Social Movements Driving Climate Justice: Divestment and Food Sovereignty

From the streets of The Hague to the rice paddies of Indonesia, social movements have become powerful forces reshaping how the world addresses climate change. These grassroots coalitions-comprising activists, students, peasants, and indigenous communities-are not waiting for governments to act. Instead, they are challenging the fossil fuel industry’s dominance and defending agricultural traditions that have sustained communities for generations. Two movements stand out in this fight for climate justice: the fossil fuel divestment campaign and the food sovereignty movement.

Understanding social movements in the climate context 🔗

Social movements have historically emerged as responses to the deprivation of basic human rights among poor and vulnerable populations. While earlier movements were largely anti-colonial in nature, contemporary movements increasingly challenge neo-liberal economic policies that prioritize profit over people and planet. The success of transformative movements-from India’s Civil Disobedience Movement to the US Civil Rights Movement and the European Feminist Movement-has always depended on building coalitions among conscientious stakeholders who share common goals.

According to social movement theorists, these movements function as networks of groups and organizations aiming to fundamentally change society or resist such changes. They can be formal or informal, with top-down or bottom-up structures, and may evolve into transnational networks that coordinate action across borders. Their effectiveness depends largely on social cohesion and organizational capacity.

The birth of climate justice as a global phenomenon 🔗

The first Climate Justice Summit was held in The Hague, Netherlands, in November 2000, running parallel to the official UN climate negotiations (COP-6). While government delegates debated market-based solutions to global warming, community activists from around the world gathered at a small theater to share experiences of climate change’s on-the-ground impacts. This watershed gathering was attended by approximately 500 people, including a strong contingent from the environmental justice movement in the United States.

The summit represented the first time such a diverse group of grassroots activists from around the world gathered to focus specifically on climate change. Speakers described human rights violations and environmental devastation caused by the fossil fuel industry, connecting local struggles to the global climate crisis. A declaration issued at the end of the summit stated that climate change is fundamentally a rights issue affecting livelihoods, health, children, and natural resources.

The Bali Principles of Climate Justice 🔗

Building on the momentum from The Hague, a coalition of movement organizations including CorpWatch, Third World Network, and the Indigenous Environmental Network developed the Bali Principles of Climate Justice in 2002. These 27 principles were formally adopted during the final preparatory negotiations for the 2002 Earth Summit. The principles sought to redefine climate change as primarily a social and human rights issue, rather than a technical problem requiring only engineering solutions. They called upon industrialized nations and fossil fuel industries to acknowledge their historical responsibility for the climate crisis.

The fossil fuel divestment movement 🔗

The divestment movement advocates for withdrawing investments from fossil fuel companies as a strategy to challenge the industry’s political power, create uncertainty about its long-term financial viability, and redirect capital toward climate solutions. The modern divestment campaign began in 2012, inspired by the successful divestment campaigns against apartheid in South Africa that helped pressure that country to end its discriminatory system.

350.org and the Go Fossil Free campaign 🔗

350.org, founded in 2008, has been at the forefront of this movement. The organization’s name refers to 350 parts per million-the concentration of carbon dioxide that scientists consider the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2. In 2012, founder Bill McKibben launched a nationwide tour of college campuses, presenting data about the fossil fuel industry’s massive carbon reserves and urging students to pressure their institutions to divest.

The first significant victory came when Unity College in Maine became the first institution of higher learning to divest from fossil fuels in November 2012. The campaign quickly spread to many parts of the world, and by 2015 thousands of divestment campaigns were underway globally. The movement has successfully pressured major cities including New York, London, and Berlin to commit to divesting public funds from fossil fuels.

Impact and growth of divestment 🔗

As of July 2023, more than 1,593 institutions with assets totaling over $40.5 trillion worldwide had begun or committed to some form of fossil fuel divestment. High-profile divesters include Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, the Church of England, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, World Council of Churches, and the British Medical Association. The campaign has been described as the fastest growing divestment movement in history.

