A/77/549 73. The massive power and resource imbalances among States participating in climate change negotiations have led to compromises that benefit politically powerful States – including former colonial powers – at the expense of global South States, especially small island developing States. One submission highlighted how existing climate mitigation interventions, which are delivered only in English and remain highly technical, widen the gap between traditional and scientific approaches to climate response. 136 Although States in the global North are typically capable of fielding large negotiating teams and relying upon well-resourced national bureaucracies operating in English, other States are limited to smaller negotiating teams with limited support from their capitals. 137 This imbalance is magnified by the outsized economic capacity of global North States, which was built in significant part through racist domination of the global South, and allows the North to exert greater leverage on the global South. At the same time, global South States have no effective, reliable means of holding global North States accountable for failing to meet their climate obligations or to provide reparations for historical and ongoing climate injustice. 74. There are vital debates about the need for greater compliance with existing international standards in the face of ecological crisis but, as highlighted by submissions received, a central problem is the existing international legal frameworks. For example, in addition to the above, internation al law fails to provide robust provisions for holding transnational corporations accountable for human rights violations that disproportionately affect peoples and territories colonially designated as non-white. International investment law presently serves as a deterrent to environmentally responsible extractivism regulation because of the costly arbitral proceedings that can result from national environmental and other regulation s that diminish the value of foreign investment. An additional concern is that the applicable legal and policy frameworks have operated as “hyper-technocratic silo[s]” 138 that are disconnected both from the bodies of law that are major contributors to the problem, and from the economic, social and political fields that shape and are impacted from ecological crisis. Even the way nature and the environment are conceptualized in international environmental discussions is limited to the commercial, human -centric understandings of nature that can be traced to early European scholars, and that remain the dominant frames in international law. 139 The worldviews that have precipitated ecological disaster and that are determining the global response remain anchored in Eurocentrism and continue to exclude the worldviews of other peoples. This epistemic imperialism is itself a racial justice issue. B. Recommendations 75. The present report conveys the grim picture on the ground, but there are racially and ethnically marginalized groups that challenge environmental racism and climate injustice on a daily basis, and that are charting paths toward climate justice and environmental justice more broadly. From consultations, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives 140 offers one example. It is a “network of networks”, that is a non-hierarchical, horizontal initiative focused on solidarity, strategic alliances and systemic solutions at the local, regional and global levels. Other examples include Oil Change International and the Indigenous Environmental __________________ 136 137 138 139 140 22/24 Submission from Vano. Danielle Falzon, “The ideal delegation: how institutional privilege silences ‘developing’ nations in the UN climate negotiations”, Social Problems, spab040 (2021). Submissions from Gonzalez and the Centre for Economic and Social Rights. Ushu Natarajan and Kishan Khoday, “Locating nature: making and unmaking international law”, Leiden Journal of International Law, vol. 27, No. 3 (2014). See https://kalpavriksh.org/our-work/alternatives/global-tapestry-of-alternatives/. 22-24043