Focus on Arts and Ecology

Blistering temperatures ranked as a Category 3—the most severe tier—in Seville, Spain’s new heat wave system. 

By Chelsea Harvey, E&E News on July 26, 2022

The world’s first named heat wave hit Seville, Spain, this week, pushing temperatures past 110 degrees Fahrenheit and earning the most severe tier in the city’s new heat wave ranking system.

Heat wave “Zoe” has brought scorching temperatures to the southern part of the country for the last few days, particularly the region of Andalusia where Seville is located. Even in the evenings, the Spanish meteorological service recorded temperatures that hovered in the mid-80s in some areas — an extra stress on the human body, which relies on cooler nights to recover from high daytime heat.

Zoe is the first named heat wave to hit Seville since it officially launched a new pilot program last month for naming and ranking heat waves, similar to hurricanes (Climatewire, June 22). Only the most severe heat waves get names, designated this year in reverse alphabetical order. After Zoe, comes Yago, Xenia, Wenceslao and Vega.

The worst of the heat is expected to begin tapering off today. But it has posed a significant risk to human health while it’s lasted, according to proMETEO Sevilla, Seville’s new heat wave ranking system.

The program is a collaboration between the city of Seville and the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock), with other partners including the Spanish Office for Climate Change and several Spanish universities and research institutes. It takes a three-tiered approach to categorizing heat waves in Seville, with Category 1 as the lowest ranking and Category 3 as the most severe.

The system has specific criteria for each category, involving not only daytime temperatures, but also nighttime lows, humidity and the heat’s expected effects on human health. Each tier triggers a set of emergency response services, like issuing weather alerts, opening cooling centers and dispatching community health teams to check on vulnerable populations.

Spain has been grappling with extreme temperatures for much of the summer already. High heat broke local records around the country last month, and the first two weeks of June were the hottest on record in the country, according to the Spanish meteorological service.

Across the continent, this year was Europe’s second hottest June on record, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Extreme heat returned again earlier this month. Cities across Spain broke monthly temperature records and wildfires sprang up on the landscape.

Record-breaking temperatures also roasted other parts of Western Europe, where heat waves are intensifying as much as four times faster than they are elsewhere in the midlatitudes (Climatewire, July 18). Temperatures in the United Kingdom skyrocketed above 104 degrees, breaking the country’s all-time temperature record multiple times in a single day (Climatewire, July 20).

Climate change is causing heat waves to become more frequent, more intense and longer-lasting all over the world, increasing the risks to human health. Seville’s new naming and ranking system is intended to heighten public awareness about the dangers of extreme heat.

It’s currently the only system with a naming component. But other cities are following suit with similar ranking programs. Athens, Greece, recently announced a new system for categorizing heat waves, while several cities across the United States are launching similar pilot programs of their own, including Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee and Kansas City, Mo.

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(Sources: Scientific American)

BY YAM G-JUN JULY 15, 2022

Sleeping as little as possible was the French racer Sofiane Sehili’s strategy. In 2020, he won Morocco’s grueling Atlas Mountain Race by sleeping a total of two hours over four days. The ability to remove sleep from the equation meant that he was able to ride further than his rivals, adding six to 12 miles more than other riders each day. But that was a different race. Now, a year later, alone in the unforgiving mountains of Kyrgyzstan, the difficulty of the route left Sehili exhausted as never before, and he had to sleep three or four hours a day just to be able to get back on his mountain bike and continue.

Eight days, 14 hours and 35 minutes after he began the 2021 Silk Road Mountain Bike Race, Sehili was the first to the finish line. Only a handful of people—the race’s organizers—were there to congratulate him. There was no prize money or even a shiny trophy. Instead, without much fanfare, Sehili was given an Ak-kalpak—a traditional Kyrgyz hat of embroidered white felt—and a few cans of beer as his reward.

Nearly half the field had already dropped out by the time he crossed the finish line. But behind Sehili, there were 51 riders somewhere in the mountains, fighting grueling ascents and dangerous descents, unpredictable extreme weather, and their own limits to complete what’s widely known among bikepackers as the toughest mountain bike race in the world.

