle. Notice that hydric justice or water justice was not yet a work that we used, or indeed we knew in 2010 when we submitted the EJOLT project.
12.- Publication of the Reports and other EJOLT materials as books and articles
This is a topic still under consideration at the end of the project in the first half of 2015. Some articles and special issues are already coming from the project (and have been mentioned here, or are listed elsewhere in this final report). Some contacts with a book publisher have been established. Some of the 23 Reports have been published in the EJOLT website in languages other than English.
B) The EJAtlas (ww.ejatlas.org)
The EJOLT inventory and maps of environmental (in)justice conflicts and resistance are at the heart of the EJOLT project which is a project for supporting research. The EJOLT Atlas will indeed facilitate research in comparative and statistical political ecology. This inventory of conflicts is an ambitious undertaking, requiring vast stores of activist and academic knowledge to locate and describe the environmental justice struggles. Some senior political ecologists expressed their skepticism on this initiative, but they were wrong. The EJAtlas must continue after the end of EJOLT, to achieve better thematic and geographic coverage. The EJAtlas has consumed about one fourth of the resources available in EJOLT for the period 2011-15, and it has attracted perhaps two-thirds of public attention. We believe it is financially feasible to find support for its continuation. It already counts with many committed outside volunteer collaborators.
It took us one year to develop, test and be satisfied with the Database Form. This process has been guided by Leah Temper, with collaboration from Daniela Del Bene (ICTA UAB), and other members. Our approach is from the commodities in question to the conflicts. By March 2014 we were able (after changing the plaform) to launch the Atlas with over 900 cases, and by the end of EJOLT we are approaching 1500 approved cases. The first academic articles are starting to appear. Moreover we have abundant proof that the Atlas is used by many students, teachers, journalists, activists.
GIS experts translated the information on environmental conflicts into geographic systems and are working on spatial indicators to help explain and visualize correlations and trends emerging from data analysis. Web and programming experts built the database platform online and made it attractive and user-friendly for a wide audience and experts and activists on the ground.
The role of coordinator ICTA UAB has been to guide and oversee the process, design the structure of the database, to coordinate with the participant EJOs and academics, to obtain outside collaboration to fill in Database Forms and, importantly, to moderate and ensure the quality of the information. Most of the EJOLT partners contributed their own inventories (OCMAL, GRAIN, CDCA…), in some cases (like Fiocruz, Brazil, 400 cases) we are still digesting the information into our own EJAtlas format. Since the launch in March 2014, over 400,000 users visited the atlas webpage and have opened almost a million pages. The re-launch in March 2015 attracted many more press reviews. Hundreds of press articles have been written and many new collaborators have been added. Academic articles have been published with several in process. Further, a user survey has been carried out to assess the webpage and to guide its further development and trajectory, under the direction of Dr Leah Temper (ICTA UAB).
We have therefore achieved most of the Objectives we had when we submitted the EJOLT project in 2010: “To compile and make available a ‘Map of Environmental Injustice’ for future research and training on the relationship between material flows, land use and the incidence of conflicts, for academics, policy-makers and civil society. This map will consist on an online unique database of resource extraction and disposal conflicts hosted on the project website, geographically referenced (mapped with GIS), and linked with social metabolism and environmental indicators. It will allow increased understanding of what the determinants of conflicts are and how material demands and policies create potential hot spots for future conflicts”.
We developed a new website for the EJAtlas, www.ejatlas.org separate from www.ejolt.org. Although, beyond the inventories, we have presented also some featured maps (gas fracking conflicts, and others), we have not yet achieved the objective of trying to explain the frequency/ intensity of various types of conflicts depending on indicators of population density, HANPP, Material Flow Extraction… But the existing inventory allows many types of analyses.
The following groups from EJOLT and outside EJOLT contributed with more than 5 cases (draft or approved)
ICTA-UAB Institute for Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona
OCMAL-Observatorio de Conflictos Mineros de América Latina
FIOCRUZ - Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro
Centro Documentazione Conflitti Ambientali, Italy
Za Zemiata, Bulgaria
Mario Alejandro Perez Rincon, Universidad del Valle-CINARA Institute, Colombia
Accion Ecologica, Ecuador
CRIIRAD - Commission de Recherche et d’Information Indépendantes sur la RADioactivité, France
Centre for Civil Society, University of Kwazulu Natal, South Africa
Jawaharlal Nehru University, Cntre for Science and Technology, India
GRAIN, Genetic Resources Action International
BOG – Bogazici University
European Environmental Bureau
World Rainforest Movement, WRM
REEDS – Int. Centre for Research in Ecological Economics, Eco-Innovation and Tool Development for Sustainability, UVSQ, France
Nature Kenya
Alliance Voahary Gasy, Madagascar
Citizens For Justice, Malawi
Observatorio de Conflictos Socioambientales en el Occidente de Mexico
Grupo de trabajo paisajes mineros en Mexico
Boa Monjane, Via Campesina
Earthlife Namibia
Environmental Rights Action, Nigeria
Oil Watch International
FOCUS Association for Sustainable Development, Slovenia
ISÖ - Social Ecology Vienna
Carolina Herrmann C.S. and Vanessa Samora, Grupo de Estudos em Temáticas Ambientais da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
CEDAT, Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Gabriel Weber, Germany
Alfred Burballa Noria, Belfast
Lund University, Sweden
Carl Middleton, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand
Business and Human Rights, UK
Alejandro Colsa, Bernadette Grafton, Katy Hintzen and Sara Orvis, Prof. Paul Mohai, School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan
Sustainable Europe Research Institute, SERI, Germany
SOS Halkidiki, Greece
Gyorgy Malovics, Hungary
Professor Kenichi Matsui, Japan
Hali Healy, King’s College London
Julien-Francois Gerber, TERI University, Delhi, India
Eradicating Ecocide campaign
Dr Anna Lora-Wainwright, Associate Professor in the Human Geography of China, University of Oxford, UK
Giuseppina Siciliano, Centre for Development, Environment and Policy (CeDEP), School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), UK
Grettel Navas, Fundación Neotrópica, Costa Rica
Patrizia Heidegger, NGO Shipbreaking Platform
Anitra Nelson, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Lena Weber, Human Ecology Division, Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Sweden
Jovanka Spiric (Balkans), ICTA - Universitat Autonoma Barcelona, Spain
Vladimir Mrkajic, University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Ana Novkovic, Environmental activist, Serbia
Milica Mancic, Environmental activist, Serbia
Geography Department - Harokopio University Athens (HUA), Greece
Marianna Stori, Centro di Documentazione sui Conflitti Ambientali, CDCA, Italy
Center for Mineral Technology (CETEM/MCTI), Brazil
Center for Social Studies (CES), Portugal
SOCIUS, Portugal
CETEM, Portugal
Maria Pinzon, CENSAT Agua Viva, Colombia
Natalia Finogenova, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Sub-platform and National Map developments
Following the creation of successful country-level maps in Colombia and Ecuador, EJOLT has had several partnerships and collaborations with universities and civil society groups to create country level inventories and in some cases, sub-platforms in local languages. Here is a selection of some of the initiatives undertaken:
- United States Map & Launch
In June 2014, the map of 40 EJ conflicts in the United States was launched. EJOLT issued a press release that has gone to the press in Europe and the University of Michigan has issued a press release to the U.S. media: http://www.ejolt.org/2014/06/map-of-most-influential-environmental-justice-conflicts-in-the-us-is-released-this-week/
The research was undertaken by 4 Masters students at the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment as part of their thesis work and was co-advised by Prof. Paul Mohai and Prof. Rebecca Hardin. An academic paper is in development and they have received a small grant to continue the work and expand the number of cases, reaching nearly 60 by March 2015.
