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Facing a call for climate reparations, wealthy nations propose an insurance scheme

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Monday, November 14, 2022

Tensions at the United Nations climate change conference known as COP27 have been running high, largely over the issue of what’s called “loss and damage” — shorthand for the disproportionate suffering that the developing world is already experiencing at the hands of climate change. In the most concrete response yet to the issue, on Monday a group of countries led by Germany announced their commitment to developing “a Global Shield against Climate Risks” to help people in the least developed countries better prepare for climate-fueled disasters.  The Global Shield is a joint initiative by the G7, a political forum consisting of the world’s most industrialized countries, and the V20, which is represented by the finance ministers of 58 of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. The German government has committed roughly $175 million to the effort, which intends to address loss and damage through insurance programs and social security schemes. Denmark, Ireland, Canada, and France have also contributed about $42 million to the initiative. The least-industrialized countries in the world have argued that they’ve done little to cause climate change but are the most affected by climate-fueled disasters, like the recent floods in Pakistan that left a third of the country underwater. (The V20’s website points out that it represents nearly 20 percent of the global population but only 5 percent of global emissions.) For this reason, developing countries have called on wealthy nations to set up a fund to pay for the loss and damage climate change has already caused and will cause in the future — in effect, for a form of climate reparations. The success of COP27 could rest on whether wealthy nations, whose early industrialization is disproportionately responsible for the climate change that has occurred so far, answer the call. “The Global Shield is long overdue,” Ken Ofori-Atta, Ghana’s finance minister, said at the press conference announcing the Global Shield’s launch at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. “It has never been a question of who pays for loss and damage, because we in the V20 are already paying for it.” Given the lack of momentum on direct funding to address loss and damage, the Global Shield is the first systematic and substantive effort by wealthy nations that responds to the call for climate reparations. While proposals for a separate, formal U.N. mechanism that would provide direct loss and damage funding are still under negotiation, some countries such as Ireland, Austria, and New Zealand have made symbolic pledges of a few million dollars to show their support for the cause. The United States, which has historically refused to acknowledge the issue, has staunchly opposed a separate fund for loss and damage. On Saturday, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said that a financing mechanism for loss and damage is “just not happening.” However, the U.S. is a member of the G7 and hence a part of the Global Shield consortium. While there are few details yet on exactly how the Global Shield will work, German federal development minister Svenja Schulze said the program will include insurance programs, social security schemes, early warning systems, and other financial assistance arranged in advance before disaster strikes. Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Fiji, Ghana, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Senegal will be the first recipients of “Global Shield packages,” according to a press release. Advocates for loss and damage warned that insurance schemes like those promised by Global Shield are an insufficient solution to loss and damage, and they worried that such programs will distract from the demand for separate direct funding. The Global Shield is an expansion of the InsuResilience Global Partnership, a program spearheaded in 2015 by the German government that primarily provides insurance schemes to countries in the Global South.  InsuResilience and other insurance programs that have been championed by wealthy nations have been inadequate to meet the scale of loss and damage that people in climate-vulnerable countries are facing, advocates told Grist. Asking people in the developing world to pay for insurance when they’ve done little to cause the climate crisis is fundamentally unfair, they said.  “If you’re a rich country who is on the hook for paying for this, it very cleverly redirects the responsibility for dealing with climate loss and damage onto vulnerable people,” said Julie-Anne Richards, an independent consultant and expert with the Loss and Damage Collaboration, an advocacy group. “Rich countries can turn around and go, ‘Well, the problem is you didn’t prepare well enough. You don’t have insurance.’” Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at the Climate Action Network, an international coalition of more than 1,800 environmental groups, said that in past years wealthy nations have used insurance programs to distract from the demand for direct loss and damage funding. He is wary of the announcement, given the lack of more concrete detail about how the Global Shield, which was earlier floated in June at the G7 leaders summit, will deliver financial support to those in need. “The phrase is very fancy: ‘Global Shield,’” he said. “But what’s inside is unclear to many.” Schulze was quick to address such concerns at the press conference on Monday. “It is not a kind of tactic to avoid formal negotiations on loss and damage,” she said. “The Global Shield also isn’t the one and only solution for loss and damage — certainly not. We need a broad range of solutions and respective funding for tackling loss and damage.” The international community has been kicking around the idea of an insurance scheme to help countries vulnerable to climate change since at least the early 1990s, when island nations proposed an insurance pool to protect low-lying countries from sea level rise. Over the years, the World Bank, United Nations, and various countries have created risk pooling programs such as the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility, the African Risk Capacity, and the Pacific Catastrophe Risk Assessment and Financing Initiative. These programs are subsidized by wealthy nations and other donors and allow countries in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific to secure coverage for disasters such as drought, flooding, and hurricanes.  