Monthly Archives: September 2018

Mongabay: Putting the action in the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco

Signs like these at the Moscone Center were indicative of a climate action process that is necessarily moving beyond the inertia of national governments and unwilling presidents and prime ministers. Photo by Justin Catanoso

California Gov. Jerry Brown‘s Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco was nothing less than a poke in the eye to presidents and prime ministers of developed nations — not simply the intransigent and denialist Trump Administration. In holding this three-day summit (Sept. 12-14, 2018), and making governors, mayors, business executives, tribal leaders and scientists the stars, a clear message was sent: if the goals of the Paris Agreement are to be met, it will take the determined efforts of subnational leaders to get it done.

My story is linked here.

Having covered four year-end United Nation’s climate summits, including the historic meeting in Paris in December 2015, and one mid-year summit in Bonn in 2016, I have come to see the gatherings as largely rhetorical exercises in caution, delay and international lack of will with the countries most responsible for global warming. What the California summit lacked in international authority, it compensated for in actual action being taken in cities, states, indigenous lands and at corporations in the fight against climate change. Caveat, as I report: it’s not nearly enough to peak global emissions or slow the rate of climate change.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said through regulations and incentives, his city cut carbon emissions by 11 percent in 2017, which is equal to removing 737,00 cars from LA roads and highways. Photo by Justin Catanoso

Mongabay: Climate mitigation has an ally in need of recognition and land rights: indigenous peoples in tropical countries

Wayne Walker, a Woods Hole Research Center scientist, in the forest with indigenous peoples. Photo courtesy of Woods Hole Research Center

In advance of the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco from Sept. 12-14, 2018, Mongabay special projects editor Willie Shubert encouraged me to attend and cover the event. In several phone discussions, we decided I should focus my coverage mainly in an area of climate mitigation I have not written about previously: the impact of indigenous peoples on the forests in which they live, and the injustice that so many live on ancestral land to which they no longer hold title.

The story is here. It’s a story that resonated with readers and was retweeted widely, including by the Ford Foundation, which has 157,000 followers. An excerpt:

“Economic analyses make it fairly clear that indigenous peoples’ lands that are titled and secured, especially in Latin America where the data is most abundant, have deforestation rates that are three to four times lower than similar lands not held by indigenous peoples,” Peter Veit, director of the Land and Resource Rights initiative at the World Resources Institute, told Mongabay. “Having title to the land is critical.”