Major Group: Women
10th Session of the Open Working Group on
Sustainable Development Goals
Focus Area 7: Energy
Thank you chair, my name is Carmen Capriles from Reacción Cimática and speaking on behalf of the MGs Women, Youth, Indigenous Peoples and international networks including Slowcat and IBON and others, representing over 1000 organizations worldwide.
We support the inclusion of both standalone and cross cutting goals and targets on energy. A standalone goal on energy can set the stage of moving the humanity forward to renewable energy and away from the old development paradigm that heavily relies upon fossil fuels.
We recommend however, to entitle this section “safe, renewable and environmentally-friendly energy” in contrast to Business as Usual. This focus area should aim at community-based small-scale decentralized renewable energy systems, which offer a cost- and environment-friendly alternative to resource extraction, processing, and infrastructure development that are associated with fossil fuels.
The focus area 7 currently does not sufficiently address the existing drawbacks of unjust and unsustainable energy systems which harm the environment, climate, communities, and especially women. A transformative Post 2015 agenda must address this power imbalance – of the continuing corporate influence/control in the way the world produces, distributes and consumes energy at the expense of the people and the planet. For example, targets should be set to reduce the energy intensity of transport systems through modal shift to lower carbon transport (e.g. public transport, rail, water, cycling), move from single care ownership to shared ownership systems and improved efficiency (especially fuel economy of cars).
We are concerned about the definition of energy as used in your document, co-chairs. Special attention needs to be paid on what is being offered as ‘modern’ sources of energy since experiences from nuclear energy have shown that these can result even more detrimental economic, health and environmental impacts. We thus recommend to apply the precautionary principle to define ‘modern’ energy - it should be defined as safe, renewable and environmentally friendly energy and recognize the high cost of externalities of nuclear and fossil fuel based energy.
We call for the following guiding principles for this section:
• Ensure women should be fully and equally involved in decision-making about energy policies and should have equal access to, and control -- we therefore welcome the co-chairs addition of women’s empowerment in the opening description.
• Prioritize decentralized and democratically controlled energy generation and use,
• Ensure equitable access to energy which means meeting everybody’s fundamental energy needs while reducing excessive energy consumption at the same time (and reducing energy licks on the distributions matrix);
• Protect the climate, ecosystems, and communities', including women's livelihoods and rights.
We therefore call for following targets:
1. Divest and remove subsidies – on coal, nuclear, large scale hydro, industrial biofuel, by 2020
2. Establish in all countries a “just energy transition program” that redirects investments to community-based, efficient, low carbon, renewable, and clean energy infrastructure by 2020 and Phase out existing destructive energy sources by date xxx (coal, nuclear, large scale hydro- dams, industrial biofuel).
3. Supports fossil and nuclear sector workers to transits to new decent energy jobs by 2020
4. Achieve maximum energy efficiency and energy saving stepwise by 2020 and 2030
5. Meet the energy needs of rural communities including indigenous peoples through safe, renewable and socially and environmentally friendly energy by 2030.
However, efficiency alone is not enough, and SDGs therefore also need to set targets for:
6. Namely, establish absolute caps to reduce (over-)consumption, especially in Northern countries; as we have to halt the current trend where the global North is provided by questionable energy sources from the global South, for instance, mega dams and large-scale wood-based bioenergy including mono-crops.
And finally, we need a target 7: by 2020 perverse incentives such as carbon offsets should be eliminated.
Thank you chair!
Sustainable Development Goals
Focus Area 7: Energy
Thank you chair, my name is Carmen Capriles from Reacción Cimática and speaking on behalf of the MGs Women, Youth, Indigenous Peoples and international networks including Slowcat and IBON and others, representing over 1000 organizations worldwide.
We support the inclusion of both standalone and cross cutting goals and targets on energy. A standalone goal on energy can set the stage of moving the humanity forward to renewable energy and away from the old development paradigm that heavily relies upon fossil fuels.
We recommend however, to entitle this section “safe, renewable and environmentally-friendly energy” in contrast to Business as Usual. This focus area should aim at community-based small-scale decentralized renewable energy systems, which offer a cost- and environment-friendly alternative to resource extraction, processing, and infrastructure development that are associated with fossil fuels.
The focus area 7 currently does not sufficiently address the existing drawbacks of unjust and unsustainable energy systems which harm the environment, climate, communities, and especially women. A transformative Post 2015 agenda must address this power imbalance – of the continuing corporate influence/control in the way the world produces, distributes and consumes energy at the expense of the people and the planet. For example, targets should be set to reduce the energy intensity of transport systems through modal shift to lower carbon transport (e.g. public transport, rail, water, cycling), move from single care ownership to shared ownership systems and improved efficiency (especially fuel economy of cars).
We are concerned about the definition of energy as used in your document, co-chairs. Special attention needs to be paid on what is being offered as ‘modern’ sources of energy since experiences from nuclear energy have shown that these can result even more detrimental economic, health and environmental impacts. We thus recommend to apply the precautionary principle to define ‘modern’ energy - it should be defined as safe, renewable and environmentally friendly energy and recognize the high cost of externalities of nuclear and fossil fuel based energy.
We call for the following guiding principles for this section:
• Ensure women should be fully and equally involved in decision-making about energy policies and should have equal access to, and control -- we therefore welcome the co-chairs addition of women’s empowerment in the opening description.
• Prioritize decentralized and democratically controlled energy generation and use,
• Ensure equitable access to energy which means meeting everybody’s fundamental energy needs while reducing excessive energy consumption at the same time (and reducing energy licks on the distributions matrix);
• Protect the climate, ecosystems, and communities', including women's livelihoods and rights.
We therefore call for following targets:
1. Divest and remove subsidies – on coal, nuclear, large scale hydro, industrial biofuel, by 2020
2. Establish in all countries a “just energy transition program” that redirects investments to community-based, efficient, low carbon, renewable, and clean energy infrastructure by 2020 and Phase out existing destructive energy sources by date xxx (coal, nuclear, large scale hydro- dams, industrial biofuel).
3. Supports fossil and nuclear sector workers to transits to new decent energy jobs by 2020
4. Achieve maximum energy efficiency and energy saving stepwise by 2020 and 2030
5. Meet the energy needs of rural communities including indigenous peoples through safe, renewable and socially and environmentally friendly energy by 2030.
However, efficiency alone is not enough, and SDGs therefore also need to set targets for:
6. Namely, establish absolute caps to reduce (over-)consumption, especially in Northern countries; as we have to halt the current trend where the global North is provided by questionable energy sources from the global South, for instance, mega dams and large-scale wood-based bioenergy including mono-crops.
And finally, we need a target 7: by 2020 perverse incentives such as carbon offsets should be eliminated.
Thank you chair!