How the “Frida Kahlo of Environmental Geopolitics” Is Lighting a Fire Under Big Oil | Global development

How the “Frida Kahlo of Environmental Geopolitics” Is Lighting a Fire Under Big Oil | Global development

SHe is one of the biggest opponents of fossil fuels on the world stage – but Susana Muhamad’s political career began in the halls of an oil company. It started when she resigned as a sustainability consultant at Shell in 2009 and returned to Colombia. She was 32 years old and disillusioned, far from the heights she would later reach as the country’s environment minister, and one of the best-known progressive leaders in global environmental politics.

Muhamad came to Shell as an idealistic 26-year-old. “I really thought you could have a big impact on the climate problem within an energy company, especially because all the advertising was about them becoming an energy company, meaning they weren’t just a fossil fuel company fuel,” she said when we met at the Colombian embassy in London.

“I resigned the day they decided to put their innovation dollars into fracking.”

Muhamad (center) speaks at a press conference in 2022 about submitting a fracking ban bill to the country’s parliament. Photo: undefined/Courtesy of Ministerio de Ambiente y Desarrollo Sostenible

Now 47, Muhamad, whose surname comes from her Palestinian grandfather, is preparing for biodiversity monitoring Cop16, a summit on the future of life on Earth that will host leaders next month in Cali, Colombia will bring together almost 200 countries. For many, she is a rising star of the environmental movement, joining voices like Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who is proposing an alternative vision of what the world could be and calling for developed countries to fund a just transition.

“Susana is the Frida Kahlo of environmental geopolitics,” says activist Oscar Soria. “Like Kahlo, whose art challenged cultural norms and spoke of resilience, Muhamad paints a vision of ecological justice that goes beyond traditional environmentalism… an environmental agenda that… reshapes the narrative around climate justice and biodiversity restoration.”

Muhamad during a visit to the Colombian embassy in London. Photo: undefined/Courtesy of Ministerio de Ambiente y Desarrollo Sostenible

The Colombian embassy sits between Harrods and its Ecuadorian counterpart, and the room where we meet offers a front row seat to the British capital’s richest people. Outside, a Rolls-Royce SUV and a blacked-out BMW wait with their drivers next to the high-end department store. Convertible supercars drive past shoppers brandishing luxury purchases from their hands. Muhamad, who represents Colombia’s first-ever left-wing government, hosts NGOs, journalists and senior British politicians – and promotes a vision of a “just transition” that would address economic imbalances alongside environmental ones.

The minister has had to be careful to avoid rhetoric about global inequality that could allow her political opponents to tie her government to more radical left-wing politicians from her region, but she is not naive to the potential pitfalls on the path to net zero. “We must be clear that this energy transition must not come at the expense of indigenous peoples, local communities and biodiversity,” she said in the plenary hall at the conclusion of Cop28 in Dubai last December, after an agreement to move away from fossil fuels fuels had been adopted. “There is responsibility in this balance between opportunity and risk. I would like to call on everyone to continue to be mobilized because with this text, intergenerational justice is still at stake,” she said.

Colombia became the first major fossil fuel producer to join an alliance of nations calling for a fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty at the December meeting. President Gustavo Petro’s government is pushing for a ban on fracking as it seeks to phase out coal, oil and gas and promises to make biodiversity the basis of its wealth in the post-fossil fuel era. Last month, it launched a $40 billion investment plan aimed at making that vision a reality. Muhamad was one of the leading ministers for including “exit” in the final Cop28 text in Dubai – an attempt that was ultimately unsuccessful. Colombia and Brazil have led efforts to end deforestation in the Amazon under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Muhamad with Cop28 President and UAE Special Envoy for Climate Change Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber Photo: Juan F Betancourt Franco/Courtesy of Ministerio de Ambiente y Desarrollo Sostenible

The evening before the embassy meeting, Muhamad addressed a Nature Summit event at the Natural History Museum. Standing under a blue whale skeleton and with a statue of Charles Darwin behind him, Muhamad underscored the urgency of the task and invited the world to be the “people’s policeman.” “As we decarbonize, we must protect and restore nature, otherwise the climate will not stabilize,” she told the crowd.

Muhamad was quick to point out that decarbonization efforts alone will be futile without protecting nature and the vast carbon sink it provides, which absorbs half of all human emissions each year. “Humanity must make a double movement. “The first is decarbonization and a just energy transition,” she said in August when announcing her vision for the conference. “The other side of the coin is to restore nature and allow it to take back its power over planet Earth so that we can truly stabilize the climate.”

The scientific background of the October conference is bleak. WWF figures show that wildlife populations have declined due to a mix of habitat loss, pollution, overconsumption, the spread of invasive species and global warming. Last year was the hottest ever recorded. The droughts and extreme heat are having catastrophic consequences for the Earth’s forests, grasslands and oceans: ecosystems that form the basis of human health, food security and civilization. Despite the warnings, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity has long been overshadowed by its climate counterpart, and governments have never met a single biodiversity target they set.

Cali will be the host city of Biodiversity Cop16 from October 21st to November 1st, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of the Convention on Biological Diversity

The summit also has important domestic political significance. Since Petro, a former Marxist guerrilla fighter, announced last year at Cop28 on climate change in Dubai that Colombia would host the biodiversity conference, he and Muhamad have pushed Cop16 to the center of the domestic agenda, hoping to portray it as an opportunity for sustainable change Development to exploit peace with insurgent rebel groups in forest areas. In July, the Central General Staff (EMC), a guerrilla group that rejected the country’s 2016 peace deal, threatened to summit after a series of bombings and shootings blamed on the group, but has since withdrawn the threat. Nevertheless, 12,000 soldiers and police will be in Cali to guard the conference.

“It was a very strange situation and we also hope to use Cop as a tool to promote peace in the country,” says Muhamad.

At home, her ministerial mandate ranges from eliminating deforestation across the country, which has fallen to its lowest level in 23 years, to managing Pablo Escobar’s hippos, which have been thriving east of Medellín since the drug lord’s death 1993. Muhamad bursts into laughter when I ask him about the hippos and what it’s like dealing with them, before launching into a ministerial answer. She says the African mammals are being wiped out using a mix of euthanasia, sterilization and hippopotamus transport: “For us it’s quite simple, it’s an invasive species that has been declared.” [as such] officially, not even by this government, by the last government. I agree with this assessment. “We already approved the plan to deal with the hippopotamus problem in April this year,” she says.

Muhamad announced during a press conference in 2023 that some of former cocaine baron Pablo Escobar’s 166 hippos would be euthanized. Photo: Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images

Muhamad lived with miners in an eco-village in South Africa, advocated for human rights in Denmark, and lived with farmers in Colombia as a student before her first “official” job at Shell. Now she is preparing to become police president for the first time, a role that will require her to focus on consensus and follow through on her decision to leave Shell. When contacted by the Guardian, the company said it aims to become a zero-emissions energy company by 2050 and last year invested $5.6 billion in low-carbon solutions, representing 23% of our capital expenditure.

Ultimately, she says of the vision she pursued at Shell: “I think it was greenwashing… There were people trying to push for change, but the fossil fuel regime was too strong,” she says. “All of this led me to believe that a more systematic change needed to be made. And for me the conclusion of that was politics.”