HIC at COP30: Standing for Climate Justice and Habitat Rights

Our Position

Position Paper from Latin America

HIC Members in Latin America have been meeting over the past few months to discuss some of the key thematics and priorities from these movements ahead of COP30. This process, facilitated along the Global platform the Right to the City, Misereor, IIED-AL and Foro Ciudades para la Vida, resulted in a joint regional position paper on the Right to the City and Climate Justice endorsed by dozens of organizations.

The document introduces the following demands:

• Fair, accessible, and direct financing for urban adaptation and mitigation initiatives that effectively reach low-income neighborhoods and local actors.
• Inclusive and binding governance mechanisms, where communities have a real say in urban and climate decisions.
• Protection of environmental defenders and community leaders from violence and criminalization.
• Recognition of local and urban knowledge, in dialogue with scientific knowledge, as the basis for climate policies.
• Support for existing territorial solutions, such as urban agriculture, nature-based solutions, circular water management, and sustainable housing rehabilitation.
• Building public-community alliances and coalitions to scale up solutions and ensure that strategies are contextualized, decolonial, and fair.

Click here to read the full document

HIC’s Position Paper on Climate Justice

The impacts of climate change most affect urban residents in precarious housing and living conditions, making it critical to draw a clear connection between climate justice, housing and habitat. HIC has advanced this connection in the last few years, making a case for climate justice as a habitat-related human right, the importance of community-led and grassroots responses to assessing losses and damages and developing adaptation measures, among others.

Read our position paper to understand in detail our approach to climate justice

Community Actions in the Face of Climate Change

In November 2023, during the Forum “The habitat crisis and climate change: from local responses to international debate” held by HIC-AL, 18 experiences (9 urban and 9 rural) were presented, showing how communities and organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean are facing the climate crisis from their territories.

Based on these presentations, the HIC Regional Office for Latin America (HIC-AL) carried out a systematization process in light of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), finding consistency with some of the strategy options outlined in the Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC Working Group III on Climate Change Mitigation.

The cases include initiatives in reforestation, agroecology, energy autonomy, community water management, safe housing with local materials, climate justice, and ecosystem regeneration. Each experience demonstrates that organized communities can generate innovative, fair, and sustainable solutions.

Here you can explore the 18 cases in image format and learn how, in different territories, these transformative actions for life, habitat, and climate are being built. Unfortunately the materials are in Spanish only for the moment.