The Silk Road race stretches about 1,155 miles across Kyrgyzstan’s mountains, from frigid, treeless alpine tundra down to green, sweltering valleys, and back up again. Riders who finish will log over 101,200 total feet of ascent over the week-plus race. The annual event, held in August, requires participants to be self-supporting. There are no friends or family to cheer them on. There is no hospital or mechanic to mend bodies or bikes. Much like the traditional nomads of Kyrgyzstan, every cyclist’s bike is their horse, their tent is their yurt, and the only food and water they have is what they carry through wind, rain, snow, and heat until the next resupply point, scattered along the route.

The event was created by current race director Nelson Trees, a towering athletic Englishman who first encountered Kyrgyzstan’s scenic extremes—endless steppes and imposing mountains— during his bikepacking tour from Shanghai to Paris in 2013. The wild, natural landscape was etched into his consciousness. “I took a mental note to come back here,” says Trees. In 2018, he returned to start the first Silk Road Mountain Race.

“Fitness and athletic prowess alone won’t win you the race,” says Trees. In fact, it’s perhaps the mentally challenging nature of the event that draws riders from around the world. Locals along the route may cheer as racers pass by their villages, but beyond the rural settlements and towns of old, Soviet-built concrete, the route snakes through an inhospitable environment of limited resources and no human contact. Riders often find themselves alone in tough situations.

More than a week before Sehili crossed the finish line, the race began at 4:23 a.m. in the small town of Talas, with a light but chilly breeze. The path illuminated by their headlamps, 95 riders took off into the dark. Their first challenge was Terek Pass, with an elevation of 12,172 feet. For centuries, the pass was on the main route of the Silk Road. Marco Polo crossed it on his way to China, and Ghengis Khan and his Mongol army used it in their relentless advance westward across Central Asia.

The path descending from Terek Pass is littered with sharp rocks. One rock slashed open the rear tire of Levente Bagoly, a slight Romanian with the muscular legs of a seasoned mountain biker. Without the equipment he needed to make a permanent repair, Bagoly patched it up and kept going. But he had to stop every six miles to pump air back into the tire. He had spent a great deal of energy in the beginning of the race chasing and passing other competitors. Now, every time he stopped, those riders would zoom past him. Slowly, keeping score in his head, Bagoly started to lose more than his position. In the inaugural 2018 race, he had finished second, and being in the top five again meant a great deal to him.

“I am a competitive person by nature, but I had lost all motivation to compete. I felt hopeless,” says Bagoly, looking back on what happened after Terek Pass. His frustration soon manifested itself physically. He experienced severe headaches and an irregular heartbeat. On the third day he vomited and collapsed. He left the race, promising to be back another year.

A few days later, it was not exhaustion but blindness—snow blindness—that nearly ended the race for riders Axel Brenner and Adrien Liechti. They were at the top of Arabel Pass, at 12,467 feet, when a storm hit and deposited several feet of snow. The gray mountain turned white, like everything else around them, and the two riders were forced to navigate the rocky, treacherous terrain with few visual cues. Hours later, the sun returned and melted all evidence of the blizzard conditions. Brenner and Liechti not only made it safely down from the pass, but would finish in second and third place, respectively.

In fact, changeable and often fierce mountain weather is the biggest wild card of the race. Dark clouds can quickly shut out the warmth of the mid-morning sun, dumping rain and hail on the course. Minutes—or hours—later, the sun may reappear and bake the steep mountain valleys, forcing riders to shed their winter layers. In addition to dangerous terrain and temperature extremes, they also experience some geopolitical reality.

To reach the rest stop of Tash Rabat, an idyllic, well-preserved caravanserai that has welcomed passing travelers since the 15th century, riders must first cross an empty land of 18 miles. Here, a long, straight fence marks the border between Kyrgyzstan and China. No one lives in this zone, and race participants must check in with border guards to gain access to this stretch of the route. Although mostly flat, the uneven gravel road takes a toll on the rider’s body; non-stop vibrations can leave their hands numb for hours or days.

