The national “Fund Our Future” Campaign seeks to achieve the following objectives:

• Create awareness about the urgency of climate action and the disproportionate impacts that private sector and Global North driven solutions have on vulnerable communities by sharing and having conversations on AAL two flagship reports with our partners, donors, public and private institutions on the issues and solutions of the report.
• To advance the climate actions of ActionAid, the Global Platform and their partners and out load the voices of the people who are highly affected by climate – induced impacts to decision makers for possible action.
• Provide an engaging alternative platform for marginalized and underrepresented groups including farmers, indigenous peoples, artists, academics, scientists, civil society, women and youth to voice their climate and development concerns, perspectives and solutions.
• Recognize and celebrate the inspiring efforts and achievements of individuals, communities, organizations, and governments in implementing climate solutions that centers peoples and communities’ wellbeing and culture.
• Expose the fallacy of private sector led, Global North driven climate solutions and the hypocrisy of entities that instead of financing renewable energy continue to finance the fossil fuel industry and export oriented industrial agriculture at the expense of own stated corporate climate targets and commitments.
• Advocate for climate justice, emphasizing the importance of equity, human rights, women’s rights, and fair distribution of climate benefits and burdens, especially for those least responsible for causing climate change.
• Advocate for plausible alternative pathways for Liberia towards financing climate adaptation, including investing in clean energy and food production systems and which strengthen rather than weaken food and energy sovereignty.
• Facilitate cross-movement learning, knowledge sharing and collaboration towards transformative climate action and development policies that address the structural traps and challenges that Africa has experienced over centuries.
• Consolidate Liberian people’s demands towards SDGs Summit, UN General Assembly and COP.

The Climate Week of Climate Actions will revolve around the following themes:

Fund Our Future 

Key messaging for the campaign

This list of key messages is led with core public messages we want to convey to the public globally and then a range of messages to choose from depending on the focus of your national campaign and priorities. 

Coe Public Messages:

1. The world’s money is flowing in the wrong direction – since the Paris Agreement, banks have provided 20 times more financing to fossil fuels and industrial agriculture activities in the Global South than Global North governments have provided as climate finance to countries on the front lines of the climate crisis.
2. This means that the causes of the climate crisis in the Global South are receiving 20 times more financing than the solutions. This is absurd.
3. Fossil fuels are by far the largest contributor to climate change, accounting for over 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
4. Industrial agriculture is the second largest contributor of climate emissions after fossil fuels. It uses methods which are not fit for purpose in an era of climate change because they not only exacerbate the crisis, but also increase the vulnerability of crops and food systems to climate impacts.
5. We have the alternatives to fossil fuels and industrial agriculture – renewable energy and agroecology. And ActionAid is calling for more public funds for them to scale up.
6. ActionAid is calling out this absurd flow of money towards the climate crisis, and demanding with young people, women-led organizations and allies for increased public funds for agroecology and renewable energy.

Broad messaging

• In plain sight, banks continue to fund dangerous fossil fuel and industrial agriculture projects in a ‘people before profits’ self-catering mission.
• Women and communities on the front lines of the climate crisis are at the mercy of decisions made in the boardrooms of banks on the other side of the world. It is time for those communities to hold bankers to account.
• Governments, banks and pension funds must stop expanding and funding fossil fuels and carbon intensive agriculture. These industries are driving global warming and impoverishing communities, yet they continue to receive trillions in new investment.
• While the climate impacts of fossil fuels are well known, many people are surprised to learn that agriculture is the second largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions globally.

The disempowerment of small farmers, predominately women is intricately linked to the aggressive expansion of large farms relying on deforestation, synthetic fertilizers, chemical pesticides and weedkillers to achieve profits.

• The good news is that we do not need to rely on harmful and intensive farming of crops and livestock to produce our food. Agroecological approaches to farming work with nature instead of against it, produce food with lower emissions, are more resilient to climate impacts, and offer more secure livelihoods for the planet’s 2.5 billion farmers, especially women. Agroecology is an alternative to industrial agriculture.
• We’re demanding that governments act quickly and switch to funding sustainable and safer methods of agriculture.
• The redirection of harmful fossil fuels and industrial agricultural is not an option, it’s a necessity.
• Effective climate resilience starts from the ground-up. Let’s change the narrative where women and young people are no longer sidelined. We stand in solidarity with those that are too often marginalized and demand a seat at the table.
• ActionAid’s Fund Our Future campaign is rooted in youth and community struggles against toxic industrial agriculture and fossil fuels projects. What’s important are community solutions led by women and young people that benefit both people and planet.
• We need a safe, caring planet and secure livelihoods now, and for the future. And we must act now to secure it.
• We are just at the start of a longer struggle for a just, green and feminist future – a world based on caring for people and planet, not maximizing profits. Such a big transformation won’t happen without power from the people.