These sorts of insurance can be purchased by governments to protect their people against disasters, and by individuals to protect their property. Premiums are typically subsidized to make them affordable. There are two main types of climate disaster insurance: indemnity insurance and parametric insurance. The former involves purchasing policies that cover specific perils over specific periods of time and are paid out depending on the scale of losses when a disaster strikes. These are similar to the insurance policies purchased by U.S. homeowners. In the case of parametric insurance, on the other hand, insurers identify specific climatic conditions that trigger payouts to policyholders. When specific predetermined thresholds describing the level of flooding or drought or other disasters are met, insurers disburse funds no matter the scale of the damage on the ground. The upshot of this is that the long and cumbersome process of filing a claim and verifying the damage is avoided, resulting in quicker payouts. But in countries in the Global South, where historical climatic and environmental data isn’t as readily available, insurers have struggled to define the best parameters — such as wind speed, rainfall, or days without rain — that trigger payouts. As a result, even when an expensive climate-driven disaster strikes, insurers sometimes don’t pay because the parametric thresholds weren’t met. For example, the government of Malawi paid $4.7 million for drought insurance through the African Risk Capacity for the 2015-2016 agricultural season. But when erratic rains resulted in a prolonged drought and more than $350 million in damages, the insurance program found that the thresholds for the number of people affected by the drought were not met, and that it didn’t trigger a payout. After sustained media coverage and outrage over the decision, the African Risk Capacity eventually reassessed its modeling and provided $8.1 million in payouts — a small fraction of the need. Similarly, after Hurricanes Irma and Maria made landfall on Antigua and Barbuda in 2017 and caused $136 million in economic damage, the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility paid out $6.8 million — 5 percent of the damages.  One research paper that studied the African, Caribbean, and Pacific insurance programs concluded that while “to some extent it is possible to address the weaknesses of parametric risk pooling schemes, it seems equally clear that it is impossible to fully remedy them.”  According to InsuResilience’s annual report, it has “enabled access to financial protection for over 350 million people in vulnerable countries,” but it’s unclear how the program is counting those who are protected and whether payouts after disasters have met their needs. Singh, the advocate with the Climate Action Network, said the program counts an entire family as protected if one member has insurance for even one of a slew of climate perils. “The starting point has to be whether people who are being affected are getting adequate support or not,” said Singh. “If they’re not getting it, then whatever we have is inadequate.” In an emailed statement in response to questions about InsuResilience’s effectiveness, a spokesperson for the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development confirmed that the number of policyholders is multiplied by the average household number to calculate beneficiaries. The spokesperson defended the estimate saying that InsuResilience “sets strong qualitative standards” and that the program “ensure[s] that products are indeed fit for purpose to provide effective protection for an entire household.” Even those working with InsuResilience have been quick to acknowledge its shortcomings. Colin McQuistan, the head of climate resilience at Practical Action, a charity in the U.K., has been helping develop a pilot program in Nepal to insure farmers against flooding in partnership with InsuResilience. The program only protects paddy farmers during the monsoon season, even though rice is just one of multiple crops that farmers in the region cultivate. “Attempting to suggest that the insurance product is protecting those farmers is ridiculous, because it’s pretty clear it’s only protecting that one crop to that one hazard,” said McQuistan.   Currently, just 10 percent of the program’s budget can be used to subsidize the insurance premium, but McQuistan hopes that in future years additional government subsidies will lower the cost further. Securing useful climate data for the region has also been a challenge, McQuistan added. The group used rainfall and river flow data for the Karnali River to develop the product, but recently some of the farmers were affected by floods from another nearby river. “There’s still a lot of work needed to develop the thresholds and triggers for a parametric insurance product in rivers where we don’t have sufficient historical data,” he said.  Aside from overcoming such technical challenges, the Global Shield’s success will depend on the amount of money that it is able to raise from wealthy nations and other donors. At the press conference, Schulze said the $175 million pledged by Germany was “just a start, a sort of seed money” and that the initiative will “need substantial additional funding over time.” At a separate press conference, Rachel Cleetus, a policy director at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, said that the scale of funding for the Global Shield “is completely off.” “Countries are putting money in the millions and the needs, they have admitted, are rising into the billions and trillions,” she said. “[The Global Shield] is not a substitute for a loss and damage finance facility.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Facing a call for climate reparations, wealthy nations propose an insurance scheme on Nov 14, 2022.

