Tag Archives: Indigenous Rights

Mongabay: Hope old and new – COP26 focused on two largely unsung climate solutions

At the Climate Action Center at the Scottish Event Center in Glasgow, the picture-worthy sign #COP26 was filled with tropical plants. Every summit, attendees make sure to have their photo taken in front of the sign (including me).

At the conclusion of every UN climate summit I’ve covered since Paris in 2015, I’ve written a story that summarizes the highlights (few) and disappointments (many) in a kind of post-COP analysis. Because of the massive global media attention COP26 drew (nearly 4,000 credentialed journalists), that story was largely written by others before I landed back in North Carolina.

Instead, with this final story from COP26, I followed an idea that came to me during my return flight home. I decided to focus on what seemed to me to be two significant positive developments from a climate summit that was declared a failure before it even started. Those two elements — one old and easily grasped, the other new and technologically futuristic — could turn out to be climate game changers in the decades ahead. That is, of course, if they receive the international support and billions in funding required to enable both to, in one case flourish, and in the other, reach proof of concept on a global scale.

Let’s be clear. The coordinated effort to save the planet by holding global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C over pre-industrial times has virtually no chance of succeeding without these efforts I write about, in combination with accelerated efforts to decarbonize industrial economies and halt deforestation and biodiversity loss in the world’s great forests. G-20 leaders have simply wasted too many decades making problems worse for any shortcuts or easy fixes to this existential climate crisis.

This photo collage that I took in my home office before leaving for Glasgow seems a fitting parting shot for my final story from COP26. Next year’s meeting, COP27, is planned for Cairo, Egypt.

Mongabay: COP26 – Indigenous leaders share hopes and concerns towards pledges made at COP26

Torbjørn Gjefsen of Rainforest Foundation Norway, writing in my notebook, makes sure the spelling of Joseph Itongwa’s name and tribal association are correct for my story. Joseph spoke French through a remarkable interpreter who was on the phone he is holding.

A few days before leaving for Glasgow and COP26, I had a Zoom call with Torbjørn Gjefsen of Rainforest Foundation Norway in Oslo. We spoke at length about the issues he and his group are most focused on: promoting and supporting indigenous rights in tropical countries around the world. He wanted me to do a story from the climate summit; he was pushing on an open door. Here’s why I was eager to write this story.

In September 2018, I covered the Climate Action Summit in San Francisco organized by then California Gov. Jerry Brown and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Mongabay wanted me there primary to write about an issue then largely underreported and little recognized: that if tropical countries were serious about preventing deforestation and meeting their carbon reduction pledges under the Paris Agreement, they had no better means of doing both than by returning land tenure and civil rights back to the Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLC) who have occupied the land, as one tribal leader told me, “since time immemorial.”

Years of meticulous scientific research comparing places where rights had been returned to those where IPLCs were still largely marginalized demonstrated the impact of doing the right thing by nature and humanity.

In Glasgow, during my first two days on site at the Scottish Events Center at the end of the summit’s first week, Torbjørn arranged for me to interview, through translators, Indigenous leaders from Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia. It was an honor to talk with each one of them and share their stories at a summit where for the first time their presence was met with praise, recognition and billions in funding for the important role they can play in their home countries in climate mitigation.

As my story explains, the momentum tribal leaders felt in Glasgow will only translate into action if the leaders of those countries allow it. DRC? Yes. Brazil and Indonesia? Not until there are regime changes.

This is the president of Indonesia. As my story explains, he’s not much better than the autocratic maniac, Jair Bolsonaro, who has terrorized Indigenous peoples in Brazil since taking office in 2017. Joko Widodo has broken every promise to return land and rights to the largest Indigenous group on earth since his re-election in 2020. Instead, deforestation to make room for oil palm plantations worsens.