From the no-man’s-land near the border, the route returns to the mountains, rising 984 feet in a little over a mile. Some riders end up carrying their bikes over their shoulders and hiking up; bikepackers call it a “hike-a-bike.” The descent is equally as steep, requiring finesse: Heavy braking could lift the rear wheel up and send the rider tumbling downhill. A few river crossings, the water’s course littered with massive boulders, signal the end of the descent. Only then do riders catch sight of Tash Rabat, where modern yurts skirt the old stone caravanserai, opposite a small stream. Many riders pause here for shelter and sustenance, just as Silk Road traders did for centuries before them.

“The yurts are like a mini oasis. Shelter, warmth, comfort, and food. All the things that soften you,” said Steven Moatt, a cheerful, middle-aged Englishman. “A danger zone as far as time is concerned! So it’s best not to get too comfortable.”

For Moatt, the ancient rest stop was more than a brief but welcome break; just making it there was a victory. The day before, he had fallen off his bike, dislocating his shoulder. “That morning, the sun was out and it was warm sitting on the grass just outside the yurt,” he says of his time at the site. “It was a relief getting to Tash Rabat as this proved to myself that I was still physically able to continue.”

The sheer determination to keep going may be the most universal quality of the race’s riders. Canada’s Jenny Tough was caught in a rainstorm mid-race. Exhausted and sick, she forced herself to keep going to reach the next resupply town, Baetov. Tough arrived just in time for dinner—and then set off the next morning at 3 a.m., while the other riders were still asleep. She would be the only female contestant who rode solo to finish the race.

Another rider, Martin Písačka from Czech Republic, gave new meaning to the phrase “by any means necessary.” About 125 miles from the finish—a day’s ride in good conditions—Písačka’s bike gears and pedal dislocated from the rear wheel at the top of 12,572 foot Kegety Pass. It could not be fixed.

Rather than giving up, Písačka decided to walk to the finish line. It took him three days, including one of the most challenging passes in the entire race and a 2,296-foot hike-a-bike. He later said that his shoes disintegrated, and locals gave him two replacement pairs but neither fit well. He crossed the finish line barefoot, with a grin.

“I know that this sport is a selfish endeavor,” Písačka says, looking back at the moment. “However, when in the mountains, my mind is at ease. I do not think about anything else but the race, food and shelter. Life becomes much simpler. In those moments, the views are perfect, the people I meet are perfect, and every day is the best day.”

(Sources: Atlas Obscura)

By Olivia Rosane, July 20, 2022, Edited by Irma Omerhodzic 

A library at the top of one of London’s oldest skyscrapers; the rainforest, mountains and coastline of Peru; a Canadian island in the Labrador Current. 

All of these are weather stations, but they won’t necessarily be reporting temperature changes or barometric pressure. Instead, they are among the 28 international locations from which writers and artists will work to make sense of the climate crisis as part of a first-of-its kind collaboration called the World Weather Network. 

“We want to see what happens when artists and writers start to use their imagination and lateral kind of abilities to think through something which is difficult to think about,” project organizer Michael Morris of Artangel in the UK told EcoWatch. 

The World Weather Network

The World Weather Network is a coalition of 28 arts organizations from the Philippines to Nigeria to Utah that believe artists and writers should be a larger part of the dialogue surrounding climate change. The idea is that the creative team at each weather station will both conduct local programming on the ground and post “weather reports” on the network website over the course of the year.

The website and programming launched on the summer solstice and will continue until June 2023. Early “weather reports” included a livestream of the sunrise on the longest day of the year from Enoura Observatory in Japan by famed photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto and audio and visual recordings by the Breath of Weather Collective from wind harps placed at eight locations in the Pacific and Aotearoa/ New Zealand that are vulnerable to climate change.

Morris said the weather motif was chosen because it has been a subject of art and literature throughout history. 

“Piers Plowman is all about the weather, Beowulf is all about the weather,” he said.

But the rise in heat waves and other unusual or extreme events because of the human burning of fossil fuels has forced us to see weather in a new way.