Calls to action:

• ActionAid is calling on financial investors across the world to immediately stop financing all new deforestation, coal and fossil fuel expansion activities, and rapidly phase out financing of all other fossil fuel and harmful industrial agriculture activities.
• We need to see serious investment in agroecological farming to reach the scale that is required to replace large scale production, while protecting the climate, ensuring resilience, producing food and empowering women and communities. A just transition is required not just in the energy and transport sectors, it’s required in the food sector too.
• We know that public financing has the capacity to contribute greatly to solutions to the climate change crisis. We’re calling on governments to redirect public funds from industrial agriculture and fossil fuels to agroecology and renewable energy.
• Banks must:
  • Immediately stop project and corporate financing for all new deforestation, coal and fossil fuel expansion activities, and rapidly phase out financing of all other fossil fuel and harmful industrial agriculture activities
  • Strengthen polices against human rights abuses and deforestation to protect the rights of communities. Ensuring Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), robust safeguards and effective disclosure and redress mechanisms.
  • Strengthen transparency and tools for verification by enhancing measures to ensure accountability of project and corporate financing.
  • Set real and ambitious targets to bring financing portfolio emissions down to as close to zero as possible, without offsets, and covering the full scope of the emissions arising from loans and underwriting.
• Governments must:
  • Effectively regulate the banking, finance, fossil fuel and industrial agriculture sectors;
  • Redirect harmful fossil fuel and industrial agricultural subsidies; o Scale up support and planning for just transitions to real solutions such as renewable energy and agroecology.
  • Finance just transitions through scaled-up climate finance, tax justice and debt relief.

Climate change

• Climate disasters are destroying the lives and livelihoods of millions of people worldwide.
• Women and young people in the Global South are on the frontline of the climate crisis and are being hit hardest by increasingly frequent and severe climate disasters despite doing the least to cause them.
• The climate science shows that our window of opportunity for keeping global warming under the key threshold of 1.5°C is closing fast. Global emissions need to reach zero by 2050 if we are to have even a 50% chance of keeping emissions under 1.5°C.

The situation:

Industrial agriculture

• Agriculture is the second largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions globally. But it is also the sector that is most vulnerable to climate impacts. Floods, droughts, cyclones, rising sea levels and erratic weather patterns can have devastating consequences on crop yields and farmers’ incomes, which are increasingly under threat in an era of climate change.

 But industrialized farming and factory-farming of livestock have contributed to deforestation and high levels of greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide and meth Create awareness about the urgency of climate action and the disproportionate impacts that private sector and Global North driven solutions have on vulnerable communities in Africa, and which have accelerated climate change.   

• Industrial agriculture drives deforestation and relies heavily on industrial methods such as intensive planting of large areas of one single crop, cultivation of genetically modified seeds, synthetic fertilizers and hybrid seeds, all designed to maximize production without considering the devastating consequences for our planet.
• A model heavily reliant on fossil-fueled chemical inputs, industrialized seeds, and corporate supply chains of agriculture is environmentally damaging. It undermines the livelihoods, knowledge and seed diversity of millions of women food producers, farmers and indigenous communities who produce the food and care for our environment.
• The combination of aggressive deforestation, production and application of agrochemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, and methane emissions from factory farming of livestock mean that industrial agriculture has an oversized emissions footprint that is a major contributor to climate change.
• The creation of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers used in industrial agriculture is energy intensive, burns large amounts of fossil fuels and leads to high carbon dioxide emissions. When applied to the soil, these fertilizers can release Nitrous Oxide (N2O), a highly potent greenhouse gas that has 298 times the atmospheric-warming effect of carbon dioxide, while also eroding stored carbon soil and converting into atmospheric carbon dioxide.
• The loss of soils from the application of chemical fertilizers also leaves crops more vulnerable to drying out or flooding as a result of climate change.

