By Chuck Baclagon
Last week the world got together to challenge the social license of the fossil-fuel industry.
Thousands came together for Global Divestment Mobilization to call on institutions and individuals to do what is necessary for climate action by divesting from fossil fuels. The broadness and diversity of the actions highlight the continuing growth of our movement.
The Global Divestment Mobilisation is not a beginning or an end: it’s a step on the path to climate justice. It’s a line in the sand showing just how many of us refuse to accept that profit is more important than preventing the climate crisis.
East Asia is a critical region because it hosts many energy projects that extract and burn fossil-fuels to the detriment of the communities and ecosystems that host those destructive facilities particularly in places like Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. At the same time some of the biggest funders and consumers of fossil-fuel energy are also located in the region, namely Japan, China and South Korea, driving further warming while harming the health and livelihood of communities.
We believe that information gives us the upper hand.
That is why we built a website that visualizes the link between fossil fuel finance and the facilities that pollute communities and induces global warming.
By connecting the dots between the fossil-fuel investments with the narratives of those in living in the vicinity of these dirty energy facilities and the plight of those at the forefront of climate impacts –we show the dirty chain-of-custody that starts with investments and ends with the lives affected by the adverse impacts of fossil-fueled development.