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A healthy and sustainable environment is the foundation of an equitable, functioning society and the basis for prosperity, well-being, security, and stability of human and animal life. We must implement global, national and subnational policies on the conservation, restoration, and sustainable management of ecosystems, landscapes, and seascapes, including building cities with nature, through locally adapted, resource-efficient, and just systemic interventions. These must be based on the precautionary principle and follow a global mitigation hierarchy for nature conservation.

In this context we are urging governments to fully utilise the opportunity presented by the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030) to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of our ecosystems and the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework in order to build a clear pathway to achieve a world in harmony with nature.

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Our Future With Nature | GYBN - Our Future With Nature | GYBN

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A healthy and sustainable environment is the foundation of an equitable, functioning society and the basis for prosperity, well-being, security, and stability of human and animal life. We must implement global, national and subnational policies on the conservation, restoration, and sustainable management of ecosystems, landscapes, and seascapes, including building cities with nature, through locally adapted, resource-efficient, and just systemic interventions.

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share your thoughts on this list of demands for international action!

As the world Builds Back Better, recreate environmental processes at every level that rely on the harmony between persons, animals, and nature as a whole. Invest in inclusive governance practices for recovery, ensuring the equal representation of Indigenous Peoples, womxn, children, youth, coastal communities, migrants, refugees, People of Color, disabled persons, low-income groups, and LGBTQ+ individuals – especially those in developing countries. Continually acknowledge the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 and climate change vulnerabilities for already marginalised communities.

Recognise the ability of youth and women-led initiatives for engaging wider society. Support and empower these projects while integrating them into formal governance and policy-making structures.

Invest in physical infrastructure as well as training to bridge gaps between passion and capacity, capability and access. These include: the digital divide, data equity, availability of information, linguistic barriers, systemic poverty, and armed conflict.

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The Intersectional History of Environmentalism

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A podcast episode on Decolonizing How We See Land & Indigenous people

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A podcast episode on Decolonizing How We See Land & Indigenous people

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A podcast I created featuring Indigenous pacific Island people talking about land, culture, and how environmental policy, sovereignty, and how these tie into the "Land Back" movement of Indigenous peoples worldwide for future policy

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What does "land back" mean to me as a Pacific Islander?

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EP#7:DECOLONIZATION SERIES #2] What does "land back" mean to me as a Pacific Islander? Six Indigenous Pacific Islanders dive deep into the land, the #LandBack movement in their islands, and where they see it going. You will hear from: Mackere (https://t

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Marshall Island President gives CTA to transportation sectors

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Marshall Island President gives CTA to transportation sectors

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President David Kabua of the Marshall Islands giving a call for action to the sustainable mobility and transport sector to achieve net-zero by 2030.

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Call for Action by President David Kabua of the Marshall Islands | Sustainable Innovation Forum 2020

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IUCN, International Union for Conservation of Nature

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"No Sacrifice People: Ableism, the Climate Crisis, and Dehumanization"

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"No Sacrifice People: Ableism, the Climate Crisis, and Dehumanization"

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In these times, we face an increasing crisis of dehumanization, both interpersonal and systemic, driven largely by the capitalist society we live in. As well as everyday impacts, dehumanization has direct implications for our response to the climate crisis; the less responsibility or solidarity we feel for the most dehumanized and vulnerable among us--who experience first and worst the impacts of climate change--the less we will feel the urgency of protecting the planet.

A point where dehumanization is enacted very acutely is in the marginalization of disabled people. Ableism, the structural oppression that produces a system of thought and action that harms and discriminates against people with disabilities, is often sidelined or invisible, such that the resulting oppression and stigma often go unchallenged.

So in an age of accelerating crisis and tremendous dehumanization, what usefulness could the lens of disability offer us in tackling all sorts of interlacing oppressions and global crises? I believe that the fight for disability liberation challenges climate justice to adopt a more radical analysis and strategy, refusing to settle for superficial or insufficient reforms.

As a person with disabilities, I am terrified of climate change at a very personal level. Currently, I have class and geographical privileges that could enable me to hole up in an insulated, "secure" community for a certain time, but one day the crisis will be in my backyard. It will be my life in the balance. Perhaps the day when a storm rips through my safe suburban home, or the day I cannot get the medical supplies I need to treat my chronic illnesses. Perhaps climate wars will reach my doorstep, or perhaps the specific foods I can eat will become scarce commodities. And when that happens, I won't be in a good position for survival. Knowing that I would not survive an environmental disaster that deprived me of medical supplies has long been a personal driving force in my activism.