A group of countries led by Germany announced a climate insurance scheme called the Global Shield at COP27 on Monday.

Tensions at the United Nations climate change conference known as COP27 have been running high, largely over the issue of what’s called “loss and damage” — shorthand for the disproportionate suffering that the developing world is already experiencing at the hands of climate change. In the most concrete response yet to the issue, on Monday a group of countries led by Germany announced their commitment to developing “a Global Shield against Climate Risks” to help people in the least developed countries better prepare for climate-fueled disasters. 

The Global Shield is a joint initiative by the G7, a political forum consisting of the world’s most industrialized countries, and the V20, which is represented by the finance ministers of 58 of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. The German government has committed roughly $175 million to the effort, which intends to address loss and damage through insurance programs and social security schemes. Denmark, Ireland, Canada, and France have also contributed about $42 million to the initiative.

The least-industrialized countries in the world have argued that they’ve done little to cause climate change but are the most affected by climate-fueled disasters, like the recent floods in Pakistan that left a third of the country underwater. (The V20’s website points out that it represents nearly 20 percent of the global population but only 5 percent of global emissions.) For this reason, developing countries have called on wealthy nations to set up a fund to pay for the loss and damage climate change has already caused and will cause in the future — in effect, for a form of climate reparations. The success of COP27 could rest on whether wealthy nations, whose early industrialization is disproportionately responsible for the climate change that has occurred so far, answer the call.

“The Global Shield is long overdue,” Ken Ofori-Atta, Ghana’s finance minister, said at the press conference announcing the Global Shield’s launch at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. “It has never been a question of who pays for loss and damage, because we in the V20 are already paying for it.”

Given the lack of momentum on direct funding to address loss and damage, the Global Shield is the first systematic and substantive effort by wealthy nations that responds to the call for climate reparations. While proposals for a separate, formal U.N. mechanism that would provide direct loss and damage funding are still under negotiation, some countries such as Ireland, Austria, and New Zealand have made symbolic pledges of a few million dollars to show their support for the cause. The United States, which has historically refused to acknowledge the issue, has staunchly opposed a separate fund for loss and damage. On Saturday, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said that a financing mechanism for loss and damage is “just not happening.” However, the U.S. is a member of the G7 and hence a part of the Global Shield consortium.

While there are few details yet on exactly how the Global Shield will work, German federal development minister Svenja Schulze said the program will include insurance programs, social security schemes, early warning systems, and other financial assistance arranged in advance before disaster strikes. Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Fiji, Ghana, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Senegal will be the first recipients of “Global Shield packages,” according to a press release.

Advocates for loss and damage warned that insurance schemes like those promised by Global Shield are an insufficient solution to loss and damage, and they worried that such programs will distract from the demand for separate direct funding. The Global Shield is an expansion of the InsuResilience Global Partnership, a program spearheaded in 2015 by the German government that primarily provides insurance schemes to countries in the Global South. 

InsuResilience and other insurance programs that have been championed by wealthy nations have been inadequate to meet the scale of loss and damage that people in climate-vulnerable countries are facing, advocates told Grist. Asking people in the developing world to pay for insurance when they’ve done little to cause the climate crisis is fundamentally unfair, they said. 

“If you’re a rich country who is on the hook for paying for this, it very cleverly redirects the responsibility for dealing with climate loss and damage onto vulnerable people,” said Julie-Anne Richards, an independent consultant and expert with the Loss and Damage Collaboration, an advocacy group. “Rich countries can turn around and go, ‘Well, the problem is you didn’t prepare well enough. You don’t have insurance.’”

Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at the Climate Action Network, an international coalition of more than 1,800 environmental groups, said that in past years wealthy nations have used insurance programs to distract from the demand for direct loss and damage funding. He is wary of the announcement, given the lack of more concrete detail about how the Global Shield, which was earlier floated in June at the G7 leaders summit, will deliver financial support to those in need.

“The phrase is very fancy: ‘Global Shield,’” he said. “But what’s inside is unclear to many.”

Schulze was quick to address such concerns at the press conference on Monday. “It is not a kind of tactic to avoid formal negotiations on loss and damage,” she said. “The Global Shield also isn’t the one and only solution for loss and damage — certainly not. We need a broad range of solutions and respective funding for tackling loss and damage.”

The international community has been kicking around the idea of an insurance scheme to help countries vulnerable to climate change since at least the early 1990s, when island nations proposed an insurance pool to protect low-lying countries from sea level rise. Over the years, the World Bank, United Nations, and various countries have created risk pooling programs such as the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility, the African Risk Capacity, and the Pacific Catastrophe Risk Assessment and Financing Initiative. These programs are subsidized by wealthy nations and other donors and allow countries in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific to secure coverage for disasters such as drought, flooding, and hurricanes. 

These sorts of insurance can be purchased by governments to protect their people against disasters, and by individuals to protect their property. Premiums are typically subsidized to make them affordable. There are two main types of climate disaster insurance: indemnity insurance and parametric insurance. The former involves purchasing policies that cover specific perils over specific periods of time and are paid out depending on the scale of losses when a disaster strikes. These are similar to the insurance policies purchased by U.S. homeowners.

In the case of parametric insurance, on the other hand, insurers identify specific climatic conditions that trigger payouts to policyholders. When specific predetermined thresholds describing the level of flooding or drought or other disasters are met, insurers disburse funds no matter the scale of the damage on the ground. The upshot of this is that the long and cumbersome process of filing a claim and verifying the damage is avoided, resulting in quicker payouts. But in countries in the Global South, where historical climatic and environmental data isn’t as readily available, insurers have struggled to define the best parameters — such as wind speed, rainfall, or days without rain — that trigger payouts. As a result, even when an expensive climate-driven disaster strikes, insurers sometimes don’t pay because the parametric thresholds weren’t met.

For example, the government of Malawi paid $4.7 million for drought insurance through the African Risk Capacity for the 2015-2016 agricultural season. But when erratic rains resulted in a prolonged drought and more than $350 million in damages, the insurance program found that the thresholds for the number of people affected by the drought were not met, and that it didn’t trigger a payout. After sustained media coverage and outrage over the decision, the African Risk Capacity eventually reassessed its modeling and provided $8.1 million in payouts — a small fraction of the need. Similarly, after Hurricanes Irma and Maria made landfall on Antigua and Barbuda in 2017 and caused $136 million in economic damage, the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility paid out $6.8 million — 5 percent of the damages. 

One research paper that studied the African, Caribbean, and Pacific insurance programs concluded that while “to some extent it is possible to address the weaknesses of parametric risk pooling schemes, it seems equally clear that it is impossible to fully remedy them.” 

According to InsuResilience’s annual report, it has “enabled access to financial protection for over 350 million people in vulnerable countries,” but it’s unclear how the program is counting those who are protected and whether payouts after disasters have met their needs. Singh, the advocate with the Climate Action Network, said the program counts an entire family as protected if one member has insurance for even one of a slew of climate perils.

“The starting point has to be whether people who are being affected are getting adequate support or not,” said Singh. “If they’re not getting it, then whatever we have is inadequate.”

In an emailed statement in response to questions about InsuResilience’s effectiveness, a spokesperson for the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development confirmed that the number of policyholders is multiplied by the average household number to calculate beneficiaries. The spokesperson defended the estimate saying that InsuResilience “sets strong qualitative standards” and that the program “ensure[s] that products are indeed fit for purpose to provide effective protection for an entire household.”

Even those working with InsuResilience have been quick to acknowledge its shortcomings. Colin McQuistan, the head of climate resilience at Practical Action, a charity in the U.K., has been helping develop a pilot program in Nepal to insure farmers against flooding in partnership with InsuResilience. The program only protects paddy farmers during the monsoon season, even though rice is just one of multiple crops that farmers in the region cultivate.

