Ethical Stocktake Reveals the Empty Shelves of the UNFCCC: A Call to Transformation
Context: The Global Ethical Stocktake (GES): An Ethical Mutirão for Climate Action, was launched as part of the lead-up to COP30 (the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference), which took place in Belem, Brazil from November 10th through the 22nd. By the start of COP30, GES regional meetings and dialogues across six continents had taken place.
During COP30, Jacqueline (Jacqui) Patterson, Executive Director of The Chisholm Legacy Project, spoke at a panel on “Future Pathways for the Global Ethical Stocktake” with co-panelists: Kumi Naidoo, Rodne Galicha, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, Brianna Fruean, Marco Tedesco, Marcel Fukayama, Filippo Grandi, Nicholas Stern. The panel took place on November 18, and was hosted by Marina Silva, Minister of Environment and Climate Change for the Government of Brazil.
The following are Jacqui’s remarks and call to action:
I am deeply appreciative of the Global Ethical Stocktake formation and the strategic, deliberative, heartful souls of Minister Marina de Silva, Karenna Gore, Wanjira Mathai, Michelle Bachelet, and all others who have held it with such care through the carefully curated spaces designed to lift the voices and leadership of frontline communities.
The ethical dimensions of the climate crisis cannot just be measured in parts per billion. The ethical dimensions of the climate crisis are measured in stories, communities, and lives, as demonstrated by the sharing of my sister Briana [Fruean].
It should be measured in the tears shed by a 13-year-old boy in Geiger, Alabama, who was the only person to survive having his home blown away by one of all too many storms fueled by climate change.
It should be measured in the number of days and the degrees of heartache as families are separated in the context of climate-forced migration.
In the words of Warsan Shire, a Kenyan-born Somali poet: “No one puts their child in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.”
It must be measured in the years of lost childhood of the girls in Mphumalanga, South Africa, who must walk farther to get water – missing school because of the time it takes due to the climate drought-fueled drying of watering holes. But what is most tragic is that I learned this in a focus group where mothers were advocating for female-controlled condoms so that the girls could wear them as they take this walk because of the likelihood of sexual assault on those dangerous paths. The very epitome of unethical.
Ethical dimensions should be measured in the number of breaths a child with asthma can take in the township of Soweto, South Africa, or in the neighborhoods of Houston, Texas, or in the favelas in Brazil – all of whom are choking on the fumes of greed.
It should be measured in the number of tears shed by too many Black men in the United States as they hold the lifeless bodies of their partners, as the epidemic of Black maternal mortality rises and is tied to particulate matter from fossil fuel pollution.
It must be measured in the number of embers from the forest fires that are burning communities from Altadena, California, to the Amazon, or the flames from oil wells that are scorching our lungs in Port Arthur, Texas, to Port Harcourt in Nigeria.
It should be measured by the billions of dollars that the fossil fuel industry is making – OR the billions of dollars being made by the price gouging disaster capitalists while millions are being displaced.
In the words of the spoken word duo Climbing PoeTree: “Who is doing the rebuilding and who are they building for?”
In answer to this question, the Global Ethical Stocktake must be institutionalized and made permanent, and it must be integrated throughout the processes and through the constituency groups. Echoing Kumi [Naidoo]’s call for an ethical impact assessment of all aspects of the UNFCCC.
The GES is only as good as if – and when – the telling of these stories, the calling out of these ethical atrocities result in meaningful transformational action.
In the North American Dialogue of the GES, David Suzuki challenged the UNFCCC Presidency to kick the fossil fuel lobby out of COP. And he was just echoing the voices of all impacted communities.
With thousands of fossil fuel lobbyists still dominating the COP, what are we really accomplishing?
When 605 lobbyists from the false solution of carbon capture and sequestration ALONE are here, while our delegation of frontline women whose tears are represented in the above stories had to split ONE BADGE day-by-day after coming here to lift our voices – as we left the very families and communities behind who are desperately in need of our care as a result of the impacts of climate change.
How can the Global Ethical Stocktake ensure that ethics becomes the rod of accountability against which we measure not just the paltry notion of emissions reduction in a net zero context, but the necessary goal of emissions elimination in a life and nation saving context?
I’m headed to the Maldives next. In 2009, they had a cabinet meeting under water to illustrate internally and to the world where they are going to be too soon – like communities such as the Biloxi Chitimacha Choctaw nation in Louisiana, and like coastal communities in the Bahamas and beyond. While billionaire oil barons bloated with the excesses born on the backs of Black babies have private mountaintop oases where they are protected from the impacts of their own greed.
At this COP, Afro-Descendant communities are rising up and calling for a focal point, a constituency group, and language in the text on systemic racism and climate reparations. Given the stories above and beyond, we can only have a positive result in taking stock of ethics when this demand has been met.
As long as the polluters continue to have more seats at the table, and more power than the people, we can safely deem that the stock we take on ethics has a long distance to go before it achieves our aspirations.
The inspiration for my organization is Shirley Chisholm, who was the first Black woman in the United States to run for President. Shirley said: If you don’t have a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.
Well, we are tired of sitting at the table with a raggedy folding chair while polluters and profiteers continue to sit on gigantic gold embossed thrones wielding all the power.
How do we reach a point where the Global Ethical Stocktake becomes a celebration instead of a parade of tears???
This is called a High-Level Ministerial Event, and the actions and the outcomes of the UNFCCC proceedings continue to bely the notion that ethics, as a metric, has reached the appropriate level of power and influence.
We will only be successful when we can celebrate that the voice and leadership of frontline communities is centered. When ethics becomes the number one metric.
When the fossil fuel lobbyists are the ones outside protesting and clamoring to get in, instead of the people who are least responsible for this crisis and most affected.
We will only be successful when instead of COP being known as the Conference of Polluters or the Conference of Profiteers, COP then becomes known as the Conference of the People!!
In the words of the now banned U.S. Youth Poet Laureate, Amanda Gorman: “There is always light. As long as we are brave enough to see it. As long as we are brave enough to be it.”