Demands of the Climate Movement for 2025 by the Palestinian COP30 Coalition
For the past 20 months, Israel has undertaken a brutal genocide against our people in Gaza, committing some of the gravest war crimes and crimes against humanity in recent history. This has been extended throughout the rest of Historic Palestine and Lebanon, where Israel has killed thousands and wrought mass destruction against civilian infrastructure, all with the aim of expanding its settler colonial project.
During this ongoing genocide, Israel’s illegal occupation forces have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023, with estimates suggesting that this death toll is much higher. Israel’s deliberate destruction of Gaza’s 4,000-year-old civilization has been accompanied by wanton devastation of land, waterways, energy infrastructure, roads, hospitals, and homes – an environmental and climate catastrophe to accompany this humanitarian crisis. According to UN human rights experts, Israel’s genocide has included “domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, cultural genocide and, more recently, ecocide.” More than 100,000 tons of bombs have been dropped on Gaza, exceeding the total amount of explosives used in World War II. The carbon footprint of the first 15 months of Israel’s war on Gaza will be greater than the annual planet warming emissions of a hundred individual countries. Yet, these military emissions are not included in UNFCCC reporting.
Heavy metals from rockets, unexploded munitions, and depleted uranium have contaminated topsoil and groundwater, which will result in severe impacts on public health and the ability of Palestinian soils to host life. By April 2025, over 80% of Gaza’s total cropland area had been damaged. Israel’s use of white phosphorus bombs in Gaza, prohibited under international law, will have social, health, and environmental consequences for years to come. The governments and corporations profiting from the socio-economic order destroying our planet and Indigenous lands, and forcing millions of people into exile and poverty, are the very ones complicit in powering and fueling militarism and Israel’s genocidal machine.
Energy exports are not a neutral form of trade. Coal, crude oil, and other energy sources are being used in Palestine as tools of oppression to sustain Israel’s colonial regime of illegal occupation, genocide, and apartheid, powering military vehicles, arms production, and Israel’s murderous AI infrastructure. Water companies and agribusiness, who claim to be at the forefront of sustainability, instead facilitate, profit from, and greenwash brutal settler-colonial occupation, using the language of sustainability and climate justice while providing irrigation and agricultural technologies to assist and maintain illegal Israeli settlements and globally undermining the livelihoods of smallholder and family farmers for the sake of corporate profits.
As environmental climate and social justice movements and organisations prepare for COP30 and mobilise to confront the disasters of global climate change, we – Palestinian environmental and grassroots organisations, justice movements, and civil society coalitions – urgently call for solidarity, ending complicity, and action for meaningful accountability that place Palestinian demands and liberation at the heart of these mobilisations.
Specifically, we are calling on all civil society organisations and movements, particularly trade unions, as well as movements for climate, racial, social, economic, and gender justice, to mobilise urgently to hold Israel accountable and to join and strengthen the global BDS movement. We ask for three key, practical steps to be taken in order to translate the sentiment of support for collective human rights and international law into specific BDS campaigns that address the intersections of climate justice and Palestinian liberation, and that can have a material impact on the unfolding genocide and Israel’s 77 year old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid.
- Join the call for a Global Energy Embargo for Palestine by:
- Demanding that the COP30 host government, Brazil, end all crude oil and refined
products exports to Israel, demonstrating its seriousness towards addressing the
genocide and climate change. - Mobilising locally, especially in the USA, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa,
Azerbaijan, Nigeria, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan
and Gabon, to demand an end to the transfer of coal, crude oil and petroleum to
Israel, and pressuring energy corporations that are most implicated in supplying
Israel during the genocide, particularly Glencore, Drummond, SOCAR, BP and
Chevron. - Mobilising locally in Jordan, Egypt, the EU, and other countries to demand an end
to gas purchases from Israel and organise against companies profiting from Israel’s
settler-colonial occupation, apartheid, and genocide.
- Demanding that the COP30 host government, Brazil, end all crude oil and refined
- Build a global coalition to end water apartheid by:
- Mobilising locally, especially in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Azerbaijan, Morocco,
Cyprus, Bahrain and India, to terminate all agreements and collaboration on
water projects with Mekorot – the Israeli water company responsible for creating
and maintaining water apartheid and shutting off water to Gaza – and prevent the
signing of new agreements. Mekorot is listed in the UN database of corporations
involved in illegal business in Israel’s colonial settlements in the occupied
Palestinian territory. - Water defenders at COP30: Including water apartheid in your advocacy, connecting
with Palestinian groups working on the defense of water, and mobilising around
this critical issue as part of the global struggle for water justice.
- Mobilising locally, especially in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Azerbaijan, Morocco,
- Build and unite behind a global call to end the enabling and greenwashing of Israel’s
genocide, apartheid, and illegal occupation by agribusiness:- Farmers, peasants, food sovereignty movements, and all those resisting the
environmental, land, cultural, and livelihood destruction of big agricultural
corporations, taking up and amplifying the call to end agribusiness complicity in
illegal ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestinian lands. - Mobilise locally across the globe to divest from Netafim and terminate all
agreements and collaborations with Netafim and other agribusiness companies or
agri-tech cooperation that profit from, enable, and greenwash genocide and settler
colonial occupation, and apartheid. - Mobilise locally against any cooperation with Israel’s corporations exporting
agrotoxics, including Adama and ICL Group, which export chemical pesticides that
destroy the land and endanger the lives of farmers and consumers, sourced from
pillaged Palestinian natural resources and tested on Palestinian occupied land.
- Farmers, peasants, food sovereignty movements, and all those resisting the
At a time when climate justice demands radical and systemic transformation through international solidarity, we call on you to include the above demands in all your communications, to take practical action towards realising them, and to reach out to Palestinian grassroots environmental organisations to build these campaigns together.
Over the past twenty months, millions of Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory, particularly in Gaza, have endured the most extreme conditions of starvation, genocide, ecocide, ethnic cleansing, massacres, and torture. Yet, despite all of this, we remain committed to the struggle for our inalienable rights to self-determination, ending the occupation and apartheid regime, and the return of our refugees to their homes and lands. We are committed to fighting for our freedom and justice, no matter the odds, and we count on the global solidarity movement to support our struggle.
Israel’s intentions are now crystal clear: to ethnically cleanse the entirety of Palestine and the south of Lebanon of their Indigenous peoples, a continuation of the Nakba, which has persisted without interruption since 1948. In this context, demands for the re implementation of a ceasefire in Gaza are meaningless unless backed up by concrete actions that can mobilise material and political pressure to stop Israel’s genocidal war machine and help dismantle its illegal regime of military occupation and apartheid.
We call on the global environmental justice movement to come together, to mobilise in our communities and international fora, to build collective resistance to genocide, apartheid, and ecocide, to join and strengthen the BDS movement, and to take practical action that can reintroduce the hope of a dignified and liberated future.
The Palestinian COP30 Coalition Members:
The Palestinian Environmental NGO Network (co-coordinator)
The Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (co-coordinator)
Palestinian BDS National Committee
The Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy
Maan Development Center
Rural Women Development Society
Palestinian Agriculture Relief Committee