- Development of Central American Atlas
This has been done in coordination with Fundacion Neotropica of Costa Rica by Grettel Navas, who has a Master’s degree from FLACSO University, Ecuador. She has entered so far 35 cases across the region. Following the initial collaboration, Neotropica has a small new project funded by UNDP to further the work focusing on mining conflicts in Guatemala. The Atlas was publicly presented by Martinez-Alier and Navas on the 11th of February 2015 at the University of Panama. It was transmitted by www.radiotemblor.org an environmental organization.
- Development of Portuguese Atlas
The Portuguese map of conflicts was generated from a literature review and collection of over 2000 documents, within the research project "Portugal: Ambiente em Movimento"- a cooperation between the Ecology and Society Lab of the Center for Social Studies in Coimbra (Ecosoc/CES), the Center for Mineral Technology of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, Brazil (CETEM/MCTI), and the Center for Research in Economic and Organizational Sociology of the University of Lisbon (SOCIUS/ISEG). The data were collected through a public consultation within a pool of Portuguese academics, activists, politicians and environmental specialists. After the data analysis and systematization, a list of almost 130 conflicts was compiled, and 25 cases of environmental conflicts of greater intensity and relevance were selected to be appreciated by the pool of Portuguese experts, asking them to choose the 15 cases that they reputed more relevant.
The Atlas was launched in a public event held on March 25th 2015 in Lisbon with the participation of local stakeholders, collaborators and J. Martinez Alier.
- Development of Italian Sub-Platform
The development of the Italian atlas entailed both the research, provision, development and upload of 22 Italian cases in the international EJATLAS, the coordination and the development of the EJATLAS Italy / Italian EJATLAS platform. This included research, and development through a participative process and the upload of 90 italian cases in the Italian EJATLAS platform: CDCA developed in this last part of the project the Italian EJATLAS, a national version of the international EJATLAS with the active involvement of local committees involved in environmental conflicts in the country. The implementation of such citizens’ participatory tool provides an important result for the potential follow-up of EJOLT in Europe in the medium and long term. This Italian “Atlante” was launched on March 14th, 2015, in Rome.
- Bulgarian Map
Partner Za Zemiata created a separate map in Bulgarian of environmental conflicts and best cases from Bulgaria and all around the world (see at http://map.zazemiata.org). Until now there are nearly 100 cases uploaded. The focus of the map is the transition to best practices and big portion of the international cases are best cases translated from the Ejatlas. The map is open and anyone can add cases. Ejatlas and especially ZZ map were presented at several workshops and university debates in Bulgaria. The ZZ map is on operation since Dec 2014 and was officially launched in March 2015 at the end of the project with press-release and news in the social media.
Two main academic publications to date
- The commodification of nature and socio-environmental resistance in Ecuador: An inventory of accumulation by dispossession cases, 1980–2013 by Sara Latorre, Katharine Farrell and J. Martinez-Alier, Ecological Economics, 2015, 116: 59-69.
- Pérez Rincón M A 2014 Conflictos ambientales en Colombia: inventario, caracterización y análisis, in L. J. Garay ed Minería en Colombia: control público, memoria y justicia socio-ecológica, movimientos sociales y posconflicto Contraloría General de la República, Bogotá 253-325
C) Documentaries, on-line courses, policy briefs and other materials
As planned in the EJOLT DoW, EJOLT has produced or co-produced a number of short documentaries on environmental conflicts that complement our Reports very well. One on the Unist'ot'en blockade in Canada, by Leah Temper, is almost finished but it is not listed here.
1) Grabbing Gambela is a short video documentary about a massive takeover of agricultural lands in the Gambela Region of Ethiopia. Since 2008, the Ethiopian government has signed deals with investors from India, Saudi Arabia, China and other countries for large-scale agricultural projects in the region. The deals give foreign investors control of half of Gambela’s arable land. In this documentary, local people affected by the land deals speak about their experiences. “Grabbing Gambela” is produced by the Anywaa Survival Organisation, EJOLT, and GRAIN.
2) Delhi Waste Wars is a short video documentary directed by Leah Temper and edited by Siobhan McKeown. A battle is brewing in Delhi, India over access and control to garbage. For decades, informal wastepickers and recyclers have turned garbage into cash. They cost the government and taxpayer nothing, yet they significantly reduce the waste sent to already overflowing landfills, improve recycling rates and “cooling the earth” by reducing carbon emissions. But government plans to privatize trash collection have put the livelihoods of the wastepickers under threat. Meanwhile, new plans to build incinerators funded by carbon credits mean the resources the recyclers depend on may soon go up in smoke. This documentary takes a street-eye view, charting the wastepickers´ struggle for their rights and recognition, and gaining a local perspective on how to create a truly sustainable waste management system in one of the world´s biggest and most densely populated cities.
3) Namibia’s Uranium Rush. Marta Conde, ICTA-UAB investigates social movements and resistance to resource extraction – with a special focus on uranium mining expansion in Africa. She recorded this film that comes together with a report on the Radiological impact of the Rössing Rio Tinto Uranium Mine and a Study on Low-level radiation of Rio Tinto’s Rössing Uranium mine workers. As the reports and documentary show, there are reasons for concern. Workers at the mines are dying of illnesses they don’t understand, the water of the Khan River is being polluted in this arid country and the tourism sector could be put in jeopardy if the uranium mining expansion goes ahead. At present, there is not a structured social protest in Namibia regarding the uranium mining expansion with some communities welcoming the mines as they hope for jobs and ‘development’. Several workers from Rössing-Rio Tinto mine have complained about their illnesses and the Toopnar community is worried but the current chief is willing to talk to the mines, trying to bargain as much as possible for its people. The only active challenge to the mines is carried out by Earthlife Namibia and LaRRI, two local NGOs, who voiced some concerns during a 2008 campaign and now again through the EJOLT project reports. Credits go to Nancy Arizpe for two years of careful editing and producing, to CRIIRAD for all the measurements and to Earthlife Namibia and LaRRI for raising the issue.
4) Yasuní, good living, is a video documentary made by Arturo Hortas for EJOLT. This film shows through different lenses the origins and development of the idea of “leaving oil in the soil” (850 million barrels) in one part of the Yasuni National Park in Ecuador. It argues that in this way biodiversity would be preserved, indigenous peoples would be protected, and carbon dioxide emissions would be avoided. Esperanza Martinez of Accion Ecologica and Alberto Acosta, the former minister of Energy who launched the proposal in 2007, are interviewed. President Rafael Correa presents the plan with vigour at a United Nations speech. Local inhabitants in the heart of the Yasuni National Park are interviewed, next to oil spills. Humberto Cholango, the head of CONAIE, shows his support for the proposal and his skepticism about Correa’s motives. The film also shows how Sumak Kawsay, ¨Buen Vivir”, or the concept of The Good Life as well as the rights of Mother Nature, have been formalized in Ecaudor´s constitution. From the jungle where the Waorani reside to the offices of activists and ministers, from Ecuador to New York and Europe, the film elicits many voices that explain and appraise this sensational proposal, undreamed of a few years ago: LEAVE THE OIL IN THE SOIL!