One hard reality is that climate solutions cannot be limited to lifestyle politics, the tepid idea embraced by mainstream liberals that the best way to make a difference on climate change is to take personal responsibility for what we eat, what we buy, what we wear, where we shop, what cars we drive, whether we recycle, what lightbulbs we use. These are commendable actions all--to live very consciously is not a bad choice, per se. Where this paradigm becomes dangerous is when lifestyle politics are substituted for more radical changes in our society, personal relations, modes of production, and economic systems.

Because in the end, we cannot rely on our individual choices as the agents for systemic change. According to journalist and activist Naomi Klein: "The hard truth is that the answer to the question 'What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?' is: nothing. You can't do anything... We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement." The emphasis on individualism has obscured the logical truth that we each on our own will not make the difference.

Klein adds that "we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small-the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town.

Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes-the policy and legal work- to others."

Rejecting the feel-good politics of individual choice may seem disheartening. But through a disability lens, even without recognizing their large-scale inefficacy, lifestyle politics solutions were already unrealistic for plenty of people, including disabled folks.

For instance, consider the idea of a "zero-waste" lifestyle. I've seen pictures of people's trash bins after a whole year with barely a few plastic scraps in them. That's really impressive. It's also completely impossible for me to emulate, and the logic of lifestyle politics therefore renders me a problematic person living a problematic life. Sorry, but I'm type 1 diabetic. My syringes, test strips, blood glucose meters, bottles for sugar tablets, insulin pump infusion set equipment--all this amounts to an awful lot of plastic that I will dispose of over the course of my life. And I can't just opt out or change my habits, and stop using test strips or something. This is my reality.

So if lifestyle politics, demanding superficial, individual changes that are both insufficient and completely out of reach, is a narrative that leaves disabled people behind, what can take its place? How does a disability lens offer different possibilities for climate activism? How can climate justice also manifest as a struggle for humanization?

Consider the concept of sacrifice zones. The term takes its roots from a Cold War designation for areas that could be written off in the case of destruction by nuclear fallout. Now, because of the fossil fuel industry's appetite for endless growth and profit, various regions and communities have been designated environmental sacrifice zones. Journalist Chris Hedges frames sacrifice zones as a consequence of "unfettered, unregulated capitalism," describing them as "areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit... environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed. And...these sacrifice zones are just going to spread outward."

Those sacrifice zones don't just write off land: neoliberal capitalism also demands sacrifice people. These can be people who directly live in environmental sacrifice zones, be those mining communities, lands slated for pipelines, or neighborhoods situated right beside incinerators or landfills. But they can also be specific populations--poor people, people of color, people in developing countries. And disabled people.

Disabled people are fundamentally dehumanized, quintessential sacrifice people, because already we have been sacrificed over and over again, through discrimination, harassment, murder, neglect, torture, stigma, mockery, inept healthcare systems, and the casual disregard for our lives or the belief that life with disabilities or chronic illness is fundamentally lesser or not worth living at all.

And just as environmental sacrifice zones are created so that corporations can continue their unrestricted pillaging in the name of economic growth, sacrifice people are also maintained for profit. Disabled folks are dehumanized to make a group of people branded as inferior and less useful into a uniquely exploitable workforce, because disabled labor is dispensable and replaceable. Capitalism fundamentally offers a justification for devaluing disabled people in the name of efficiency and profit, just as it does for destroying the planet.

So we can conclude that in order to entwine disability liberation with climate justice, we cannot base our solutions on the same system that created these problems through its incentive for exploitation and dehumanization.

The climate crisis must be a battleground for humanization, for greater empathy in this time of depravity and sacrifice. Paolo Freire reminds us in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed that change is possible, that we "must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which [we] can transform" into one of greater freedom and humanization (49). Those of us struggling for climate justice and those who still cling to inertia or denial all will have to reckon with the imperative questions: whose lives are worth saving, when the stakes are highest? For whom do we want to build a better world? And in times of crisis, as well as in the day-to-day--who will we sacrifice?

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"No Sacrifice People: Ableism, the Climate Crisis, and Dehumanization"

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In these times, we face an increasing crisis of dehumanization, both interpersonal and systemic, driven largely by the capitalist society we live in. As well as everyday impacts, dehumanization has direct implications for our response to the climate crisis; the less responsibility or solidarity we feel for the most dehumanized and vulnerable among us--who experience first and worst the impacts of climate change--the less we will feel the urgency of protecting the planet.

