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	The magnitude of the crises we face demands system change by Karin Nansen The Ecologist, Friends of the Earth   We are facing deep-rooted climate, social and environmental crises. The current dominant economic system cannot provide solutions. It is time for system change.   For Friends of the Earth International this means creating societies based on peoples’ sovereignty and environmental, social, economic and gender justice. We must question and deconstruct the capitalist logic of accumulation.   The climate catastrophe is interwoven with many social and environmental crises, including oppression, corporate power, hunger, water depletion, biodiversity loss and deforestation. At its heart sits an unsustainable economic system, the sole aim of which is endless growth and profit. This system concentrates wealth, power and obscene privilege with the few. Corporations and national elites are empowered by that very system to exploit people and their livelihoods with impunity.   We must tackle climate change and the associated social and environmental crises by taking rapid and bold action to address the common root causes; privatization, financialization and commodification of nature and societies, and unsustainable production and consumption systems.   The magnitude of the crises we face demands system change.   That system change will result in the creation of sustainable societies and new relations between human beings, and between human beings and nature, based on equality and reciprocity. But we cannot create these societies and assert people’s rights without increasing people’s power. We need to reclaim politics. This means creating genuine, radical and just democracies centred around people’s sovereignty and participation. International law must put people above corporate profit, ensuring binding rules for business and mechanisms that guarantee access to justice for victims of transnational corporations.   System change calls for an articulation of the struggles against oppression; that is, patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and class and capitalist exploitation. It demands commitment to the struggle against the exploitation of women’s bodies and work. We are witnessing how the expansion of capital over the territories leads to increased violence against women alongside the violation of their rights. Gender justice will only be possible when we recognize women as political subjects, stop violence against women, strengthen women’s autonomy, advance the principles of feminist economy, deconstruct the sexual division of labor and reorganize care work.   A transformation of the energy system is fundamental to system change. It entails democratic answers to the fundamental questions: for whom and what is energy produced? And a total departure from fossil fuel reliance and corporate control. This must be a just transition, founded on workers’ and community rights.   It is not only about changing technologies and renewable energy, but about public and community ownership and control, therefore addressing the root problems of a system that turns energy into a commodity and denies the right to energy for all. It requires equity and justice, especially for those already impacted by the changing climate in the global South.   Genuine system change would radically transform the food system towards food sovereignty and agroecology: valuing local knowledge, promoting social and economic justice and people’s control over their territories, guaranteeing the right to land, water and seeds, nurturing social relations founded on justice and solidarity, and recognizing the fundamental role of women in food production, to provide an effective way to feed the world and a counter to destructive industrial agriculture.   Biodiversity and forests are best protected by the communities who live in them. Protecting forests can address climate change by maintaining natural carbon stores and reducing the amount of carbon released through deforestation, while providing communities with food, fibres, shelter, medicines and water. Just eight per cent of the world’s forests are managed by communities; it is vital we secure community rights over forests and livelihoods.   System change must address people’s individual and collective needs and promote reciprocity, redistribution and sharing. Solutions include public services achieved through tax justice, social ownership and co-operativism, local markets and fair trade, community forest management, and valuing the wellbeing of people and the planet.   People all over the world are already living or implementing thousands of initiatives which embody justice and challenge the capitalist logic. Now we must expand them. And that requires commensurate international and national public policies that empower people to fight for a democratic state that ensures rights and provides environmentally and socially just public services, and active popular participation; a state that guarantees peoples’ rights to water, land and the territories, food, health, education, housing and decent jobs.   We all need to support local and international resistance, engage in popular mobilization, strive for policy change and upscale the real solutions, the solutions of the people. This is system change. Visit the related web page
	The SDGs are not achievable without progressive policies by Celeste Drake Equal Times   In July, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), a foundation that promotes the values of social democracy, freedom, justice and solidarity, hosted a forum at the 14th United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Conference (UNCTAD 14) focusing on the progress we have made toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aim to end poverty and create a better, healthier, more sustainable world by 2030.   I spoke at this panel, providing insights from the international labour movement. I began by noting that, from the point of view of working people – who provide the engine of every sector of every economy around the world – there are serious questions about how we will achieve the SDGs given the policies included in and missing from the SDG 2030 Agenda. Of particular concern is the failure to put unions at the centre of the goal of liveable wages and decent work.   The term “trade union” does not appear a single time in the entire SDG 2030 document. Not even once. Why do the SDGs ignore research by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and others that unions are key to addressing income inequality? Research also shows that unions can help raise productivity, a critical factor in growth. So it is disappointing that unions, which have much to contribute, aren’t even mentioned in the SDGs.   In addition, among the four pillars of the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Decent Work Agenda, social dialogue is the only one not explicitly recognised among the targets and indicators of the eighth SDG.   On a related note, the SDGs do not directly confront corporate governance or the incentives that corporate decision makers face that often lead to the exploitation and abuse of working people, the environment, and small businesses at the bottom of the supply chain. Social dialogue, co-determination, corporate by-laws, and national laws governing corporate entities all have an important role to play in eliminating the race to the bottom and achieving the SDGs.   Regarding progress toward the SDGs, unfortunately, the current “market fundamentalism” (i.e., “corporations are always right”) that governs global trade and investment policy is getting in the way of achieving the SGDs. For example, paragraph 68 of the SDG declaration begins: “International trade is an engine for inclusive economic growth and poverty reduction, and contributes to the promotion of sustainable development.”   The absence of any qualifiers in this sentence (like “can” or “sometimes”) ignores the reality that international trade can also be an engine for wage stagnation and inequality. The SDGs just focus on “more trade” instead of the right kind of trade.   Unfortunately, this myopia about the current model of globalisation is compounded by existing trade and investment agreements and pending ones including the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).   Like other existing trade agreements, the TPP puts states in competition to attract investments by driving down costs. This disincentivises the enactment or enforcement (or both) of labour market policies and workplace protections that would drive wages up, increase demand and raise living standards. As it is, labour share of income is at historic lows across the globe.   Similarly, to drive down costs and attract investment, the TPP incentivises tax abatements and ever lower corporate tax rates. These can undermine needed investments in labour market institutions, industrial and social transfer policies, infrastructure, health and education by limiting government revenues. [Read the Capaldo study Trading Down to learn more about this relentless competition to attract capital.]   In addition, the TPP contains the investor-to-state dispute settlement mechanism (ISDS), which undermines democratic governance by providing foreign investors with special rights and private tribunals they can use to bully governments out of enacting health, worker training, environmental and other needed reforms.   Importantly, there is no data available on the number of times investors have threatened but not filed cases once the policy they opposed was withdrawn or amended. However, we know the ‘chill factor’ caused by the threat of such cases undermines democratic choices about how best to enact policies needed to achieve decent work for all and other SDGs.   The TPP also undermines access to affordable medicines and health technologies, undermining the third SDG. By including many TRIPS-plus disciplines such as patent extensions, patent evergreening and minimum market exclusivity periods for biologic medicines, US trade policies delay entry of generic medicines and devices and tend to raise health care costs for patients and government health care programs.   Finally, the TPP is unlikely to help ensure labour rights and increase workplace safety. Although it requires parties to adopt and maintain fundamental labour rights, the US has a poor record of monitoring and enforcing such obligations. In reality, labour conditions degraded in Mexico and Central America after trade deals between the US and those countries went into force.   To achieve the SDGs, including inclusive growth and shared prosperity, the working people of the world need an effective collective voice in the workplace, not mere lip service. To walk the talk, global institutions like UNCTAD must turn away from neoliberal trade policies toward more progressive, inclusive ones. 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