5) Arturo Hortas made another documentary for EJOLT on the case Sarayaku vs. Ecuador. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) ruled in favor of a Kichwa community’s right to consultation prior to oil exploration projects on their land. Sarayaku is an indigenous community located in the province of Pastaza, in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Sarayaku (“River of Maize”) is inhabited by 1,200 people from the Kichwa nationality. They operate a system of direct democracy. In 2002 the company CGC Argentina (Compañía General de Combustibles), accompanied by the Ecuadorian army illegally entered the territory of Sarayaku and buried 1500 Kg of pentolite, explosives used in seismic exploration for oil. The case was brought before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, creating a historical precedent in the defense of indigenous rights. The Constitution and the ILO Convention 169 determined to have prior, free and informed consent of indigenous peoples before starting exploitation. The people from Sarayaku won the case. But as this video will show, the threats to their community are far from over. The documentary was made by Arturo Hortas with the support of the Government of Aragon and EJOLT.
6) We are here to stay! (“Aquí nos vamos a quedar”) is a LaMCA-EJOLT documentary where scholars, activists and people suffering environmental injustices provide their views and testimonies on environmental justice. LaMCA is the environmental conflicts media house from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. This documentary directed by Beatriz Rodriguez Labajos shows small communities from Argentina, Colombia, Kenya, Mexico, the Tibetan plateau, and also big cities in Italy and Colombia. With very different forms of livelihood, the people explain how their everyday realities are threatened or have ceased to exist. In their stories we find common patterns of inequity in the use of local resources, lack of recognition of their viewpoints in decision making, lack of opportunities for participation and, to sum up, the impossibility of living according to their own wishes. This story is given to the backdrop of beautiful scenery, touching music and colorful images. The narrative is divided into four parts: distribution, recognition, participation and capabilities. The documentary considers all such aspects of environmental justice drawing on statements of inhabitants of these communities, and also on words from activists who support them, civil servants and scientists of several countries. Among those interviewed are Robert D. Bullard, Julio Fierro and Tatiana Roa. Next to them, we get to know the unknown faces and names of those who not only endure threats but also confront them, mobilizing collectively and, sometimes, winning battles for environmental justice. In less than half an hour, viewers get a very good sense of what environmental justice is all about.
Online courses
In the EJOLT project three on-line courses on Ecological Economics and Environmental Justice were offered in successive years. Haly Healy (from King's College, London) was in charge delegated by ICTA UAB and SERI together with the cooperation of many other EJOLT partners. About 100 students completed one of the three courses, each of them running for 4 or 5 months. There was a synergy with the EJOLT blog, to which some students offered their entries, and also with entries into the EJAtlas. There was also a one-day presential course at the closing EJOLT event in Brussels in early March 2015. The on-line courses are well established, and there might be a continuation. Fundacion Neotrópica, Costa Rica, collaborated in the third on-line course (2014), and has shown interest in running a Spanish version.
Policy Briefs
Many of the Reports produced as a by-product, a policy-brief meant for policy-makers. We have published 12 well designed policy-briefs (see the EJOLT webpage, under Briefings). In at least one occasion, the Policy-Brief (on ship dismantling) came just in time in the policy-cycle, as the European Commission and Parliament were discussing the issue. Other policy-briefs have had or will have, we hope, delayed effects. Policy Briefs were distributed in Brussels at the final meeting of EJOLT in early March 2015, where there were some EU policy makers.
The Blog
For over three years, the EJOLT webpage published a blog, with news about EJOLT partners and the EJOLT project (new Reports, news about the EJAtlas, announcements of summer schools, on-line courses, jobs), and also about recent environmental conflicts around the world, quite often with mortal victims. We published an average of 10 blog entries per month.
The Glossary
The EJOLT webpage, under Resources, contains a large Glossary of terms from ecological economics, political ecology, environmental justice studies, with their definitions. This has been managed by SERI and used particularly for the on-line courses. It is of course in open access.
D) An internal evaluation
To summarize, we reproduce here Martinez-Alier’s words read at the final internal meeting of the EJOLT consortium in early March 2015 in Brussels, taking stock of what we have achieved so far. This could be seen as an internal evaluation, to be compared to the external evaluation by Professor Jennifer Clapp.
“Many EJOLT members have been engaged in the study and the practice of socio-environmental conflicts and in campaigns for environmental justice for a long time, and we shall continue to be so. Acción Ecológica was engaged in a campaign against Texaco called Amazonía por la Vida by 1990, ERA was fighting Shell in the Delta by 1995 and even before. Alf Hornborg from Lund University wrote in 1998 a crucial article on the theory of ecologically unequal exchange in the journal Ecological Economics. And so, for most of us. GRAIN was active defending peasant agriculture over 25 years ago and introduced the concept of "land grabbing" in 2008. We did not start in 2011 and we shall certainly not finish in 2015. EJOLT has given us some extra money, some extra strength, some new contacts, and some younger recruits for the research and the practice of environmental justice.
This project came into being not because the EC made a research call on studies on environmental justice, I do not think they have yet done this. The call was to support collaborative research on any topic, between academics and civil society (i.e. activists), in a “science-in-society” framework. Such ideas had percolated to the EC research establishment from Andy Stirling and similar authors like Funtowicz and Ravetz we have known for a long time. The coordinators and a few partners were also trained in a previous Science-in-Society project (2008-10), CEECEC, on teaching and learning ecological economics with civil society organizations.
The idea of an environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous (against Ronald Inglehart’s “post-materialist” thesis), or equivalently, as Leah Temper now puts it, the environmentalism of the dispossessed, comes from India and Latin America in the late 1980s. Then, a definition of “ecological distribution conflicts” was published in 1996 by Martin O’Connor and Joan Martinez-Alier, and through Philippe Roman it influenced very much the EJOLT project. The links between the USA movement for environmental justice and against environmental racism and the global movement for environmental justice were mentioned in articles and books already between 1995 and 1997. In EJOLT we have had voluntary collaboration from Prof. Paul Mohai (University of Michigan) whose research work against environmental racism started in the 1980s.
Therefore, in reality the beginning of EJOLT goes back 30 years. And there is no end in sight although financial help will be required to continue, particularly with the EJ Atlas but also to help publish as articles and books many of the collected materials in the Reports, about 25 Reports of various lengths. If from the CEECEC project, 2008-2010, with Hali Healy, we produced a book in 2012, with chapters already from EJOLT, called "Ecological Economics from the Ground Up", now we should perhaps publish a bigger book, “Political Ecology and Environmental Justice from the Ground Up”, apart from many other articles and books which are already coming along.