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"The digital divide worsens the inequitable impacts of the climate crisis"

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"The digital divide worsens the inequitable impacts of the climate crisis"

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This story originally appeared in Grist and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalistic collaboration to strengthen coverage of the climate story.
One of the starkest inequalities exposed by the coronavirus pandemic is the difference between the digital haves and have-nots. Those with a fast internet connection are more able to work and learn remotely, stay in touch with loved ones and access critical services such as telemedicine. For the millions of Americans who live in an internet dead zone, fully participating in society in the age of social distancing has become difficult, if not impossible.

But if the pandemic has laid bare America's so-called "digital divide," climate change will only worsen the inequality that stems from it. As the weather grows more extreme and unpredictable, wealthy urban communities with faster, more reliable internet access will have an easier time responding to and recovering from disasters, while rural and low-income Americans - already especially vulnerable to the impacts of a warming climate - could be left in the dark.

Unless, that is, we can bring everyone's internet up to speed, which is what Democratic lawmakers on the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis are hoping to do.

Buried in a sweeping, 538-page climate change plan the committee released last month is a call to expand and modernize the nation's telecommunications infrastructure in order to prepare it, and vulnerable communities around the country, for future extreme weather events and climate disruptions.

The plan calls for increasing broadband internet access nationwide with the goal of getting everyone connected, updating the country's 911 emergency call systems and ensuring cellular communications providers are able to keep their networks up and running amid hurricane-force winds and raging wildfires. This plan isn't the first to point out that America's internet infrastructure is in dire need of an upgrade, but it is unusual to see lawmakers frame better internet access as an important step toward building climate resilience.

While the internet is often described as a great equalizer, access to the web never has been equal.

To Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at the moderate public policy think tank Third Way, this framing makes perfect sense. "You've got to build resilience into communities but also people," Kessler said. "And you can't do this without people having broadband and being connected digitally."

While the internet is often described as a great equalizer, access to the web never has been equal. High-income people have faster internet access than low-income people, urban residents are more connected than rural ones, and whiter counties are more likely to have broadband than counties with more Black and Brown residents.

We're not just talking about a few digital stragglers being left behind: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) estimates that more than 18 million Americans lack access to fast broadband, which the agency defines as a 25 megabits per second download speed and 3 megabits per second upload speed. Monica Anderson, who studies the digital divide at Pew Research Center, says that many more Americans have broadband access in their area but don't subscribe because it's too expensive. "What we see time and again is the cost is prohibitive," Anderson said.

A lack of broadband reduces opportunities for people in the best of times, but it can be crippling in wake of a disaster, making it difficult or impossible to apply for aid or access recovery resources.

Puerto Ricans experienced this in the aftermath of 2017's Hurricane Maria, which battered the island's telecommunications infrastructure and left many residents with terminally slow broadband more than a year after the storm had passed. Three years later, with a global pandemic moving vast swaths of the economy online for the foreseeable future, internet-impoverished communities around the country are feeling a similar strain.

To some extent, mobile networks have helped bridge the broadband gap in recent years. More than 80 percent of Americans own a smartphone, with similar rates of ownership among Black, white and Hispanic Americans. Nearly 40 percent of Americans access the internet primarily from a phone. As far as disaster resilience goes, this surge in mobile adoption is good news: Our phones allow us to receive emergency alerts and evacuation orders quickly, and first responders rely on them to coordinate on the fly. Of the 240 million 911 calls made every year, more than 80 percent come from a wireless device, per the FCC.

But in the age of climate change, mobile networks are becoming more vulnerable. The cell towers, cables and antennas underpinning them weren't always built to withstand worsening fires and storms, a vulnerability that Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T have all acknowledged in recent climate change disclosures filed with the CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project). And when these networks go down - as nearly 500 cell towers did during California's Camp and Woolsey fires in 2018, according to the new House climate change plan - it can create huge challenges for emergency response.

"Everything from search-and-rescue efforts to sending out warnings to getting people directions to shelters is facilitated through various telecommunications and internet," said Samantha Montano, an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. "We're pretty reliant on them."

Democrats' new climate plan seeks to address many problems created by unequal and unreliable internet access in order to build a more climate-hardy web and society.

To help bring about universal broadband access, the plan recommends boosting investment in FCC programs such as the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, a $20 billion fund earmarked for broadband infrastructure deployments across rural America. It also calls for increased investment in programs such as the FCC's Lifeline, which offers government-subsidized broadband to low-income Americans, and it recommends mandating that internet service providers suspend service shutoffs for 60 days in the wake of declared emergencies. Broadband improvements should be prioritized in underserved communities "experiencing or are likely to experience disproportionate environmental and climate change impacts," per the plan.