“Attempting to suggest that the insurance product is protecting those farmers is ridiculous, because it’s pretty clear it’s only protecting that one crop to that one hazard,” said McQuistan.  

Currently, just 10 percent of the program’s budget can be used to subsidize the insurance premium, but McQuistan hopes that in future years additional government subsidies will lower the cost further. Securing useful climate data for the region has also been a challenge, McQuistan added. The group used rainfall and river flow data for the Karnali River to develop the product, but recently some of the farmers were affected by floods from another nearby river.

“There’s still a lot of work needed to develop the thresholds and triggers for a parametric insurance product in rivers where we don’t have sufficient historical data,” he said. 

Aside from overcoming such technical challenges, the Global Shield’s success will depend on the amount of money that it is able to raise from wealthy nations and other donors. At the press conference, Schulze said the $175 million pledged by Germany was “just a start, a sort of seed money” and that the initiative will “need substantial additional funding over time.”

At a separate press conference, Rachel Cleetus, a policy director at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, said that the scale of funding for the Global Shield “is completely off.”

“Countries are putting money in the millions and the needs, they have admitted, are rising into the billions and trillions,” she said. “[The Global Shield] is not a substitute for a loss and damage finance facility.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Facing a call for climate reparations, wealthy nations propose an insurance scheme on Nov 14, 2022.

Read the full story here.
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Climate change could deliver considerable blows to US corn growers, insurers: Study

Federal corn crop insurers could see a 22 percent spike in claims filed by 2030 and a nearly 29 percent jump by mid-century, thanks to the impacts of climate change, a new study has found. Both U.S. corn growers and their insurers are poised to face a future with mounting economic uncertainty, according to the...

Federal corn crop insurers could see a 22 percent spike in claims filed by 2030 and a nearly 29 percent jump by mid-century, thanks to the impacts of climate change, a new study has found. Both U.S. corn growers and their insurers are poised to face a future with mounting economic uncertainty, according to the research, published on Friday in the Journal of Data Science, Statistics, and Visualisation. “Crop insurance has increased 500 percent since the early 2000s, and our simulations show that insurance costs will likely double again by 2050,” lead author Sam Pottinger, a senior researcher at the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Data Science & Environment, said in a statement. “This significant increase will result from a future in which extreme weather events will become more common, which puts both growers and insurance companies at substantial risk,” he warned. Pottinger and his colleagues at both UC Berkeley and the University of Arkansas developed an open-source, AI-powered tool through which they were able to simulate growing conditions through 2050 under varying scenarios. They found that if growing conditions remained unchanged, federal crop insurance companies would see a continuation of current claim rates in the next three decades. However, under different climate change scenarios, claims could rise by anywhere from 13 to 22 percent by 2030, before reaching about 29 percent by 2050, according to the data. Federal crop insurance, distributed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), provides economic stability to U.S. farmers and other agricultural entities, the researchers explained. Most U.S. farmers receive their primary insurance through this program, with coverage determined by a grower’s annual crop yield, per the terms of the national Farm Bill. “Not only do we see the claims’ rate rise significantly in a future under climate change, but the severity of these claims increases too,” co-author Lawson Conner, an assistant professor in agricultural economics at the University of Arkansas, said in a statement. “For example, we found that insurance companies could see the average covered portion of a claim increase up to 19 percent by 2050,” Conner noted. The researchers stressed the utility of their tool for people who want to understand how crop insurance prices are established and foresee potential neighborhood-level impacts. To achieve greater security for growers and reduce financial liability for companies in the future, the authors suggested two possible avenues. The first, they contended, could involve a small change to the Farm Bill text that could incentivize farmers to adopt practices such as cover cropping and crop rotation. Although these approaches can lead to lower annual yields, they bolster crop resilience over time, the authors noted. Their second recommendation would  involve including similar such incentives in an existing USDA Risk Management Agency mechanism called 508(h), through which private companies recommend alternative and supplemental insurance products for the agency’s consideration. “We are already seeing more intense droughts, longer heat waves, and more catastrophic floods,” co-author Timothy Bowles, associate professor in environmental science at UC Berkeley, said in a statement.  “In a future that will bring even more of these, our recommendations could help protect growers and insurance providers against extreme weather impacts,” Bowles added.

