VIDEOS: Activists at the COP21 Climate Change Summit in Paris

On Saturday, as delegates from almost 200 countries prepared to sign a global accord on climate change, tens of thousands of activists took to the Paris streets in defiance of a ban on protests.

Watch as Truthdig columnist Sonali Kolhatkar reports from the scene, speaking to activists including leading global climate activist and founder of 350.org Bill McKibben.

Sonali interviews indigenous women from North America at the COP21 conference here:

In this video, Sonali talks to activists as they form a human chain around the Eiffel Tower and spell out the letters “S.O.S” during a ban on protests at the COP21 summit:

On Thursday, hundreds of activists gathered near the Eiffel Tower on International Human Rights Day to draw attention to the impacts of climate change on poor people of color around the world. Below, Sonali interviews African women activists calling for not just climate solutions but climate justice. In order to achieve justice, as these women remind us, the voices of the most affected communities have to be at the center:

Next door to the COP21 meeting, the United Nations and the French government designated a space for use by people who couldn’t get accreditation to attend the conference. The area was called the Espaces Generations Climat, or Climate Generation Space, and unofficially referred to as “the green zone” — as opposed to “the blue zone,” where the official COP21 talks were held. Like the Climate Action Zone, it hosted a number of booths representing climate justice organizations but was also dominated by corporate and technological companies offering their solutions to climate change. Unlike the Climate Action Zone, the Climate Generation Space was a tightly controlled area where activists were allowed to have discussions as long as they did not disrupt the talks. Once in a while, however, activists did break the rules. In this video report, Sonali reports from the Climate Generation Space, speaking to Liddy Nakpil, coordinator of the Asian People’s Movement on Debt and Development:

Again near the Eiffel Tower on International Human Rights Day, Eros Sana—a prominent French climate justice activist—addressed a crowd of people who described themselves as representatives of “front-line communities” in the fight against climate change. After his talk, Sana explained to Sonali why he was there and what the activists had planned for the last day of negotiations:

Read Sonali’s report from COP21 here.