Mongabay: Land rights, forests, food systems central to limiting global warming: report

This gigantic mahogany is Cocha Cashu is a rich target for illegal timbering. If were to fall and be burned, it would release tons of sequestered CO2 and no longer provide the ecosystem service of absorbing air pollution. (That’s me in the background.) Photo by Jason Houston

On Oct. 8, 2018, the International Panel on Climate Change  (IPCC)  raised a bright red flag of warning for world leaders. In essence, the 91 climate scientists from 40 nations decried in a major report the lack of action on climate mitigation internationally. It made clear that time is running out. They warned that irreversible climate damage could lock in as early as 2040, not decades later, as previously hoped.

This story of mine, posted one week later, is largely in response to the IPCC report and is based on the research stemming from another group of climate scientists and advocates with the acronym CLARA — Climate, Land, Ambition and Rights Alliance.

As one source told me: “Our study is not meant to either contradict or complement the IPCC report,” said Doreen Stabinsky, a co-author of Missing Pathways. “The IPCC looks very generally at pathways to 1.5 degrees C. We dive into the literature to find what would be useful, specific contributions from the land sector to stay within a 1.5-degree pathway.” 

Interesting context. Mongabay special editor Willie Shubert emailed me Thursday morning, Oct. 11, to ask if I could turn a story around quickly on the CLARA study and have it ready to post by Monday, Oct. 15. I agreed. I put calls out early Thursday afternoon and arranged for three telephone interviews on Friday. I knew Hurricane Michael, a climate-change-fueled monster, had made landfall in northern Florida at 155 mph a day earlier; I didn’t realize it was heading to central North Carolina. By Thursday afternoon, winds in Greensboro hit 50 mph as Michael swept through. Trees fell all over the Triad. Power and Internet went out in my neighborhood and around the region around 3:30 pm Thursday. It would not be restored until Sunday afternoon.

A sincere thanks to HQ Greensboro, the co-working space in downtown Greensboro, which never lost power or Internet service. I spent all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday there, doing my reporting, conducting my interviews, grading my Wake Forest assignments, and finally, writing the story linked here. My editor, Glenn Scherer, liked the irony that I was writing about climate mitigation while being directly affected by a climate-influenced event.

 

 

Mongabay: ‘Guardians of the forest:’ Indigenous peoples come together to assert role in climate stability

Guardians of the Forest at Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, September 2018. Photo by Joel Redman, courtesy of If Not Us Then Who. 

Several weeks before I flew to San Francisco ahead of Hurricane Florence to cover the Global Climate Action Summit hosted by Gov. Jerry Brown (September 12-14, 2018), I had a conference call with Mongabay special projects editor Willie Shubert and videographer/activist Paul Redman of the nonprofit group If Not Us Then Who. His group seeks to raise the visibility of indigenous peoples and their role in forest protection.

Willie had an idea for the story  — ultimately, this story — and Paul had details about how I could get at it. His group was hosting a side event to the summit in which tribal leaders from around the world would meet for presentations, panel discussions and documentaries. What’s the story? I asked. They both offered ideas and themes, both general and specific. But I realized that this was one I just had to trust, trust that if I spent enough time at the side event, and spoke to enough people — along with the reading and research I would do in advance — that the story would come to me.

I spent several hours both September 13-14 at Covo, the co-working space where the side event was being held about a half mile from the Moscone Center and the main summit. Paul was there Thursday; he was tremendously helpful, lining up a trio of exceptional sources for me to interview one-on-one while I took notes during panel discussions and took in the scene. On Friday I interviewed NGOs with the Nature Conservation Society and World Wildlife Fund for greater context. And little by little, I got the sense that I had witnessed something special, something important, and that I had the pieces I needed to tell the story.

This one quote by a remarkable tribal leader from Panama crystallized the theme of my story and led me to the equation around which I built my story: indigenous peoples + land title and tenue = climate mitigation:

“There is one basic principle,” Candido Mezua told Mongabay through a translator. “We cannot see the forest or nature as a tool for getting richer. That is something the indigenous people cannot do… We are contributing to climate stability, something we have been doing for centuries without being compensated one penny.”

Candido Mezua of Panama talking with me through translator Ana Isabel Alvardo of Costa Rica. My photo.