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Join us for our inaugural conference to open Women's History Month, dedicated to exploring the intersection of women and green colonialism.
Follow this link to reserve your space at this free event - Hurry! Places are limited
Saturday 1st March 2025
The green energy transition is helping us reimagine a world without fossil fuels… but at whose expense?
17:00 - 21:45 pm
Espacio Afro, C. de Cáceres, 49, Arganzuela, 28045 Madrid
The event will be in both Spanish and English, please bring headphones to be able to listen to the English and Spanish Interpretation via your mobile device. We will not be providing food at the event so please do bring your own refreshments.
Want to know more?
For our "Women and Green Colonialism" conference, we are going to be examining the dark side of the renewable energy transition and how this impacts women of the global majority. We will be premiering our short documentary “Apaa Land”, highlighting the powerful stories of women from the Apaa region of Uganda who are resisting dispossession and displacement due to "green" mineral extraction for renewable energy technologies.
During the event we will explore how the renewable energy transition is often driven by unethical resource extraction and green-washing tactics, which attempt to conceal the realities of occupation, land displacement, and the continued extraction of fossil fuels in the Apaa region of Uganda and beyond.
We hope that you will not only leave this event informed but also energised to advocate for a truly just and equitable energy transition.
If you’re not sure what “Green Colonialism”, or "Green-washing" is, check out our Instagram page here where we will be sharing key definitions and examples of green colonialism in both Spanish and English.
Closer to the event we will share the schedule on this page and we will be updating this page with details of the speakers who will be sharing their lived experiences and insight with us on the day.
Meet the Speakers
Tugume Rachel
Tugume Rachel and her children are directly affected by the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and are at threat of being dispossessed of their land, along with many others in their villiage. She will be sharing her lived experience and exposing how greenwashing is being used to justify this destructive fossil fuel project.
Spanning 1,445 kilometers across Uganda and Tanzania, EACOP poses devastating consequences for local communities, wildlife, and the planet. The project threatens to displace thousands from their land, further deepening social and environmental injustices.
Rachel is part of both the EACOP Host Communities movement and the Stop EACOP movement which campaign to raise awareness of the harms of EACOP and mobilise global solidarity against the banks and companies funding this pipeline.
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Marizol Gonzaler
Marizol graduated in Social and Cultural Anthropology in 2019 from the Autonomous University of Madrid. In 2020 she completed her studies in the Master's degree in Contemporary Arab and Islamic Studies at the same university. She is a PhD candidate in January 2025 in the Department of Contemporary History of the Autonomous University of Madrid, following a line of research around gender, national and epistemic decoloniality and Human Rights.
Marizol is going to facilitate a closing activity to guide our audience in understanding the colonial roots of mainstream renewable energy projects and tangible steps they can take to ensure a just and equitable transition that does not perpetuate exploitation and displacement.
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Necmettin Türk, Decolonial researcher-activist
Necmettin Türk is a longstanding human rights and environmental activist-scholar based in Kurdistan and Europe. He completed his MA in human rights at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2021, with his master’s thesis focusing on the legal and political-economic dimensions of land-grabbing. His research explored its implications for peasants’ rights to food, land, and development, with a specific emphasis on socio-economic and ecological vulnerabilities among peasants. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD at the University of Hamburg. His research project examines how the democratic autonomy of Rojava responds to the colonial legacy concerning its decolonisation strategies, particularly in the development of ecological agricultural systems, community-based governance and socio-ecological transformation within regions marked by conflict and resistance.
Leah Pattem
Leah Pattem is a multi-award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and documentary filmmaker, whose background in climate science has given her a deep understanding of environmental issues on a local and global scale. Leah reports for major outlets, including the BBC, El País, The Guardian, The Times, and Al Jazeera, covering breaking news, in-depth analysis and original investigative features.
In 2016, Leah founded Madrid No Frills, a hyper-local journalism platform that highlights Madrid’s social issues, movements and identity, and which has become a vital voice in the city’s media landscape.
As an experienced teacher, Leah leads multimedia journalism courses for school and university students, as well as professional journalists looking to expand their expertise. She organises local events and frequently travels to deliver talks, fostering deeper conversations around the stories she tells.
Leah will be speaking about how mainstream media contributes to the greenwashing of the renewable energy transition while erasing the realities of green colonialism.
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Eva Maria Fjellheim, Southern Saami researcher
Eva Maria Fjellheim is a Southern Saami scholar, writer, educator and radio documentary producer working on decolonial struggles and solidarity across Indigenous geographies. In 2024, she successfully defended her PhD in Indigenous studies at the Centre for Saami Studies at UiT, the Arctic University of Norway. Her research and thesis concern dispossession of Saami reindeer herding landscapes by the wind energy industry as a form of green colonialism.
Sara Buri
Economist and ecofeminist. Head of administration and finances at Conciencia Afro, activist at SOS Racismo Madrid and former head of sustainable finances at Ecologistas en Acción. Co-author of 'Alerta Greenwashing' and translator of 'Negra. La vida desconocida de Claudette Colvin'.
Sara will be speaking on how Anti-racist activists and Feminist can incorporate climate justice into their advocacy and activism.
Bilbo Bassaterra, Futuro Vegetal Co-founder
Bilbo Bassaterra is originally from Cádiz and the founder of Futuro Vegetal. He worked as a lawyer until he left to devote himself entirely to climate activism and became a day labourer and, currently, a waiter.
Futuro Vegetal Vegetal is a non-violent civil disobedience movement that fights to reach resilience against the climate crisis. Its main demand is to push food security and sovereignty through a change in the farming system.
Bilbo will be sharing his journey towards decolonising his activism and the importance of ensuring white dominant environmental movements in Spain include and center the voices of women of the global majority.
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