Introducing Ivonne Yanez – Acción Ecológica/Ecuador
Meet Ivonne Yanez. She is a founding member and current president of Acción Ecológica (Ecuador), one of the most well-known and respected climate justice organizations in Latin America, as well as Oilwatch Latin America, an oil activities resistance network. Ivonne works on energy, climate change and, more recently, environmental services. She has been an active promoter of the “Keep the Oil in the Soil” campaign for many years, with Yasuni as the emblematic case. Acción Ecológica has been an ecumenical partner since before the creation of KAIROS, dating back to the Jubilee Campaign, where Acción Ecológica led the call for recognition of the ecological debt of the North to the South.
She is emphatic on the impacts that false solutions can bring to Ecuador and its people:
“We also denounce from Acción Ecológica the false solutions from the market like CO2 emissions compensations, as well as other false solutions like geoengineering that carry a high risk to the life on the planet. All these false solutions enable the big polluters to get allowances to continue with their activities, contributing to global warming.”
Ivonne’s message to the Canadian government urges greater accountability:
“From Canada, many things can be done. For example, it can drastically diminish the extraction and use of fossil fuels. But also from Canada, it’s possible to force accountability on the Canadian mining industries operating in global South nations like Ecuador. These industries deforest, cause biodiversity losses, and pollute the water, too, in the context of water scarcity for human consumption.”
Find more information on the different campaigns at Acción Ecológica – Ecuador here.
Watch Ivonne’s introductory video.