In EJOLT we had a contribution from the EC that taking off the 7% overhead, amounts to about 3.5 million €. In our work plan, the DoW, we promised to spend a little over one thousand person-months. If we would count in person-years, the EJOLT project has meant about 85 person-years, at an average of about 40.000€ per person year (which includes more than salaries – also social security, travels etc.). We know that there are very different rates depending on whether partners are from rich or poor countries, which is a shame. This aside, how have we spent the 85 person-years? – this is a length of time similar to the whole professional life of a long-lived professor together with one assistant.
The officially reported figures come of course in terms of person-months, by work-packages and by participant organization. But here we want to summarize what we have done, roughly allocating Person-Years to the different large groups of tasks. Of the 85 person-years, we consumed 1 in the book (CEECEC + EJOLT) “Ecological Economics from the Ground Up” (Routledge, 2012), and then about 6 in administration and doing the accounts (mainly at ICTA UAB and also at all organizations).
For the excellent Blog, and for running the two websites (www.ejolt.org www.ejatlas.org) we consumed about another 6 person-years.
For travel and exchanges among ourselves at the six meetings and workshops we had (BCN in April 2011, Rio + 20, Nigeria at Port Harcourt and Abuja which was so instructive, Lund, Rome and the final one in Brussels), i.e. our 6 successful scheduled meetings, about 30 people for 10 days at each meeting including travel time, preparations, some internal trips (as in Brazil)…. This amounts to 6 person-years.
Then for the documentaries (Ethiopia land grabbing, Delhi waste collectors, Sarayaku and Yasuni ITT in Ecuador, Uranium in Namibia, the excellent “Aquí nos vamos a quedar – We are here to say”, and the almost finished documentary on the Unist'ot'en Camp in Canada stopping several pipelines), they have consumed very different amounts of time each, perhaps all together about 6 person-years.
We have run 3 on-line courses on ecological economics and environmental justice, with about 30 students completing each course, which lasts in practice for nearly six months. This has involved many tutors, in summary amounting to about 2 person-years (counting only the coordinator and tutors, not the students).
Up to here, we have counted 27 Person-Years.
Now we come to the Reports, policy briefs and to the articles (and new books) published or in advanced preparation. This is the most important item in EJOLT, it comprises all the Reports in the list of official deliverables, and some extra reports. Beatriz Rodríguez Labajos who painstakingly edited the Reports, and all members who have been involved in writings parts of them, will still discuss further their impact, the plans for further publications. The length of the Reports is variable, between 50 and 220 pages, they are attractively edited. Some of them will easily become books (e.g. the ones on legal issues, from CEDAT and others, which are already published articles; or perhaps the five nuclear Reports, as a single book; or the Reports on Biomass conflicts; or the “transversal” Reports on Valuation or Health). We hope the language will be geared to EJOs. Or they will become published articles. One of them, Report n. 6, on Yasunization and other initiatives to leave oil in the ground, inspired by ERA and Acción Ecológica, is often quoted in Naomi Klein’s 2014 book on climate change that will be so influential at the end of 2015 at the COP in Paris. She also quotes other EJOLT Reports, including the one on carbon trading in Africa.
A byproduct from another Report, n. 18, on one fundamental concept for EJOLT, the Ecological Debt, has been an article by co-author Rikard Warlenius in Global Environmental Change. This article would not exist without Rikard’s industry and intelligence and without the cooperation within EJOLT. This is only one article but there are today already 10 or 12 academic articles published in journals, and there are two special issues in preparation (one in Geoforum on mining conflicts and another one in the Journal of Political Ecology as an outcome of the Lund meeting). There are also some Policy Briefs, as outcomes of the Reports. Much more could and will be said about these materials, their quality and their usefulness. They have still to be fully digested.
Writing and editing 25 Reports, plus Policy Briefs, plus preparing articles for publication, has required an average of 1.5 person-years for each Report, but with much variation depending on the length. This would amount to 36 person-years.
The remaining Person-Years, which would be 22 (which equals 85 - (27+36), we consider have been devoted to the EJAtlas, which on top of this has also enjoyed much cooperation from unpaid collaborators whose time is not included in the present accounts. Preparation of the platform, making some mistakes, preparing and testing the database form, changing the platform (from UC London to Y. C. when he came in) took no less than 2 person-years. Then, in 3 years the EJAtlas has collected, “moderated” and put publicly in the web ejatlas.org nearly 1500 cases, which means 500 per year. Leah Temper and Daniela del Bene have worked full time on EJAtlas. We have established cooperation with outside collaborators. Most other partners have supplied conflict cases for the Atlas: CDCA, Acción Ecológica with OCMAL, ERA, GRAIN, WRM, JNU, CCS Durban, FIOCRUZ, FOCUS from Slovenia, Za Zemiata, BOG in Istanbul, REEDS-UVSQ, Nature Kenya, practically all. The process from cradle through “moderation” to public website implied many people. “Moderation” alone “consumed” two full time well trained people in order to reach 500 new cases per year. We should and will now continue because collaborators are feeding in many cases but we need extra funds. As you know, some geographical areas are under-represented, and this must be corrected to make the EJAtlas credible. Some academic articles will soon appear drawing on the EJAtlas (e.g. country articles on Ecuador by Sara Latorre et al, on Colombia by Mario A. Pérez Rincón, also we hope on Turkey; and thematic articles).
We are developing a new “statistical political ecology”. We have not yet done the correlations we wanted to do between the conflicts and physical or social indicators. Nevertheless, the EJAtlas is a success. A Ph.D. student at the Nelson Centre at the University of Wisconsin (chaired by Paul Robbins, one of the best know political ecologists), Mohammed Rafi Arefin (unknown to us) wrote in a blog on 25th January 2015: “The sheer amount of mapped conflicts is impressive, but what stands out about this tool is the extensive filter and search functionality. Struggles, which are already color coded by toxin or resource, can be parsed at a large level by country, commodity, or company. Once at this level, there are over 50 more filters ranging from mobilizing forms to outcomes. As a preliminary research tool, a teaching aid, or an activist resource, the Environmental Justice Atlas should be of interest to those concerned with environmental justice struggles and innovative ways to make these struggles visible”.
Potential Impact:
We believe that the main objective of the EJOLT project is even more relevant now than it was in 2011, namely, to study and help environmental justice movements because they are a strong force for sustainability. Through our Reports, Policy Briefs, many public presentations, Documentaries, OnLine courses, the EJOLT blog, and the EJAtlas, we undoubtedly have helped to make environmental injustices more visible. In this vein, here we outline some of the main impacts of the project, through a “best practices” approach, i.e. we give some of the best examples to illustrate the impacts of the project.
1) Increased capacity of project members
EJOLT has firstly benefited the members of the network. The academics have enriched their work and capacity through collaboration with non-academic groups and many researchers have expressed that they have learnt to do research in a new way that entails undertaking research more directly guided and led by the input and needs of activists and societal stakeholders and through a participatory manner that entails processes of feedback and reflection between participants.
EJOLT offered some EJOLT academics their first chance to work with CSOs, and the variety of CSO that we called EJOs. This mutual learning will contribute to strengthening the capacity of European researchers to engage in future collaborative, trans-disciplinary research in sustainability sciences with civil society participation.