Multinational agricultural corporations:

• In recent decades, agriculture has become increasingly dominated by large-scale multinational corporations which are driven by profit and do not priorities the benefit of farmers or our planet.
• Industrial agriculture is the second largest contributor of climate emissions after fossil fuels and uses industrial methods which are not fit for purpose in an era of climate change because these methods not only exacerbate the crisis but also increase the vulnerability of crops and food systems to climate impacts.
• Industrial agriculture favors large farms, encourages the use of synthetic fertilizers, chemical pesticides and weedkillers to achieve profits and, as a result, disempowers small farmers, degrades the environment and makes climate change worse.

Key agriculture stats:

• In 2019, approximately 79% of global greenhouse gas emissions came from the sectors of energy, industry, transport and buildings together and 22% from agriculture, forestry and other land use.
• Approximately 3.4 billion people – or 45% of the world’s population – live in rural areas.
• Roughly 2 billion people (26.7% of the world population) derive their livelihoods from
• In 2016, an estimated 57% of people in Africa were living in rural areas. 53% of the population was economically active in agriculture.
• An estimated 500 million family farms represent over 90% of all farms globally and over half of these farmers are women.

Fossil fuels

• Much of the world’s energy is produced by burning fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas.
• Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) into the atmosphere, which traps heat radiating from Earth toward space.
• Fossil fuels are by far the largest contributor to climate change, accounting for over 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
• The potential emissions from the coal, oil and gas fields already in production would push emissions way above 1.5°C.
• The fossil fuel industry’s activities have disproportionate impacts on women. Fossil fuel extraction sites are also sites where gender-based violence and femicide is concentrated.
• Experts including climate scientists, the head of the International Energy Agency and UN Secretary General António Guterres have all called for an immediate halt to the expansion of fossil fuels – i.e. that no new coal, oil or gas fields should be developed. Guterres has further called for a fossil fuel phase out that would mean leaving fossil fuels – including those at sites that have already been developed – in the ground where they belong.

Women and girls

• Women and children are 14 times more likely to die during climate disasters.
• It is estimated that 80 per cent of people displaced by climate change are women, according to UN Environment.
• In the Global South, it is often women who grow crops and work the land, but this is becoming increasingly difficult due to more frequent droughts, floods, cyclones and other severe climate events. At the same time, many places are becoming uninhabitable due to the climate crisis.
• Women and girls are leading efforts to build resilience in their communities as practitioners of agroecology and developing sustainable solutions to protect their livelihoods.

The problem

As the climate crisis escalates, fossil fuels and industrial agriculture – the two industries that are the largest contributors to climate change – continue to expand and benefit from huge financial flows, while the solutions needed to address the climate crisis remain woefully underfunded.  

• These are also not sustainable and can lead to mass deforestation in parts of the world, like the Amazon, which threatens indigenous communities, destroys biodiversity, increases emissions and reduces the planet’s ability to soak up carbon.
• Despite global banks’ public pledges that they are addressing climate change, they continue to invest in fossil fuels and industrial agriculture on a staggering scale.
• Since the Paris Agreement came into force in 2016, banks have provided an average of 20 times more financing to fossil fuel and industrial agriculture activities in the Global South, than Global North governments have provided as climate finance to countries on the front lines of the climate crisis.
• Combined average annual bank financing to fossil fuels and industrial agriculture in the Global South 2016-2022 was US$513 billion. Climate finance support to the Global South in 2020 was between just US$21 billion and US$24.5 billion. (Ref: Oxfam’s Shadow Climate Finance Report 2023).
• This means that the causes of the climate crisis in the Global South are receiving 20 times more financing than the solutions. This is absurd.
• Major banks are funding corporations responsible for controversial projects which are causing harm to local communities and ecosystems.
• None of the major banks has a policy to fully phase out oil and gas financing, even though this is required if their financing is to be consistent with a 1.5°C climate goal.
• Public financing has the capacity to contribute greatly to solutions to the climate change crisis but at the moment it is part of the problem. Governments continue to channel far more public funds to fossil fuels and industrial agriculture through a web of public subsidies, state-owned enterprises, state-owned banks, national wealth and pension

funds, and official development assistance (ODA), then they do to the solutions to the climate crisis.