Climate
Agriculture
Science

From Greenland to Ghana, Indigenous youth work for climate justice

“No matter what happens we will stand and we will fight, and we will keep pushing for solutions.”

For the last week,  Indigenous leaders from around the world have converged in New York for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFI. It’s the largest global gathering of Indigenous peoples and the Forum provides space for participants to bring their issues to international authorities, often when their own governments have refused to take action. This year’s Forum focuses on how U.N. member states’ have, or have not, protected the rights of Indigenous peoples, and conversations range from the environmental effects of extractive industries, to climate change, and violence against women. The Forum is an intergenerational space. Young people in attendance often work alongside elders and leaders to come up with solutions and address ongoing challenges. Grist interviewed seven Indigenous youth attending UNPFII this year hailing from Africa, the Pacific, North and South America, Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Arctic. Joshua Amponsem, 33, is Asante from Ghana and the founder of Green Africa Youth Organization, a youth-led group in Africa that promotes energy sustainability. He also is the co-director of the Youth Climate Justice Fund which provides funding opportunities to bolster youth participation in climate change solutions.  Since the Trump administration pulled all the funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, Amponsem has seen the people and groups he works with suffer from the loss of financial help. Courtesy of Joshua Amponsem It’s already hard to be a young person fighting climate change. Less than one percent of climate grants go to youth-led programs, according to the Youth Climate Justice Fund.   “I think everyone is very much worried,” he said. “That is leading to a lot of anxiety.”  Amponsem specifically mentioned the importance of groups like Africa Youth Pastoralist Initiatives — a coalition of youth who raise animals like sheep or cattle. Pastoralists need support to address climate change because the work of herding sheep and cattle gets more difficult as drought and resource scarcity persist, according to one report.  “No matter what happens we will stand and we will fight, and we will keep pushing for solutions,” he said. Janell Dymus-Kurei, 32, is Māori from the East Coast of Aotearoa New Zealand. She is a fellow with the Commonwealth Fund, a group that promotes better access to healthcare for vulnerable populations. At this year’s UNPFII, Dymus-Kurei hopes to bring attention to legislation aimed at diminishing Māori treaty rights. While one piece of legislation died this month, she doesn’t think it’s going to stop there. She hopes to remind people about the attempted legislation that would have given exclusive Maori rights to everyone in New Zealand. Courtesy of Janell Dymus-Kurei The issue gained international attention last Fall when politician Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke performed a Haka during parliament, a traditional dance that was often done before battle. The demonstration set off other large-scale Māori protests in the country.  “They are bound by the Treaty of Waitangi,” she said. Countries can address the forum, but New Zealand didn’t make it to the UNPFII.  “You would show up if you thought it was important to show up and defend your actions in one way, shape, or form,” she said. This year, she’s brought her two young children — TeAio Nitana, which means “peace and divinity” and Te Haumarangai, or “forceful wind”. Dymus-Kurei said it’s important for children to be a part of the forum, especially with so much focus on Indigenous women. “Parenting is political in every sense of the word,” she said. Avery Doxtator, 22, is Oneida, Anishinaabe and Dakota and the president of the National Association of Friendship Centres, or NAFC, which promotes cultural awareness and resources for urban Indigenous youth throughout Canada’s territories. She attended this year’s Forum to raise awareness about the rights of Indigenous peoples living in urban spaces. The NAFC brought 23 delegates from Canada this year representing all of the country’s regions. It’s the biggest group they’ve ever had, but Doxtator said everyone attending was concerned when crossing the border into the United States due to the Trump Administration’s border and immigration restrictions. Taylar Dawn Stagner “It’s a safety threat that we face as Indigenous peoples coming into a country that does not necessarily want us here,” she said. “That was our number one concern. Making sure youth are safe being in the city, but also crossing the border because of the color of our skin.” The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, protects Indigenous peoples fundamental rights of self-determination, and these rights extend to those living in cities, perhaps away from their territories. She said that she just finished her 5th year on the University of Toronto’s Water Polo Team, and will be playing on a professional team in Barcelona next year.  Around half of Indigenous peoples in Canada live in cities. In the United States around 70 percent live in cities. As a result, many can feel disconnected from their cultures, and that’s what she hopes to shed light on at the forum — that resources for Indigenous youth exist even in urban areas. Liudmyla Korotkykh, 26, is Crimean Tatar from Kyiv, one of the Indigenous peoples of Ukraine. She spoke at UNPFII about the effects of the Ukraine war on her Indigenous community. She is a manager and attorney at the Crimean Tatar Resource Center. The history of the Crimean Tatars are similar to other Indigenous populations. They have survived colonial oppression from both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union — and as a result their language and way of life is constantly under threat. Crimea is a country that was annexed by Russia around a decade ago.  