Case Study Example: CEDAT- URV Experience – New Research Project on Environmental Justice
According to the CEDAT- URV, an academic centre for international environmental law based in Tarragona, Spain, this was the first time that they participated in a Project with civil society groups and this Project has had a transformational impact on how they do research, how they relate to their students and to the scientific development of their work. URV’s participation in this project contributed to significantly broadening the methodology and approaches in the research and teaching activities that it conducts, as reflected in the recently awarded four-year research project in the field of Law, “From Sustainable Development to Environmental Justice: Toward a New Paradigm for Global Governance” 2014-2016, DER2013-44009-P, financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. In addition the team is leading a H2020 proposal under call INT-03-2015, which is meant to continue some aspects of the EJOLT project with the collaboration of some of the EJOLT partners.
The abstract of the new Project DER2013-44009-P is as follows. Concepts and theories from EJOLT are clearly demonstrated.
Based on the political, economic and moral beliefs of Western modernity, the international legal order is the institutional matrix for the global social metabolism, which presents two fundamental problems. For one, it favours the unequal exchange of resources and an inequitable distribution of the negative effects on the environment as characteristic features of the social metabolism in an advanced stage of capitalist accumulation (environmental justice). In addition, it does not take at all into account the finite and vulnerable nature of resources, hence creating obvious risks of (eco)systemic collapse and wanton destruction of natural heritage. In this sense, having provided a paradigm for international (and domestic) environmental law since the 1980s, the notion of sustainable development has revealed itself as insufficient to address the two major present challenges in the relationship between society and nature. In fact, recent development such as the concept of green economy may be regarded as a step back. Coming from the periphery of the global economy, the idea of environmental justice has emerged as a conceptual matrix for imagining an alternative setting to the current status quo. Such an alternative would be based on a global governance system build on different premises. These imply the vindication the ideas of human emancipation that are inherent to constitutionalism, the finiteness and vulnerability of natural resources, as well as the accountability that humankind for its economic and technological development. Moreover, research patterns have emerged in the fields of economics and sociology that reveal significant imbalances between the centre and the periphery of the world economy in terms of unequal ecological exchange. The current system of international relations and international law contribute to these imbalances, thus highlighting the need for theoretical underpinnings for alternative conceptual matrices. The project aims to take on this challenge, focusing on the feasibility of reconceptualising global governance in terms of pluralism and constitutionalism, based on the central notion of environmental justice. On this basis, it intends to elucidate the applicability of constitutionalist notions such as ‘checks-and-balances’ to the power struggles in the contemporary world. Therefore, it will focus on relevant areas in which the lack of justice casts shadow over the hegemonic discourse on sustainable development and its role in international law. The project seeks to identify theoretical elements and legal instruments that may contribute to fostering change in the role of states in the global society, as a first step towards more specific proposals for reconceptualising global governance based on the premises of social and environmental sustainability.
2) Conceptual and Theoretical Development
Through the co-production of knowledge and joint theoretical development between activists and academics, EJOLT contributed significantly to advancing the inter-disciplinary field of environmental justice, specifically in the thematic and transversal areas covered but the project has also touched on unplanned fields at the outset such as the Political Ecology of water, Science and Technology studies and Conservation Biology.
Best Practice Example: Co-production of knowledge on Ecological Debt and Unequal Ecological Exchange
WP 10 has addressed several illusions at the foundation of the current economic world view. These include: the illusion that market prices by definition are equal and fair (the cultural representation of unequal exchange as reciprocal); the illusion that poorer nations should be grateful for wealthier nations’ consumption of their inexpensive labor and natural resources (‘the White Consumer’s burden’); and the illusion that the technological capacity of a given population is independent of that population’s position in a global system of resource flows (‘technological fetishism’). These illusions lead to a discourse on sustainable development that assumes consensus: thus, power, conflicts of interest, unequal distribution, and environmental injustices are rarely identified as scientific problems in need of analysis and research. When such questions of global ecological distribution are addressed within mainstream economics, their treatment often exposes profound moral flaws in currently hegemonic thinking, as illustrated by the infamous ‘Lawrence Summers memo.’
As the concepts of ‘ecologically unequal trade (or exchange)’ and ‘ecological debt’ are highly contested, an important aspect of the work of WP 10 has been to sharpen the analytical definitions of these concepts. In terms of this analytical work, progress has been made in distinguishing concepts of economic value from biophysical metrics commonly referred to in theories of unequal exchange. A conclusion is that materialist theories of value, such as labor and energy theories of value, tend to confuse the economical and the physical. The increase in economic value in a production process certainly entails a decrease of physical, productive potential, as Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen observed, but it is misleading to reduce the added economic value to the investment of a specified quantity of labor or energy. The notion of ‘use value’ commonly thought to be ‘underpaid’ on the market (i.e. the discrepancy between ‘use value’ and exchange value) is a misnomer, since it confuses biophysical quantities with (culturally constituted) consumer demand. Ecologically unequal exchange should be conceptualized as asymmetric transfers of embodied biophysical resources, and is generally reproduced by a disproportionality between the amount of resources embodied in commodities and their relative exchange values, but those embodied resources should not be defined as ‘use values’. The implications of these analytical clarifications are spelled out in several publications. In terms of policy, they imply that simply raising market prices of embodied resources will not make exchange ‘equal’ – because money cannot compensate for entropy – but it could discourage unequal exchange. Similarly, an ‘ecological debt’ cannot be compensated (in material terms) with money, but it can be prevented from increasing.
3) Capacity Building of Activists
For their part, activists have also benefited from their participation in EJOLT, with some differences depending on their individual capacities and needs. The conceptual development within the project and the tools are input to their work, beyond this, we have seen how scientists knowledge has been mobilized for activist purposes as described by Marta Conde, in an article published in 2015 in the journal Ecological Economics.
Case Study Example: Building Capacity on Uranium Mining in Namibia
Through two reports and a documentary, the EJOLT team working on nuclear energy shed light on the dangers of uranium mining in Namibia. Two NGOs in Namibia (Earthlife Namibia and LaRRI), a Brazilian university (FIOCRUZ), a French independent laboratory specialised in radiation (CRIIRAD) and team coordinator Marta Conde (UAB) partnered to produce this remarkable set of action oriented resources. After a public event on the 10th April 2014 in London – together with other activists from Madagascar, Papua New Guinea and the US who are also impacted by the activities of Rio Tinto – an article appeared in The Guardian. This event was organised prior to the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of Rio Tinto that took place on the 15th April 2014. In the AGM, Roger Moody from PARTIZANS presented the results of the study carried out by Earthlife and LaRRI on the impact of uranium mining on workers.
The study was based on 45 interviews with workers and ex-workers of Rössing. 39 of them have complained of health problems. Most workers stated they are not informed about their health conditions and generally don’t know whether they have been exposed to radiation or not. Some workers consult a private doctor to get a second opinion – that, however, is a measure that most workers cannot afford. Following the study published on the impact of low level radiation on mine worker health workers were empowered to demand compensation
EARTHLIFE Namibia and CRIIRAD(Commission for Independent Research and Information about Radiation) also organized visits and measurements in areas located in the vicinity of uranium mines in Namibia, especially Rössing. The CRIIRAD team (Christian Courbon and Bruno Chareyron) also conducted training activities and lectures about Radioprotection issues and the impact of uranium mining. The lectures took place in Windhoek and Swakopmund between September and October 2011. In the course of an on site mission carried out between September 22th and October 2nd 2011, scientists from the CRIIRAD laboratory took radiation measurements in situ, and collected 14 samples of top soil, 13 samples of surface sediments of the Swakop, Gawib and Khan rivers and 11 underground water samples in the alluvium of Swakop, and Khan rivers and tap water from Arandis city. Solid samples have been analysed at the CRIIRAD laboratory in France and water samples have been monitored. The CRIIRAD laboratory accuracy in radiation monitoring is acknowledged by the French Nuclear Safety Authority.
