Community-led regeneration is a remedy for political inaction

A statement on this week's UN Environment Programmes Emissions Gap Report ahead of COP30

We want to start this statement by saying that there is hope. It’s easy to feel disheartened, and it’s also easy for writers to fall into the doomscrolling traps that make our readers feel shocked and scared for the sake of a clickable headline. Yes, we are in a dire place, but that doesn’t mean we should sit back and let corporate greed in the minority world ruin us all. We can take action.

Hold on to your optimism as you read the latest UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Emissions Gap Report. This week’s report marks ten years since the Paris Agreement and delivers a very frank warning. While the last ten years has seen a solid uptake of seemingly positive policies from nations around the world, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, reaching a record 57.7 gigatonnes of CO₂ equivalent in 2024. Current policies and practices put the planet on course for around 2.8 °C of warming. The report highlights that 1.5 °C of warming will almost certainly be exceeded within the next decade, if indeed we have not already passed this threshold.

Oxfam’s new report titled Climate Plunder highlights how the majority of these emissions are caused by a small group of people in the Global North. A single billionaire emits as much emissions as the entire population of many countries. At the same time, many billionaires and their companies lobby policymakers to protect their polluting interests at the expense of progressive climate policies. This greed, very literally, costs lives.

Politics tends to be innately slow. Sometimes, this is rightfully so because, of course, policies need to go through a consultation period and be reviewed and iterated on by a wide number of people with a high level of expertise in the subject. However, we often see how policies are undermined because of corporate interests. Climate policies move at a disproportionately slow rate, and at previous climate conferences like COP we see that climate goals gradually weaken throughout the drafting process after interventions by fossil fuel lobbyists.

We acknowledge and applaud the meaningful steps forward toward climate action, but these steps are far too slow and too shallow. Every moment of inaction or weak action locks in further harm for people, non-human animals and ecosystems, especially in the Global South. Many communities are already facing climate-induced disasters and displacement.

But we don’t need to wait for the political needle to shift. Communities around the world are already transforming their eco-social landscapes through regenerative design. The wild, natural world is filled with learnings on how we can meet our human needs while also living in partnership with thriving, healthy ecosystems.

We need politicians and policymakers who are Permaculture Designers, Agroecologists, Regenerative thinkers, and implementers of Nature-based Solutions. As practitioners in Regenerative movements, let’s educate them at every possible opportunity. But while they are learning, let us stand in solidarity with each other, and learn from one another’s wisdom. Let us tend to our own communities, locally and internationally, to grow resilience from the group up. We can’t wait, and we don’t need to wait.

Signed,

Re-Alliance members