The solutions:

Agroecology:

• Agroecology is a term to describe farming and managing crops, livestock, forests and fisheries in a way that works with nature, avoids emissions, is, and offers various other environmental, social and cultural benefits such as addressing food and water scarcity, and poverty.
• The elements of agroecology have been defined by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), outlining 10 key principles that encourage diversity, knowledge sharing, recycling of nutrients, and social benefits.
• Sustainable agriculture can be seen as an umbrella term that includes several ways of farming sustainably, like permaculture, organic agriculture, biodynamic agriculture, and agroecology.
• Agroecology champions a holistic approach, which values the experience and knowledge of farmers and indigenous people and combines it with evidence-based, natural agricultural practices and innovations that promote ecological and socio-economic benefits.
• Agroecological approaches are the most effective means of adapting to climate change. By improving the health, structure and nutrition of soil through the use of compost, manure, mulching or green manures, they reduce erosion, improve plant health, and increase the ability of soil to absorb and retain water in times of both drought and floods.
• Agroecology promotes agricultural biodiversity by planting multiple varieties of crops which can increase the resilience of farmers to extreme climate events by spreading risk. This kind of farming helps farmers to able to adapt and minimize the effects of erratic rainfall patterns, droughts, floods and pests.
• By adding nutrient and carbon-rich organic matter such as compost and manure to soils, agroecology avoids the need for climate-harming and soil-degrading synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. Agroecology is therefore not only more resistant to climate change than industrial agriculture, but it also can avoid and stabilize global warming.
• Sustainable solutions like agroecology which would feed the world and keep temperatures low are being undermined by large multinational industrial agriculture companies which are financed by banks and governments even as they wreck the planet.

What do ActionAid’s projects do?

Women farmers face unique constraints because of gender bias such as not having decision-making powers, low rural wages, lack of access to training, support, information, land and resources, unpaid care work responsibilities, and limited exposure or access to markets to sell their produce. 

• ActionAid is already supporting communities and movements to defend their land, livelihoods and heritage against climate destroying projects, challenging industrial corporate agriculture and false solutions such as climate-smart agriculture.
• ActionAid supports women farmers’ access to markets for trade.
• ActionAid advocates for the reduction of public debt and increased public financing for women farmers and agroecology.
• ActionAid promotes agroecology as a real alternative to industrial agriculture, which ensures food stays where it is most needed.
• ActionAid contributes to farmers’ resilience against climate change by providing them with training, tools, climate-resilient seeds, and information about sustainable practices.
• ActionAid contributes to the empowerment of women farmers so they know about their rights and are armed with all the information they need to lead change.  

KEY MESSAGING

You are encouraged to shape your own message and adapt it to your local context. Be creative and it can be helpful rely on many of the messages who are coherent and supportive to our campaign’s demand, such as the following:

1. The world’s money is flowing in the wrong direction – since the Paris Agreement, banks have provided 20 times more financing to fossil fuels and industrial agriculture activities in the Global South than Global North governments have provided as climate finance to countries on the front lines of the climate crisis.
2. This means that the causes of the climate crisis in the Global South are receiving 20 times more financing than the solutions. This is absurd and needs to stop.
3. Fossil fuels are by far the largest contributor to climate change, accounting for over 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
4. Industrial agriculture is the second largest contributor of climate emissions after fossil fuels. It uses methods which are not fit for purpose in an era of climate change because they not only exacerbate the crisis, but also increase the vulnerability of crops and food systems to climate impacts.
5. We have the alternatives to fossil fuels and industrial agriculture – renewable energy and agroecology. And ActionAid is calling for more public funds for them to scale up.
6. ActionAid is calling out this absurd flow of money towards the climate crisis, and demanding with young people, women-led organizations and allies for increased public funds for agroecology and renewable energy You can find all of them here: Key messaging – Fund Our Future .pdf.

KEY DEMANDS

Our #FundOurFuture campaign is very clear on its demanding, and you can include them in your messaging:

Banks must immediately stop financing fossil fuel expansion and industrial agriculture that causes deforestation and human rights violations.

Banks must strengthen polices against human rights abuses and deforestation to protect communities.

Governments must regulate the banking sector to stop the financing of fossil fuel expansion, and they must scale up just transitions to real solutions such as renewable