Taylar Dawn Stagner In 2021, President Zelensky passed legislation to establish better rights for Indigenous peoples, but months later Russia continued its campaign against Ukraine.  Korotkykh said Crimean Tatars have been conscripted to fight for Russia against the Tatars that are now in Ukraine.  “Now we are in the situation where our peoples are divided by a frontline and our peoples are fighting against each other because some of us joined the Russian army and some joined the Ukrainian army,” she said.  Korotkykh said even though many, including the Trump Administration, consider Crimea a part of Russia, hopes that Crimean Tatars won’t be left out of future discussions of their homes.  “This is a homeland of Indigenous peoples. We don’t accept the Russian occupation,” she said. “So, when the [Trump] administration starts to discuss how we can recognize Crimea as a part of Russia, it is not acceptable to us.” Toni Chiran, 30, is Garo from Bangladesh, and a member of the Bangladesh Indigenous Youth Forum, an organization focused on protecting young Indigenous people. The country has 54 distinct Indigenous peoples, and their constitution does not recognize Indigenous rights.  In January, Chiran was part of a protest in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, where he and other Indigenous people were protesting how the state was erasing the word “Indigenous” — or Adivasi in Hindi — from text books. Chiran says the move is a part of an ongoing assault by the state to erase Indigenous peoples from Bangladesh. Courtesy of Toni Chiran He said that he sustained injuries to his head and chest during the protest as counter protesters assaulted their group, and 13 protesters sustained injuries. He hopes bringing that incident, and more, to the attention of Forum members will help in the fight for Indigenous rights in Bangladesh. “There is an extreme level of human rights violations in my country due to the land related conflicts because our government still does not recognize Indigenous peoples,” he said.  The student group Students for Sovereignty were accused of attacking Chiran and his fellow protesters. During a following protest a few days later in support of Chiran and the others injured Bangladesh police used tear gas and batons to disperse the crowd.  “We are still demanding justice on these issues,” he said. Aviaaija Baadsgaard, 27, is Inuit and a member of the Inuit Circumpolar Council Youth Engagement Program, a group that aims to empower the next generation of leaders in the Arctic. Baadsgaard is originally from Nuunukuu, the capital of Greenland, and this is her first year attending the UNPFII. Just last week she graduated from the University of Copenhagen with her law degree. She originally began studying law to help protect the rights of the Inuit of Greenland.. Recently, Greenland has been a global focal point due to the Trump Administration’s interest in acquiring the land and its resources – including minerals needed for the green transition like lithium and neodymium: both crucial for electric vehicles. “For me, it’s really important to speak on behalf of the Inuit of Greenland,” Baadsgaard said. Taylar Dawn Stagner Greenland is around 80 percent Indigenous, and a vast majority of the population there do not want the Greenland is around 80 percent Indigenous, and a vast majority of the population there do not want the U.S. to wrest control of the country from the Kingdom of Denmark. Many more want to be completely independent.  “I don’t want any administration to mess with our sovereignty,” she said.  Baadsgaard said her first time at the forum has connected her to a broader discussion about global Indigenous rights — a conversation she is excited to join. She wants to learn more about the complex system at the United Nations, so this trip is about getting ready for the future. Cindy Sisa Andy Aguinda, 30, is Kitchwa from Ecuador in the Amazon. She is in New York to talk about climate change, women’s health and the climate crisis. She spoke on a panel with a group of other Indigenous women about how the patriarchy and colonial violence affect women at a time of growing global unrest. Especially in the Amazon where deforestation is devastating the forests important to the Kitchwa tribe.  She said international funding is how many protect the Amazon Rainforest. As an example, last year the United States agreed to send around 40 million dollars to the country through USAID — but then the Trump administration terminated most of the department in March. Courtesy of Cindy Sisa Andy Aguinda “To continue working and caring for our lands, the rainforest, and our people, we need help,” she said through a translator. Even when international funding goes into other countries for the purposes to protect Indigenous land, only around 17 percent ends up in the hands of Indigenous-led initiatives. “In my country, it’s difficult for the authorities to take us into account,” she said.  She said despite that she had hope for the future and hopes to make it to COP30 in Brazil, the international gathering that addresses climate change, though she will probably have to foot the bill herself. She said that Indigenous tribes of the Amazon are the ones fighting everyday to protect their territories, and she said those with this relationship with the forest need to share ancestral knowledge with the world at places like the UNPFII and COP30.  “We can’t stop if we want to live well, if we want our cultural identity to remain alive,” she said. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline From Greenland to Ghana, Indigenous youth work for climate justice on Apr 25, 2025.