“In recent years, those inspirations of the past–which are to do with how the weather makes us feel, what the weather does to us–have really been replaced by a concern about what we’re doing to the weather,” Morris said. “There’s been … an inhibition to really relate to the weather we’re experiencing now, the extreme weather in many parts of the world, and artists and writers are somehow keeping away from it.” 

The purpose of the World Weather Network is to invite them in, and, so far, it seems to have succeeded. New York-based artist Liam Gillick, who designed a weather station on Fogo Island, Canada, told EcoWatch in an email that he was drawn to the project because it brought so many people and organizations together. 

“It is truly global and offers the chance to access an enormous variety of original approaches through one portal,” he said. “That’s never been done before as far as I know. Certainly nothing on this scale.”

Participating artist Luz María Bedoya of Peru agreed. 

“I decided to participate in the WWN because it is an opportunity to work together, despite the fact that we are in different and distant places, and to generate the strength that the network can produce when we are gathered around the same key issue of today, the climate crisis,” Bedoya said in an email.

The project is climate-friendly in execution as well as theme. 

“One of the other things about this project is that it’s a huge international collaboration that hasn’t involved any flying around the world at all,” Morris told EcoWatch. 

It grew out of digital conversations during the coronavirus lockdown, and Morris said he wasn’t sure if the project would exist in its current form without the pandemic. Perhaps because of the project’s virtual evolution, it is important for the organizers that the weather reports posted to the website aren’t mere reproductions of what’s happening in situ, but rather specifically tailored for what online art can do.

“[O]ne of the things that each partner is having to grapple with is that they’re doing two things,” Morris said. “They’re putting on something locally, which is physical and can be visited, and they’re also thinking of how that would be best manifested on a digital platform.”

Weather Station: London, UK

Artangel has commissioned two London-based projects that exemplify the difference between the place-based and online offerings. The first is a sound installation called A Thousand Words for Weather that launched on the solstice in London’s Senate House Library, an iconic Art Deco building completed in the 1930s that is considered one of London’s first skyscrapers. 

Taiwanese-Canadian writer Jessica J. Le asked ten poets to write and define ten words for weather in their native languages–English, Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, French, Polish, Urdu, Mandarin, Turkish and German. Each of the ten words was then translated into the other languages for a total of 1,000 words. Next, Composer and artist Claudia Molitor turned this dictionary into a “sound installation in a building which is governed by silence,” as Morris put it. The recorded words are controlled by live weather reports from the UK’s Met Office.

“[T]he weather outside the building actually alters the mix and the velocity and the volume, so that on any day you’ll hear something completely different,” Morris explained.

The installation will run through March 25 of next year, giving Londoners a chance to hear three seasons worth of weather words. For those who can’t make it to the Senate House Library before then, Chinese-born spatial and visual designer FeiFei Zhou will create a “living, animated dictionary for the web,” according to the website. 

A second London project will exist entirely online. This is called Abi Palmer Invents the Weather. The writer and artist will film her Siberian forest cats Lola Lola and Cha-u-Kao playing in four boxes that correspond to each season, as she brings the outside weather inside to her felines.

Weather Station: Fogo Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada

The weather station on Fogo Island took the assignment a little more literally. Gillick has designed a sculpture called A Variability Quantifier (aka The Fogo Island Red Weather Station) that will actually record weather data that can be used by the local community as well as scientists and artists abroad. 

“I wanted to do something that would be properly maintained for a number of years and have the support structure to really gather concrete accurate data,” Gillick said. “Historically, weather stations have taken many forms. It is only in the contemporary period that they have become so functional. I wanted to reintroduce an artistic element to the siting of a scientific structure.”

In designing the sculpture, Gillick was inspired by the culture and architecture of Fogo Island–specifically, the “fishing stages” that are common on the island. The sculpture is a nearly full-scale model of the frame of such a stage to which scientists and community members can attack instruments for measuring weather. 

“The sculpture is aesthetic and functional,” Gillick said. “It is a tribute to the history of the island and a useful site for the collection of data. It is also important that the wood is local and milled by local fishers and [virtually] neutral in regard to the local ecosystem.”

