World Development Movement blog

Alex Salmond has called for 2012 to be the "year of climate justice", but Scottish Ministers are already going against that by not funding their own plans and policies to cut climate emissions in Scotland.

Guest post by Innocent Sithole, used to be Web intern

One of the most encouraging aspects of our campaign against food speculation is that our arsenal of research-based evidence proving the connection between unbridled financial speculation and rising food prices continues to grow. Following our exposé of Barclays Bank’s harvest of super profits from betting on food last year, we’ve gone further to pull the fig leaf off some of Europe’s biggest food gamblers with a new report released jointly with Friends of the Earth Europe.

Guest post by James Angel, used to be campaigns intern

Guest post by James Angel, used to be campaigns and policy intern

As climate justice activists, when we think about our global economy’s addiction to fossil fuels, we quite rightly focus on the 300,000 in the global south that are killed by climate change every year. But our addiction to fossil fuels is also killing thousands of people in the UK through fuel poverty. Between 2010 and 2011, there were 25,700 ‘excess winter deaths’ in the UK, this statistic demarcating the extra people that died in the winter in comparison to other seasons. Of these deaths we can be sure that, at the very least, 10 per cent were directly attributable to the fact that people cannot afford to heat their homes.

Alongside the UN climate talks that took place earlier this month, Durban’s KZN university hosted a ‘people’s space’: an alternative space where people could come together to talk about the struggle for climate justice.

On, the penultimate day of the Durban climate talks, I joined other climate justice allies at what became one of COP17’s most theatrical press conferences yet. Organised by the Climate Justice Now coalition, allies from across the world took this opportunity to give their analysis of the conference so far, making it clear they felt ignored by the governments who are supposed to represent them.

Talk of a long-term climate deal to cut carbon emissions is allowing industrialised countries to delay taking action, says World Development Movement policy officer Murray Worthy, writing from Durban.