Climate
Indigenous
Culture

Harris County commissioners approve climate justice plan

Nearly three years in the works, the Harris County Climate Justice Plan is a 59-page document that creates long-term strategies addressing natural resource conservation, infrastructure resiliency and flood control.

Sarah GrunauFlood waters fill southwest Houston streets during Hurricane Beryl on July 8, 2024.Harris County commissioners this month approved what’s considered the county’s most comprehensive climate justice plan to date. Nearly three years in the works, the Harris County Climate Justice Plan is a 59-page document that creates long-term strategies addressing natural resource conservation, infrastructure resiliency and flood control in the Houston area. The climate justice plan was created by the Office of County Administration’s Office of Sustainability and an environmental nonprofit, Coalition for Environment, Equity and Resilience. The plan sets goals in five buckets, said Stefania Tomaskovic, the coalition director for the nonprofit. Those include ecology, infrastructure, economy, community and culture. County officials got feedback from more than 340 residents and organizations to ensure the plans reflect the needs of the community. “We held a number of community meetings to really outline the vision and values for this process and then along the way we’ve integrated more and more community members into the process of helping to identify the major buckets of work,” Tomaskovic told Hello Houston. Feedback from those involved in the planning process of the climate justice plan had a simple message — people want clean air, strong infrastructure in their communities, transparency and the opportunity to live with dignity, according to the plan. It outlines plans to protect from certain risks through preventative floodplain and watershed management, land use regulations and proactive disaster preparation. Infrastructure steps in the plan include investing in generators and solar power battery backup, and expanding coordination of programs that provide rapid direct assistance after disasters. Economic steps in the plan including expanding resources with organizations to support programs that provide food, direct cash assistance and housing. Tomaskovic said the move could be cost effective because some studies show that for every dollar spent on mitigation, you’re actually saving $6. “It can be cost effective but also if you think about, like, the whole line of costs, if we are implementing programs that help keep people out of the emergency room, we could be saving in the long run, too,” she said. Funds that will go into implementing the projects have yet to be seen. The more than $700,000 climate plan was funded by nonprofit organizations, including the Jacob & Terese Hershey Foundation. “Some of them actually are just process improvements,” Lisa Lin, director of sustainability with Harris County, told Hello Houston. “Some of them are actually low-cost, no-cost actions. Some of them are kind of leaning on things that are happening in the community or happening in the county. Some of them might be new and then we’ll be looking at different funding sources.” The county will now be charged with bringing the plan into reality, which includes conducting a benefits and impacts analysis. County staffers will also develop an implementation roadmap to identify specific leaders and partners and a plan to track its success, according to the county. “This initiative is the first time a U.S. county has prepared a resiliency plan that covers its entire population, as opposed to its bureaucracy alone," Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said in a statement. "At the heart of this plan are realistic steps to advance issues like clean air, resilient infrastructure, and housing affordability and availability. Many portions of the plan are already in progress, and I look forward to continued advancement over the years."

Climate
Conservation
Resources

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LEAVES

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Reboot

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Animation
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Cosmos

TripleF***

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Climate
Activism
Documentary

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