“This government has had environmental catastrophes for two years and there is no longer enough money,” President Gustavo Petro lamented last Tuesday, October 15, when referring to the climate crisis that increases this type of emergency and criticized “lukewarmness about caring for nature” to a few days before the COP16 on Biodiversity starts in Cali.
“COP16 is going to bring together people, some rulers are going to do so (attend) simply to warm up the discourse (…) but what many people are going to seek is to unite, and that unity of people is the only thing that can save us “said Petro after signing a decree that establishes measures for the development of the environmental competencies of indigenous authorities.
Along these lines, and just a few days before the international summit begins on October 21, the president questioned “when we had seen that the Amazon River dried up and at the same time La Guajira was flooded, when we had seen that we were going from environmental catastrophe to environmental catastrophe.”
Regarding the budget allocated for these emergencies, he regretted that when his Government tried to “imposing taxes on coal and oil, which was the logical thing to at least from then on cement the possibilities of adapting to the climate crisis, since the defenders of fossil capital who today still have power in Colombia suspended the law” .
This is in reference to the ruling of the Constitutional Court that overturned the part of the tax reform that prohibited the deduction of royalties from the taxable base of the income tax of companies dedicated to the exploration and exploitation of non-renewable natural resources.
Regarding the decree signed today, the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development indicated that “With this new regulation, the indigenous authorities will build, together with other entities, direct mechanisms to guarantee the protection of the country’s ecosystems and its territories, taking into account their ancestral knowledge.”
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In this sense, the Colombian president highlighted that “No one can teach any Colombian and any Colombian and Latin American institution how to build balance with nature better than indigenous peoples.”
EFE