The preliminary findings – submitted to the National Radiation Protection Authority – should give reason for concern about uranium mining in Namibia. The dose rate measured by CRIIRAD on the parking of Rössing mine is about 6 times above natural background value. The finest fraction of the radioactive rocks is washed down by rain water and contaminates the sediments of the Khan river: with values 10 times above those measured in sediments collected in Khan river upstream Rössing mine.
During a meeting on 11 March 2015 called by Rossing, Earthlife and LaRRI were informed by the MD of Rossing, that Rio Tinto will soon conduct an epidemiology study on the mine workers based on the historical medical records of Rossing. This was decided because of the many “rumors” on deteriorating health conditions of miners. It is evident that this long overdue action by Rossing was triggered off by the study done by Earthlife and LaRRI.
The process in Namibia (and similar initiatives undertaken within the Project in Brazil and Malawi not described here) has been termed by Marta Conde in an article in Ecological Economics as a process of “Activism Mobilizing Science”. According to Earthlife, through EJOLT, their members gained substantial knowledge through the project, especially in the field of the nuclear industry and the energy sector in general. Subcontractors familiarized themselves with the topic. Multinational companies and managers of local uranium mines are alerted and recognize Earthlife’s role as watchdog better than ever before, especially after scientific sound data achieved with the invaluable assistance by CRIIRAD were published and discussed with relevant authorities and mine management. Potential miners have a better knowledge about the risks they are exposed to as workers in uranium mines and can make an informed decision. The Namibian public at large is more aware of the impacts caused by uranium mining.
4) Advisory support: an important indirect outcome
Best practice example. Among the connections that has been build or reinforced thanks to WP9, we can quote the collaboration developed between the team of
the Chevron-Texaco case lawyer Pablo Fajardo and the team of the Procurator Antonio Gustavo Gomez from Tucuman, Argentina. The collaboration has led to the
presentation of the demand in October 2014 at the International Criminal Court against Chevron Texaco CEO filled in by Pablo Fajardo and Eduardo Bernabé Toledo, who had met previously during EJOLT WP9 week of activities in Rome in November 2013. See Ejolt blog post and the complaint.
5) Training within EJOLT: Courses, interns and pedagogical uses
One of the most important impacts of the EJOLT project includes the direct training given –3 online courses, the workshops and the presencial course.About 100 students from all over the world participated and completed the yearly online EJOLT courses. Another 30 participated in the final presencial course in Brussels. The pedagogical tools created by the project, including the EJAtlas, the glossary, the policy-briefs, the blog entries, the factsheets and the Reports and published articles have been widely used by a much larger audience.
As envisioned at the beginning of the project the CEECEC course that had been run in 2009-10 was further developed and restructured towards the needs and interests of EJOs. A joint CEECEC-EJOLT textbook ("Ecological Economics from the Ground Up") was edited by Hali Healey et al, and published by Routledge, London in late 2012. A main project objective to build a solid and reliable platform as an information and learning resource for both EJOs and otherswas fully achieved. Within the project 23 Reports were produced, providing detailed insights into the various EJOLT topics and cross cutting issues from a theoretical perspective as well as practical examples. Some Fact Sheets in the EJOLT website allow an easy insights into conflict cases from all over the world as a supplement to the 1500 cases in EJAtlas. The 12 Policy Briefings link EJOLT issues to policy debates and formulate policy recommendations. The Glossary finally provides easy accessible condensed definitions and sources for further reading on relevant EJ terms and approaches.
The training materials co-developed by researchers and EJOs have been used directly as course materials by academic EJOLT partners. For example, in doctoral summer schools in political ecology, in online MOOCs and in multiple classes. Teaching lessons based on the EJAtlas and case studies are being developed for use in high schools and university, benefiting environmental pedadgogy.
Numerous early stage researchers acquainted with the work have been inspired to conduct further research along these lines. At least five official internships and research collaborations with Masters and Doctoral students were engaged in and of these many have been able to leverage their experience for career and personal advancement. Several doctoral and masters theses and academic articles have and will continue to be achieved with EJOLT support.
Best Practice: The EJatlas as a pedagogical tool
Based on the results of a survey administered on ejatlas.org the importance of the tool for teachers and students is clearly demonstrated. Students and teachers using the atlas for their work included those working in the following fields and areas: Political Science, Management, International Studies and Diplomacy, Geo-science, Environmental Sciences, Biodiversity Conservation, Water Resources Management and Policies, veterinany studies, community rights, human ecology, indigenous rights, human rights, geography, GIS and Mapping studies, ecosystem management, industrial ecology, environmental law, History and philosophy of ecology, environmental philosophy, environmental ethics, political ecology, corporate social responsibility, energy and natural resource studies, among others.
Students and other academic users represent approximately 50% of the 1,000+ users who access the EJAtlas daily. According to the survey they use the atlas for displaying for presentations or teaching and also as a reference for research. Further, almost 25% of users found about the atlas through an academic institution or publication, demonstrating its wide use ranging from high school through to university, as well as in less formal learning settings.
6) Sharing of best practices
EJOLT aimed to document best practices methods in (economic and multi-criteria) valuation and assessment of environmental liabilities, sometimes based on court cases, and by publishing these findings in reports to help enable a wide range of external EJOs and other CSOs to uptake these methodologies, and to apply EJOLT findings to their own work. Another expected impact was increased legal capacity and ability to undertake legal court cases. This entailed manuals and guidelines on legal strategies.
Best Practice: Two reports on Best practices in Valuation and Legal Strategies.
Case study: Ejolt report 16: Economic tools for evaluating liabilities in environmental justice struggles. The EJOLT experience
There was a demand from partner EJOLT for clarification on the use of Cost Benefit Analysis (that had been used successfully in the defence of the Tana Delta by Nature Kenya) and Multi-Criteria Analysis (which was being deployed by academics in Ecuador in the case of the Yasuni ITT initiative). In workshops and reports, questions were elucidated. Outcomes suggest that methods are more effectively used through carefully planned interventions supporting debates on local futures and visions, and when there are complementarities with regulatory and institutional developments. Oppositely, evaluation methods disable local mobilization when they force communities to bring their concerns into assessment schemes that do not fit their own languages and concerns, when they reproduce uneven power relations, or where public decisions have little to do with formulating and advancing ‘reasoned arguments’. Insights on the benefits from science-activism collaboration and recommendations on the use of evaluation tools are finally outlined.