Fogo Island is an evocative location from which to consider the climate crisis because it sits in the Labrador Current, the “iceberg alley” along which melting ice travels. Gillick told EcoWatch he thought it was important that artists participate in framing the collective understanding and imagination of global heating.

“Artists have something to offer,” he said. “We can add new ways to imagine and visualize the world around us. We have to go beyond the clichéd imagery that has often accompanied climate consciousness. That’s what this project is about. We are not starting afresh, we are here to support, refine and transcend the visual literacy required to further the good work already being done by climatologists, activists and researchers.”

The project was commissioned by Fogo Island Arts and the National Gallery of Canada. It will remain in situ until October 2026. 

Weather Station: Coastline, Andes and Rainforest, Peru 

If the Fogo Island weather station is focused around one structure, the Peruvian station incorporates three different ecosystems. Bedoya is presenting two projects commissioned by the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI) that involve the different ways that water flows by and past the country. 

The first is called All the Lighthouses of the Peruvian Coast. Bedoya created a graphic score based on the codes of the 56 lighthouses that dot Peru’s Pacific Coast. This score was then interpreted by around 40 musicians and authors. Bedoya’s second project–called Other Scores of Water–grows out of her first. It will consist of three films made in the Andes and the Peruvian Amazon, focusing on the different forms that water takes from snow to river. Bedoya will work with local communities, academics, musicians and other artists to  produce her weather reports. 

In focusing three distinct Peruvian ecosystems, Bedoya also hopes to illuminate the social complexity of a country that is home to many different languages and cultures, as well as racial and economic inequalities inherited from colonialism. 

“I am trying to ensure that my projects offer a reading of the local climate that goes beyond the purely meteorological, and do not allow themselves to be enraptured by the grandeur of our landscapes, which is always a temptation in a geography such as this,” she told EcoWatch. “Taking as a basis some of the different expressions of water in Peru (ocean, snow-capped mountains, rivers, cloud forests, subsoil waters), I hope that they will serve as guidelines that account for the social and cultural fabric of the environments in which they are found.”

In choosing to make art around the climate crisis, Bedoya is globally minded as well. She said the human species as a whole is “living a limit moment,” and it’s the very liminality of the moment that makes it important for artists to respond. 

“We are used to thinking of meteorology and climatology as devices that allow the statistical measurement of atmospheric phenomena, however what we call climate in an extended sense escapes statistical rationality,” she told EcoWatch. “This is where art may have something to contribute. It will probably not be definitive solutions (in fact, there are no definitive solutions for our climate crisis), but it may allow us to modify the ways in which we encounter our present and bring us closer to making forms of life that we would not have imagined.”

Olivia Rosane

Olivia has been writing on the internet for more than five years and has covered social movements for YES! Magazine and ecological themes for Real Life. For her recent master’s in Art and Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London, she completed a creative dissertation imagining sustainable communities surviving in post-climate-change London.

(Sources: EcoWatch)

 BY VANDANA SHIVA, FEB 16, 2021

The path to an ecological civilization is paved by reclaiming the commons—our common home, the Earth, and the commons of the Earth family, of which we are a part. Through reclaiming the commons, we can imagine possibility for our common future, and we can sow the seeds of abundance through “commoning.”

In the commons, we care and share—for the Earth and each other. We are conscious of nature’s ecological limits, which ensure her share of the gifts she creates goes back to her to sustain biodiversity and ecosystems. We are aware that all humans have a right to air, water, and food, and we feel responsible for the rights of future generations.

Enclosures of the commons, in contrast, are the root cause of the ecological crisis and the crises of poverty and hunger, dispossession and displacement. Extractivism commodifies for profit what is held in common for the sustenance of all life.

The Commons, Defined

Air is a commons.

We share the air we breathe with all species, including plants and trees. Through photosynthesis, plants convert the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and give us oxygen. “I can’t breathe” is the cry of the enclosure of the commons of air through the mining and burning of 600 million years’ worth of fossilized carbon.

Water is a commons. 

