As an alliance of grassroots environmental, climate, racial and gender justice organizations, we understand the existential threat of the climate crisis and the critical importance of not abdicating any climate policy space to power. However, given the escalating conditions in Palestine, as people of conscience we cannot participate in the greenwashing of genocide in Gaza. To honor this boycott we are canceling our delegation to the UNFCCC-COP for the first time in 15 years.

For more than one month, Israeli occupying forces have imposed a devastating siege on Gaza, massacring more than 10,300 Palestinians, including over 4,000 children, and leaving tens of thousands maimed and injured. People of conscience from multifaith, multicultural, multiracial, multigenerational backgrounds around the globe — including rabbis, the Pope, human rights organizations, and the United Nations itself — are demanding an immediate ceasefire, to allow the immediate entry of life-saving humanitarian aid, and a lift of the siege on Gaza.

The time to prevent further loss of innocent life is now. Never again is now. The only choice to end the mass killing of children and families in Gaza is a ceasefire now. We join this boycott in solidarity with Palestinian-led organizations, who are reminding us that the survival of land and people anywhere requires that we oppose settler-colonialism, apartheid, militarism, land theft, and environmental destruction everywhere.

There is no climate justice without human rights. Under the COP28 Presidency of the UAE, the UNFCCC process is overtaken by an oil baron host, and a country that is the world’s seventh-largest extractor of oil and the fifth-largest emitter of CO2, with plans to still increase oil production. The UAE has its own stark record of internationally recognized human rights abuses, imprisonment of human rights defenders, and abuse of migrant workers. It is a major purchaser of Israeli surveillance technology and as host of COP28, is providing Israel a global platform to conduct greenwashing while it commits genocide. We oppose all attempts by UAE, Israel, and repressive governments to use COP28 to greenwash their repressive regimes.

We call on climate and environmental organizations to join the call to boycott COP28. We call on those organizations who do attend COP28 this year to use every opportunity to support a Ceasefire now, and to directly demand that governments act to end Israel’s siege and the genocide of Palestinian people. We implore conscious forces everywhere to apply pressure on all fronts, to remind world leaders of their responsibility to act, and to loudly and unrelentingly echo the international call for a ceasefire now.