As far as mobile networks go, House Democrats recommend that Congress authorize states to set disaster resilience requirements for wireless providers as part of their terms of service. They also recommend boosting federal investments in Next Generation 911, a long-running effort to modernize America's 911 emergency call systems and connect thousands of individually operating systems. Finally, the plan calls for the FCC to work with wireless providers to ensure their networks don't go offline during disasters for reasons unrelated to equipment failure, citing Verizon's infamous throttling of data to California firefighters as they were fighting the Mendocino Complex Fire in 2018.

Kessler of Third Way said that Democrats' climate plan lays out "the right ideas" for bridging the digital divide. "You want to be able to get the technology out there, the infrastructure out there, and you need to make sure people can pay for it," he said.

The call for hardening our internet infrastructure is especially salient to Paul Barford, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 2018, Barford and two colleagues published a study highlighting the vulnerability of America's fiber cables to sea level rise, and he's investigating how wildfires threaten mobile networks. In both cases, he says, it's clear that the telecommunications infrastructure deployed today was designed with historical extreme conditions in mind - and that has to change.

"We're living in a world of climate change," he said. "And if the intention is to make this new infrastructure that will serve the population for many years to come, then it is simply not feasible to deploy it without considering the potential effects of climate change, which include, of course, rising seas, severe weather, floods and wildfires."

Everything from search-and-rescue efforts to sending out warnings to getting people directions to shelters is facilitated through various telecommunications and internet.

Whether the House climate plan's recommendations become law remains to be seen. Many specific ideas in the plan already have been introduced to Congress in various bills, including the LIFT America Act, which would infuse Next Generation 911 with an extra $12 billion in funding, and the WIRED Act, which would authorize states to regulate wireless companies' infrastructure.

Perhaps most significantly, House Democrats recently passed an infrastructure bill that would invest $80 billion in broadband deployment around the country overseen by a new Office of Internet Connectivity and Growth. The bill would mandate a minimum speed standard of 100/100 megabits per second for federally funded internet projects, a speed stipulation that can be met only with high-speed fiber optics, says Ernesto Omar Falcon, a senior legal counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties nonprofit.

Currently, Falcon estimates that about a third of Americans have access to this advanced internet infrastructure, with a larger swath of the country accessing the web via older, slower, DSL copper or cable lines. "It would connect anyone who doesn't have internet to a 21st century line," Falcon said. "That's a huge deal."

The infrastructure bill seems unlikely to move forward in a Republican-controlled Senate. But the urgency of getting everyone a fast, resilient internet connection isn't going anywhere. In fact, the idea that internet access is a basic right seems to be gaining traction every day, even making an appearance last week in presumed Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's new infrastructure plan.

With the pandemic continuing to transform how we work, live and interact with one another, and with climate change necessitating even larger transformations in the future, our need to be connected digitally is only becoming greater.

"I think every day the pressure mounts, because the problem is not going away," Falcon said. "It's really going to come down to what we want the recovery to look like. And which of the problems COVID-19 has presented us with do we want to solve."

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The digital divide worsens the inequitable impacts of the climate crisis | Greenbiz

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This story originally appeared in Grist and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalistic collaboration to strengthen coverage of the climate story. One of the starkest inequalities exposed by the coronavirus pandemic is the difference between the digital haves and have-nots.

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Indigenous Peoples' Statement for Planetary Health & Sustainable Development

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Indigenous Peoples' Statement for Planetary Health & Sustainable Development

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This Statement from Indigenous participants in the 23rd IUHPE World Conference on Health
Promotion (Rotorua, Aotearoa New Zealand) is a call on the health promotion community
and the wider global community to make space for and privilege Indigenous peoples’ voices.

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CARE’s Adaptation Learning Programme for Africa- Nowhere on the planet are people more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change than in sub-Saharan Africa.:https://insights.careinternational.org.uk/publications/care-s-adaptation-learning-programme-for-africa

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CARE’s Adaptation Learning Programme for Africa- Nowhere on the planet are people more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change than in sub-Saharan Africa.:https://insights.careinternational.org.uk/publications/care-s-adaptation-learning-programme-for-africa

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The gap between youth energy and access to power need to be addressed and youth- led initiatives need to be supported and integrated into wider society if we are to achieve climate resilient and sustainable future

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The gap between youth energy and access to power need to be addressed and youth- led initiatives need to be supported and integrated into wider society if we are to achieve climate resilient and sustainable future

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A Case study of an eco youth-led initiative in East Africa:

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The Impact of Climate Change on Minorities & Indigeneous People's 

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The Impact of Climate Change on Minorities & Indigeneous People's 