The planet is 70% water. Our bodies are 70% water. Water is the ecological basis of all life, and in the commons, conservation creates abundance. The plastic water bottle is a symbol of the enclosures of the commons—first by privatizing water for extractivism, and then by destroying the land and oceans through the resulting plastic pollution.

Food is a commons. 

Food is the currency of life, from the soil food web, to the biodiversity of plants and animals, insects and microbes, to the trillions of organisms in our gut microbiomes. Hunger is a result of the enclosure of the food commons through fossil fuel-based, chemically intensive industrial agriculture.

A History of Enclosure

The enclosure transformation began in earnest in the 16th century. The rich and powerful privateer-landlords, supported by industrialists, merchants, and bankers, had a limitless hunger for profits. Their hunger fueled industrialism as a process of extraction of value from the land and peasants. 

Colonialism was the enclosure of the commons on a global scale. 

When the British East India Company began its de facto rule of India in the mid-1700s, it enclosed our land and forests, our food and water, even our salt from the sea. Over the course of 200 years, the British extracted an estimated $45 trillion from India through the colonial enclosures of our agrarian economies, pushing tens of millions of peasants into famine and starvation.

Our freedom movement, from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, was in fact a movement for reclaiming the commons. When the British established a salt monopoly through the salt laws in 1930, making it illegal for Indians to make salt, Gandhi started the Salt Satyagraha—the civil disobedience movement against the salt laws. He walked to the sea with thousands of people and harvested the salt from the sea, saying: Nature gives it for free; we need it for our survival; we will continue to make salt; we will not obey your laws. 

Expanding Enclosures

While the enclosures began with the land, in our times, enclosures have expanded to cover lifeforms and biodiversity, our shared knowledge, and even relationships. The commons that are being enclosed today are our seeds and biodiversity, our information, our health and education, our energy, society and community, and the Earth herself.

The chemical industry is enclosing the commons of our seeds and biodiversity through “intellectual property rights.” Led by Monsanto (now Bayer) in the 1980s, our biodiversity was declared “raw material” for the biotechnology industry to create “intellectual property”—to own our seeds through patents, and to collect rents and royalties from the peasants who maintained the seed commons. 

Reclaiming the commons of our seeds has been my life’s work since 1987. Inspired by Gandhi, we started the Navdanya movement with a Seed Satyagraha. We declared, “Our seeds, our biodiversity, our indigenous knowledge is our common heritage. We receive our seeds from nature and our ancestors. We have a duty to save and share them, and hand them over to future generations in their richness, integrity, and diversity. Therefore we have a duty to disobey any law that makes it illegal for us to save and share our seeds.” 

I worked with our parliament to introduce Article 3(j) into India’s Patent Law in 2005, which recognizes that plants, animals, and seeds are not human inventions, and therefore cannot be patented. Navdanya has since created 150 community seed banks in our movement to reclaim the commons of seed. And our legal challenges to the biopiracy of neem, wheat, and basmati have been important contributions to reclaiming the commons of biodiversity and indigenous knowledge.

Partnership, Not Property

So, too, with water. When French water and waste management company Suez tried to privatize the Ganga River in 2002, we built a water democracy movement to reclaim the Ganga as our commons. Through a Satyagraha against Coca- Cola in 2001, my sisters in Plachimada, Kerala, shut down the Coca-Cola plant and reclaimed water as a commons.  

Ecological civilization is based on the consciousness that we are part of the Earth, not her masters, conquerors, or owners. That we are connected to all life, and that our life is dependent on others—from the air we breathe to the water we drink and the food we eat. 

All beings have a right to live; that is why I have participated in preparing the draft “Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.” The right to life of all beings is based on interconnectedness. The interconnectedness of life and the rights of Mother Earth, of all beings, including all human beings, is the ecological basis of the commons, and economies based on caring and sharing. 

Reclaiming the commons and creating an ecological civilization go hand in hand.

VANDANA SHIVA is an internationally renowned activist for biodiversity and against corporate globalization, and author of several books, including Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, and Soil Not Oil; and Staying Alive. She is a YES! contributing editor.at

(Sources: Yes! Magazine)

"It's madness," said Greenpeace Africa. "These plans must be scrapped immediately." 