The movement’s power has been amplified through community-led petitions. Over 1,000 petitions supported by more than 350,000 signatures from around the world have helped shift trillions of dollars away from fossil fuels. Faith-based organizations have played a particularly significant role, recognizing the moral imperative to act on climate. The campaign’s success has even been acknowledged by the fossil fuel industry itself-Peabody Energy mentioned the divestment movement as a factor in declining profits in its SEC filings.

Food sovereignty and La Via Campesina 🔗

The industrial food system is a major contributor to climate change, responsible for between 44 and 57 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions when accounting for deforestation, agriculture, processing, packaging, transportation, refrigeration, and waste. In response, La Via Campesina-meaning “the peasant way” in Spanish-emerged as an international movement bringing together millions of peasants, small and medium-size farmers, landless people, rural women and youth, indigenous peoples, migrants, and agricultural workers from around the world.

Origins and structure of La Via Campesina 🔗

Founded in 1993 in Mons, Belgium, La Via Campesina now comprises approximately 182 organizations in 81 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, representing about 200 million farmers. The movement is autonomous, pluralist, and multicultural, remaining independent from any political, economic, or other affiliation. It was this movement that first introduced the concept of “food sovereignty” at the World Food Summit in 1996.

Food sovereignty is defined as the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. This differs significantly from “food security,” which focuses merely on access to sufficient food. Food sovereignty places control of food systems in the hands of those who produce, distribute, and consume food, rather than markets and corporations.

Agroecology as a climate solution 🔗

La Via Campesina promotes agroecology as an alternative to corporate food systems. Agroecological practices work with nature rather than against it, reducing dependence on fossil fuel-based inputs like synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Research indicates that a food system based on food sovereignty, small-scale farming, and agroecology could reduce carbon emissions by half within a few decades-without commodifying carbon through trading schemes.

Peasant agroecology helps cool the Earth by requiring less energy than industrial agribusiness and keeping fossil fuels in the ground through reduced dependence on chemical inputs. Studies have found that the biodiversity within agroecological systems makes them significantly more resilient to climate disasters, allowing farmers to recover more quickly from extreme weather events.

Resistance to REDD+ and land grabbing in Indonesia 🔗

La Via Campesina members have actively resisted what they call “false solutions” to climate change, including carbon trading schemes like REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). In Indonesia’s Jambi province, around 96,000 hectares of land were privatized through a REDD+ project in the early 2000s, ostensibly as an “environmentally friendly” initiative. Local communities lost their food sovereignty while a corporation received a 100-year lease to access the land.

The Indonesian Peasant Union (Serikat Petani Indonesia, or SPI), a La Via Campesina member, has led resistance against such land grabbing and deforestation. Their efforts contributed to the development of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2018. This declaration includes measures to guarantee the rights of peasant communities to land, water, and other resources.

The interconnected struggle for climate justice 🔗

Both the divestment movement and the food sovereignty movement share a common understanding: climate change is fundamentally about power, justice, and human rights. They recognize that those who have benefited most from industrialization are disproportionately responsible for climate change, while the world’s poorest and most marginalized communities suffer the greatest consequences.

The divestment movement attacks the problem from the financial side, seeking to delegitimize and defund the fossil fuel industry. The food sovereignty movement addresses it through alternative production systems that feed communities while healing the land. Together, they represent a comprehensive grassroots challenge to business-as-usual approaches to climate change.

These movements demonstrate that effective climate action does not require waiting for governments or international agreements. Communities around the world are already building alternatives-withdrawing support from destructive industries, practicing sustainable agriculture, and organizing across borders to amplify their voices. Their successes show that social cohesion and collective action remain powerful tools for transformation.

What do you think? How might the strategies of divestment campaigns and food sovereignty movements be adapted to address climate challenges in your own community? And in what ways could connecting financial activism with agricultural reform create more powerful leverage for systemic change?

References

1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2023.2176760
2. https://www.corpwatch.org/article/climate-justice-summit-provides-alternative-vision
3. https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/46926/looking-back-on-bali
4. https://gofossilfree.org/
5. https://350.org/our-impact/
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_divestment
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Campesina
8. https://www.fao.org/agroecology/database/detail/en/c/1199383/
9. https://www.agroecology-europe.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/La-Via-Campesina-in-Action-for-Climate-Justice_volume_44_6_1.pdf