A legal guide for communities seeking environmental justice: EJOLT Report 17
The manual provides information on who can fill a lawsuit/action before a Court or institutional bodies, how it needs to be done and links to contacts and models of demands. It is composed of 3 main parts. The first part includes information regarding civil law tools at international, regional and transnational levels. The second part is about international, regional and national criminal tools and bodies. The last part provides information on the defence of environment defenders and other instruments and strategic views based on good practices. The manual also provides information on key concepts, guidance and practical examples on lessons learned from past legal experiences.The manual translates information that is often considered as ‘too difficult’ into a language that is easy to understand and provides basic information for EJOs on how to defend criminalised or threatened environmental justice defenders.
7) Impacts on Policy and Corporate actors
EJOLT published 12 Policy Briefs throughout the project-life. Based from Reports, these briefings aimed to guide or to influence policy decisions related to environmental governance in the EU. EJOLT briefings were given to MEPs while several other events were held with the participation of policy makers. For example the final workshop of the project was held in Brussels in early March 2015, and invited policymakers from the European Union to attend. The Italian EJAtlas was also presented at an event in the European Parliament. On 26 March 2014, an EJOLT delegation (including University of Michigan members, who helped in entering cases in the EJAtlas) visited the headquarters of the European Environment Agency (EEA) in Copenhagen. David Stanners rounded up the debate by sending the EJOLT team home with some questions: “We want to know what is needed for environmental justice. Which existing EU laws can be used, which court cases should we refer to and what are the barriers for making the Aarhus convention effective?”
A few policy-briefs (as explained below) coincided in time with events in the policy-cycle in Brussels that made them more relevant.This is the list of Policy Briefs:
• An overview of industrial tree plantations in the global South: Recommendations for policy makers (EJOLT Briefing 001)
• Shipbreaking: European waste disposal causing conflicts (EJOLT Briefing 002)
• Mining conflicts around the world: the environmental justice perspective (EJOLT Briefing 003)
• Multicriteria evaluation for enhanced Environmental Justice (EJOLT Briefing 004)
• Unburnable Fuels (EJOLT Briefing 005)
• Digging for dirty oil (EJOLT Briefing 006)
• Make human rights truly universal (EJOLT Briefing 007)
• Living beyond our means (EJOLT Briefing 008)
• Use economic tools effectively for evaluating liabilities in environmental justice struggles (EJOLT Briefing 9)
• Expanding Nuclear Power Generation in Eastern Europe (EJOLT Briefing 10)
• Uranium mining. Unveiling the impacts of the nuclear industry (EJOLT Briefing 11)
• A legal guide for communities seeking environmental justice (EJOLT Briefing 12)
Best Practice: EJOLT Policy Brief on Shipbreaking
Our briefing paper with policy recommendations on shipbreaking was used in September 2012 – where policymakers from all over the world were discussing matters related to the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal. EU policymakers involved in the issue of shipbreaking were urged by a specialised NGO – Shipbreaking Platform – to stop the environmental injustices that are a result of the current legal framework and would continue to arise if the European Parliament would adopt the commission proposal made in March 2012. While the Shipbreaking Platform worked hard on dismantling the legality of the current proposal, we contributed by putting some specific case studies (in Alang, Gujarat, India) in their proper environmental justice context – showing the lack of consistency, respect and justice when it comes to dumping the ships we use. This policy briefing sums up what the problem with shipbreaking is, what the EU is doing wrong and what policymakers can actually change.
Best Practice on Corporate Actors: BHR Company response mechanism
EJOLT partner Business and Human Rights (BHR) has been the primary point of contact with external corporate actors. The BHR Resource Centre seeks company responses to allegations of misconduct and publishes these on its website and in the Weekly Updates newsletter. Since launching this service in 2005, they have invited hundreds of companies to respond to allegations; over 75% have responded. The Updates provide an impartial space in which allegations, company responses, and follow-ups to those responses are published alongside one another, helping people to see both sides of the coin and thus get closer to the truth, and encouraging change on the ground. Moreover, the Updates now reach many thousands of opinion leaders worldwide. The BHR response process has sometimes led to immediate positive changes in company policy or practice, in others, to dialogue between the company and those who raised the concerns. In all cases it has increased transparency, enhanced public accountability, and provided information to sectors that use their own means to address company abuses: NGOs, governments, the UN, procurement officers, investors, consumers.
8) Dissemination to the Public at Large
The project may be considered to have had a significant impact on public opinion and awareness. The objective of WP12 was to achieve the widest possible dissemination of project results among external CSOs and EJOs, researchers,policy-makers and the general public. Nick Meynen (EEB) has been crucial to this effort.
Over 200.000 different web users have opened nearly 500.000 pages on www.ejolt.org. The top 12 countries with the highest number of visitors (US, UK, Spain, Canada, India, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Australia, South Africa and Brazil) contain countries from all six continents, showing the global reach of EJOLT. The ECAS database contains the details of approximately 900 dissemination entries, from workshops to articles and presentations to posters. Both scientific and wider audiences were well approached through articles, speeches, social media, TV and radio reports, videos and podcasts. In addition policy makers and journalists were specifically targeted in selected events. EJOLT Documentary videos were shown as teaching tools, in environmental film festivals, world social forums, COPs, and a wide array of other events. Some of the Repots have been widely quoted. This activity is continuing after the end of the project – e.g. in April 2015, the EJAtlas was presented by EJOLT coordinator at the China Agricultural University, Beijing.
The launch of the Atlas was a huge success. Over 130 media in 21 countries with a combined audience of at least 150 million covered the launch in March 2014. Total number of visitors to ejatlas.org are over 400,000 visitors opening almost a million pages in only slightly over a year of being online. EJOLT appeared in TIME magazine (when some EJOLT members met the Pope in Rome in November 2013), several times in The Guardian and many EJOLT resources were quoted in Naomi Klein’s groundbreaking book ‘This Changes Everything. Capitalism vs The Climate’. EJOLT team members and collaborators produced at least ten peer reviewed publications drawing from project results, while several more are pending.
Best Practice: EJOLT in the Media
In countries with ample inventories in the EJAtlas and strong involvement of local groups like Colombia and Italy, the EJAtlas was used as an instrument for bringing many groups together to collaborate on a joint effort reached the front pages of national newspapers, with potential policy impacts. Here are some selections from some of the press coverage about EJOLT and EJatlas
From India, the Live Mint of the Wall Street Journal noted that the Atlas shows how human rights scrutiny of business is increasing. “The Indian and global lists are far from comprehensive, but the information is scalable and can quickly incorporate data and critical perspectives. It’s a list that cannot be wished away by the government’s blocking of such websites, or accusations that it’s a conspiracy of Maoist rebels, of “pseudo-intellectuals” or “pseudo-secularists”…. Unless India adopts the don’t-give-a-damn approach of China, in the game of public relations truth-or-dare there is nowhere for India to cut and run. The increasing globalization of social networking, activism and accountability makes it so….. Those who manufacture spin about protests and environmental clearances being the main hold-up for businesses and economic growth in India, not massive and deliberate administrative ineptitude, impractical policies, populist fiscal payouts and rivers of corruption that flow as quick in dry summer months as they do at monsoonal spate, would need to take note. Human rights scrutiny of business is increasing. Deal with it.”