By KENNY STANCIL, July 25, 2022

The Democratic Republic of Congo is set to begin selling huge tracts of land to oil and gas giants later this week—a move that is being decried by environmental justice campaigners and local communities because it would enable new fossil fuel extraction in the second-largest old-growth rainforest on Earth, further endangering the world's chances of staving off the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

Twenty-seven oil and three gas blocks are scheduled to be auctioned off to the highest bidding corporations on July 28 and 29. The roughly 11 million hectares of land up for grabs in the Congo Basin—whose rainforest trails only the Amazon in size and is more intact—include parts of Virunga National Park, home to a key gorilla sanctuary, as well as tropical peatlands that prevent massive amounts of planet-heating carbon from reaching the atmosphere.

"If oil exploitation takes place in these areas, we must expect a global climate catastrophe, and we will all just have to watch helplessly," Irene Wabiwa, international project leader for Greenpeace Africa's Congo Basin forest campaign in Kinshasa, told the New York Times on Monday.

Greenpeace Africa on Monday submitted a petition with more than 100,000 signatures urging DRC President Félix Tshisekedi to halt the sale of land—"home to thousands of local and indigenous communities and countless animal and plant species"—to Big Oil.

"Sacrificing peatlands and protected areas in the Congo Basin forest," the group tweeted, would be "a death blow to the Paris agreement," which seeks to limit global warming to 1.5ºC over preindustrial levels. "It's madness. These plans must be scrapped immediately."

The DRC's approval of new oil and gas drilling in the region comes eight months after Tshisekedi endorsed a 10-year agreement to protect the country's rainforest—a major repository of biodiversity and the world's largest terrestrial carbon sink—at the United Nations' COP26 climate summit in Glasgow last December.

The deal to curb deforestation included pledges of $500 million for the DRC over the first five years. But since Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing sanctions threw global energy markets into chaos, the DRC has watched as Norway—a leading proponent of forest conservation—advanced plans to expand offshore oil drilling and U.S. President Joe Biden, a self-styled climate leader, begged Saudi Arabia to boost oil production.

The DRC "has taken note of each of these global events," the Times reported, citing Tosi Mpanu Mpanu, the nation's top representative on climate issues and an adviser to the minister of hydrocarbons. "Congo's sole goal for the auction, he said, is to earn enough revenue to help the struggling nation finance programs to reduce poverty and generate badly needed economic growth."

"That's our priority," Mpanu told the newspaper in an interview last week. "Our priority is not to save the planet."

As the Times noted:

The auction highlights a double standard that many political leaders across the African continent have called out: How can Western countries, which built their prosperity on fossil fuels that emit poisonous, planet-warming fumes, demand that Africa forgo their reserves of coal, oil, and gas in order to protect everyone else?

And it raises a question asked by many communities whose very survival is based on cutting trees for sale or for cooking fires: If they protect carbon stocks of incalculable value to the whole world, what do they get in return?

"Maybe it's time we get a level playing field and be compensated," Mr. Mpanu said.

Many Congolese officials believe that after decades of colonialism and political mismanagement, their country's needs should be prioritized against those of the world.

"There are no words that can adequately describe this catastrophe," researcher Joey Ayoub lamented, referring to the impending auction—first approved in April and nearly doubled in size last week to 30 blocks, up from the initially proposed 16.

"The polluting Global North countries are refusing to transition away from fossil fuels and countries like the DRC are left to fend for themselves," Ayoub wrote on Twitter.

Mpanu contended that the refusal of rich nations to adequately compensate poor countries for not exploiting natural resources leaves policymakers in the Global South with few good options for economic development.

That argument was echoed by others on social media, who highlighted the case of Ecuador. In 2007, then-President Rafael Correa "set up a trust fund that the international community could finance to stop the country from exploring an oil block in the Yasuní National Park, one of the most biodiverse regions in the world," the Times reported. "The goal was to raise around $3.6 billion. Years later, it had only raised $13 million. So in 2013, the government decided to allow oil exploration. Drilling began three years later."

