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Not1More activists and environmental defenders

Not1More printing workshop held during COP26-side events - 'Resist. Fight for Forests'

Last year, thousands of climate justice activists gathered at the COP 26 Climate Conference in Glasgow to protest, raise awareness of environmental and social injustices and fight for their rights. Amongst these were Sussex Sustainability Research Programme (SSRP) members and Not1More representatives and activists. Not1More, an environmental campaign group, investigates environmental conflict and crime, working closely with at-risk defenders and communities in Cambodia, West Africa and Brazil and denounces the human rights abuses defenders face across the world. Their website states the shocking fact that ‘on average, four defenders are killed every week across the world.’ Not1More’s mission ‘for everyone who defends the Earth to be safe and to be free’ is essential in the fight for climate justice.  

As part of their awareness raising activities during COP, the group, together with frontline environmental defenders and activists from Brazil, Tanzania and Cambodia set up workshops looking further into the links between violence to environmental defenders and climate justice, including film screenings, conversations with defenders and a collagraph printing workshop. Some of these events built on previous SSRP-funded projects undertaken by the research team and their partners (see ‘Indigenous visions for rights-based approaches to sustainability’ and more recently ‘Mapping the ‘violence footprint’ of UK-listed companies and their operations in Cambodia’).

The activities and workshops held during COP 26 were also used as an opportunity to visually document the impactful work which researchers at the University of Sussex, frontline environmental defenders and their in-country partners had been undertaking over the last few years through the SSRP. With funding from the SSRP Impact Fund, video footage was filmed by Dave Aspinall Films during the COP-side events and workshops in November 2021 and now been put together as a 15-minute video. With the main focus being on environmental defenders, human rights abuses and climate action, the short film features interviews with frontline activists from Brazil, Tanzania and Cambodia and their fight for climate justice supported by Not1More representatives and SSRP researchers.

Dr Mika Peck, SSRP research fellow who supported the video production, stressed: ‘Any honest attempt to address the climate and biodiversity crises requires decision makers to sit down and listen to those on the front line of the climate and biodiversity crisis facing intimidation and assassination’.

The film addresses the brutal reality of the lives and struggles of environmental defenders conveying a powerful message and highlighting the importance of collective activism. As Dr Mary Menton (School of Global Studies, SSRP, Not1More) explains in the film ‘there’s a problem in individualising what is often a collective movement and collective struggles. You become a figurehead but by becoming a figurehead as the leader of a certain movement, you then have a target on your back. It’s easy to kill one person, it’s very difficult to kill a movement’.

As part of the University‘s Biodiversity Week (25 -29 April 2022), the video will be premiered at an in-person screening event in the presence of the video producers and Not1More activists on 27 April 2022 at 5.45pm, followed by a brief Q&A session. The screening will take place in Room G30 of the Business School and will be held straight after a seminar on ‘Anti-colonial ecologies: Indigenous art and resistance in Brazil’, co-hosted by the SSRP and Brighton-based arts charity ‘ONCA’, at 4pm in the same location.

Further information about the seminar and the video premiere can be found online. SSRP researchers and Not1More activists will be present at both events and introduce and lead the (Q&A) sessions.

Sussex students and staff, the local community and anyone interested is welcome to attend one or both of the free in-person events.

Further information about the project on ‘Indigenous visions for rights-based approached to sustainability’, jointly funded by University of Sussex’s International Development Challenge Fund (IDCF) and the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme (SSRP), can be found on the SSRP website.

Further information: https://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/centres/sussex-sustainability-research-programme/events?id=57871

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