Science Magazine covered the map, noting that of the 915 conflicts listed at the time (amcth 2014) 271 involve local scientists and professionals, and 17% are described as environmental victories. Perhaps our best coverage has been from Colombia where top newspapers such as El Tiempo , La Semana and El Espectador have carried pages full of information on the EJOLT Atlas, compiled by Dr. Mario A. Perez Rincon and his collaborators at CINARA and Universidad del Valle, Cali.
In an article in El Espectador, Carlos Andrés Baquero showed the incidence of environmental conflicts in areas inhabited by indigenous and Afro-Colombian minorities. Using data from the EJAtlas, he shows that of the 72 cases already uploaded for Colombia, in 42 there was involvement of such ethnic minorities, a proportion much higher than in the population as a whole. Such statistics will become of interest, we feel, to UN Rapporteurs.
Finally the EJatlas has recently been written about twice in the Guardian. EJatlas Coordinator Leah Temper wrote about the Atlas on March 3, 2015 under the heading: Mapping the Global Battle to Protect the Planet. In the article she explains that “While statistics on strike action have been collected since the late 19th century for many countries and now globally by the International Labour Organisation, there is no one body that tracks the occurrence and frequency of mobilisations and protests related to the environment. It was this need to better understand and to track such contentious activity that motivated the Atlas of Environmental Justice project, an online interactive map that catalogues localised stories of resistance against damaging projects: from toxic waste sites to oil refining operations to areas of deforestation.” The article was shared over 1,000 times from the website and hundreds of thousands of times via social media. The Guardian later followed up on this article with another written by staff writer Jonathan Watts entitled: No battle can be fought without a map, the autor writes: “This is a positive step forward and hopefully only the start. I’d like to see a global environmental map that allows people across the world to post images and stories of dump sites, chemical spills, cancer clusters, deforestation and major sources of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It should be searchable, filterable and have a Wikipedia-like system of verification. This could be a very useful tool for policymakers and activists, as well as reminding the rest of us what we are doing to our planet.Environmental conflict is only likely to grow as populations increase, resources become scarcer and climate change takes its toll. Mitigating or fighting these problems will require a greater understanding of where they originate. No such battle can be fought without a map.”
9) Creating a network dedicated to Environmental Justice.
EJATLAS has proven to be an invaluable resource to users both within and beyond the academic community. Beneficiaries include civil society groups, local communities, policy-makers, students, the academic community, journalists, the case study communities, the public at large and all those who have a stake in Environmental Justice. EJOLT has significantly strengthened the networking among project members themselves and acts as an important platform for networking among all those committed to Environmental Justice activism and research. For example, according to a survey conducted on ejatlas.org over 17% of users make use of the atlas for networking.
Best Practice: The EJatlas Extended Community
Up to April 2015, there have been over 200 contributors both individuals and groups, from all over the world, including 70 different academic institutions and many individual activists and groups, of which at least 50 have contributed with more than 5 cases. Institutional collaborations include those with the University of Michigan and the research group of prof. Paul Mohai and Rebecca Hardin, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Oxford University (Human Geography of China), FLACSO Ecuador, Center for Social Studies in Portugal, among others. Requests for using or analysing data have come from policy-making agencies (like UN ECLAC), Asian Development Bank, the International Organization for Migration and numerous researchers.
The EJATLAS has also provided an outlet for discriminated groups to make their claims and learn from others. In the past it has brought cases to the attention of the office of the Aarhus Convention for example.The development of Featured maps as campaign tools as has been done with Friends of the Earth Europe on a featured map on Fracking that included conflicts and geo-spatial data such as one on water stressed regions and a map with GRAIN on Seed Laws. Other collaborations include with the End Ecocide Campaign, the Stop Corporate Impunity campaign, Friends of the Earth Australia, Yes to Life No To Mining, the Global Alliance Against Incineration, World Movement of Fisher-peoples, OilWatch, Latin American Observatory of Mining Conflicts, Via Campesina and others.
Sub-Platforms and Country Maps
Best Practice: The Italian Atlas in the European Parliament
The Italian Atlas has been developed as a national focus from the international atlas. Coordinated by the research team of CDCA, the full platform has been translated to Italian to ease its access and use at national level. The Italian Atlas is an open, georeferenced Web Platform built by a interdisciplinary team composed of researchers, journalists, activists and territorial committees. It gathers information on the major Environmental conflicts in Italy. From Vajont to Casal Monferrato, from Taranto to Brescia, from the “Terra dei Fuochi” to Susa Valley, from the oil exploitation area to the coal-fired power plants, from Industrial districts to agroindustry areas, from the mega-infrastructures to waste management. The Atlas of the Italian environmental emergencies also gathers the experiences of active citizenship in defence of local territories and right to health.
http://cdca.it/en/events/event/presentazione-dellatlante-italiano-dei-conflitti-ambientali-al-parlamento-europeo
On Tuesday 14th April 2015 at 15.30 pm the Documentation Centre on Environmental Conflicts (CDCA) in partnership with the association A Sud presented the Italian Atlas on Environmental Conflicts to the European Parliament. Representatives of the following local committees involved in the Atlas development participated in the public event and debate, among them:
Coordinamento Nazionale No Triv (National coordination against oil extractions) | Local committees against oil extractions: No Triv Abruzzo | No Triv Irpinia (Campania) | No Triv Calabria | No Triv-No Eni Gela (against oil extractions and petrochemical plants, Sicily) | No Elettrodotto Villanova-Gissi (against a power line project, Abruzzo) | No Muos Niscemi (Committee against Mobile User Objective System, Sicily) |Laboratorio Aprile Acerra (Local committee against incinerator, Campania) | Stop Biocidio Campania(network for environment and health) | Forum ambientalista Calabria (network of environmental committees) | Comitato regionale Calabria No discariche No inceneritori (against waste dump and incinerator) | Comitato Legamjonici – Taranto (against industrial contamination, Puglia) | Rete salute-ambiente Salerno (network for environment and health, Campania) | Comitato No Inceneritore Salerno(against an incinerator, Campania) | Coordinamento interregionale Abruzzo-Marche No Tubo (interregional network against a pipeline project) | No centrale del Mercure (against a biomass central for energy production) | No elettrodotto Calabria (against power line) | Brindisi bene comune (against industrial pollution).
After the presentation of the Atlas, A Sud, CDCA and the representatives of the committees met various MEPs members of the ENVI – Commission for environment, public health and food safety.
In conclusion, EJOLT has achieved and in many cases exceeded these strategic objectives and has had a considerable impact including upon project members and their institutions, the academic and scholarly community, to the work of civil society and social movement groups and in the wider public. Many other impacts will be felt of course after the end of the project in 2015.
Moreover, as public engagement with the project and a recent survey administered on the project website demonstrate, project results and outputs have reached different actors – from government workers, to students to activists to concerned citizens far beyond Europe and the project can be considered to have an impact globally.
Evidence of societal impact was strong according to the Project External Evaluator who notes that it may yet still be too soon to know the full societal impact of the project.
According to her interview of participants, over 70% of the participants judge the societal impact of the project to fall within either the significant category (easy to cite three or more examples of societal impact – 33.3%) or in the strong impact category (easy to cite at least two areas of impact 39.4%). In terms of the broad reflections on societal impact, many participants noted the deepening and broadening of research around themes of environmental justice and conflict.
List of Websites:
www.ejolt.org
www.ejatlas.org