The estimated monetary value of the DRC's buried fossil fuels won't be known until highly destructive seismic surveys are conducted. But hydrocarbons minister Didier Budimbu said in May that the DRC has the potential to expand its oil production from the present level of 25,000 barrels per day to 1 million, the Times noted. At current prices that would amount to $32 billion per year, more than half of the impoverished nation's GDP.

"We have a primary responsibility toward Congolese taxpayers who, for the most part, live in conditions of extreme precariousness and poverty, and aspire to a socio-economic wellbeing that oil exploitation is likely to provide for them," Budimbu told The Guardian this past weekend.

Budimbu has spoken with some of Africa's major oil producers, including Angola, Nigeria, and Equatorial Guinea, "so that the DRC can take the same path," according to a recent statement on the ministry's website.

History has shown that the overwhelming majority of people in the DRC are unlikely to benefit from increased fossil fuel production, as the working-class residents of neighboring nations have borne almost all of the costs of extraction while multinational corporations and a small minority of local elites capture the profits.

Already, the mining of cobalt and lithium—minerals that are crucial to the green energy industry—has failed to improve living conditions in the DRC, as Faustin Nyebone from AICED (Support for Community Initiatives for Environmental Conservation and Sustainable Development) pointed out on Monday.

"The DRC lacks no resources to boost its economy and improve the living conditions of Congolese people," Nyebone said in a statement. "The country is ranked 182 in good governance, while its population lives on less than $1 a day even in the town of Walikale, where cobalt is mined."

Justin Mutabesha of the Association des Jeunes Visionnaires RDC echoed that sentiment.

"With the auction of oil blocks, local communities are taken hostage by politico-economic elites," said Mutabesha. "Congolese oil will mean the disappearance of immense parts of the biodiversity which 100 million people depend on for fishing, agriculture, and other traditional practices. It also means the ongoing neglect of alternatives to renewable energies. We say no to this sale."

Joe Eisen, executive director of Rainforest Foundation U.K., said that "while DRC's development needs are very real, there is little to suggest that oil and gas revenues would be used for the public good rather than the personal enrichment of political elites. Instead, we urge the government and its international partners to keep fossil fuels in the ground and trees standing by working with local and indigenous communities who depend on these areas."

Last week, a team of forest campaigners from Greenpeace Africa collected testimonies from people living in four of the proposed oil blocks.

They "were all shocked about the prospective auction of their lands to oil companies," according to Greenpeace. "Some communities, such as those living around the Upemba National Park, see the prospective oil exploration as a direct threat to the lake they rely on for generations and are planning to resist it."

As corporations move ahead with plans to expand oil and gas production across Africa—despite warnings that doing so is "not compatible with a safe climate future"—environmental justice advocates have sought to break down the false narrative that economic development depends on fossil fuel extraction, arguing that it is possible to build more prosperous and egalitarian societies powered by renewable energy.

"The international community and the Congolese government must end the neocolonial scramble for African fossil fuels by restricting oil companies' access to the DRC, focusing instead on ending energy poverty through supporting clean, decentralized renewable energies," Wabiwa said last week.

Marianne Klute, chairwoman of Rettet den Regenwald/Rainforest Rescue called the DRC's plans "shocking."

"As the world is facing a mass extinction of animal and plant species and a climate emergency, DRC's government is about to trigger an environmental bomb that also threatens the livelihood of millions of people who depend on Congo's forests," she said on Monday. "The oil must be kept in the ground around the world, including in DRC."

Isaac Mumbere of the Réseau CREF RDC emphasized that "nothing can justify this environmental crime."

"Look for money elsewhere and don't pollute our planet," Mumbere added.

In March, Ève Bazaiba, the DRC's minister of environment, told the Times that officials were still considering their options. "Should we protect peatland because it's a carbon sink or should we dig for oil for our economy?" she asked.

Last week, Bazaiba indicated a willingness to stop the auction.

"If we have an alternative to the oil exploitation, we'll keep them," she tweeted, alluding to the peatlands that store three years' worth of global carbon emissions.

(Sources: Common Dreams)