This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN.

Last September, Nicaraguan state security forces arrived at Indigenous Miskitu leader Brooklyn Rivera’s home in Bilwi, on the North Caribbean coast. Pretending to be health workers, officers allegedly handcuffed Rivera and beat him with batons before putting him in the back of an ambulance and driving away. More than six months later, Rivera’s family still doesn’t know where he is, or if he is alive. 

Although Rivera had spent decades fighting for Miskitu autonomy and land rights, Carlos Hendy Thomas, another Miskitu leader, said that the recent targeting began with Rivera’s April 2023 trip to New York for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, the world’s largest gathering of Indigenous leaders and activists, and a place for Indigenous peoples to bring attention to issues their communities face. Hendy Thomas said that before Rivera left for New York, government officials warned him not to speak out against the government. He did so anyway, and when Rivera tried to board a plane to return home, he was told that the Nicaraguan authorities had not approved his reentry. Instead, Rivera flew to Honduras and crossed the border back into Nicaragua to return to Bilwi.

A few days before his arrest, Hendy Thomas told Rivera he should leave the country for his own safety, but Rivera insisted his people needed him. That was the last time the two spoke. This year, Hendy Thomas came to the Permanent Forum to ask the United Nations to pressure Nicaragua for information. “We are hoping that by coming here, at least this would come to light, and the U.N. would intervene to get him out from jail, if he’s still in jail, or if he’s even alive,” Hendy Thomas said. 

Rivera’s situation is reflected in a growing trend of Indigenous leaders facing retaliation for speaking out at UNPFII and other international spaces. With few options for Indigenous peoples to advocate in their own countries, especially where regimes refuse to even recognize their existence, many leaders turn to the international community for help. But even that option is becoming less feasible for many Indigenous peoples.

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the number and severity of reprisals against people for engaging with the United Nations system has increased. Just in the past two years, Indigenous leaders attending U.N. meetings have faced attempted kidnapping, harassment, arrest, intimidation, online censorship, travel bans, smearing, and other forms of reprisal. 

Hernan Vales, the chief of the Indigenous Peoples and Minorities Section at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that his office has seen an increase in reported cases of reprisals, but declined to give specific numbers. Vales and other U.N. experts also believe that there may be many more cases that go unreported. A 2023 U.N. report on the issue also says that more people are simply choosing not to engage with the U.N. because they are afraid of repercussions. According to the report, for example, 38 Indigenous Yukpa people decided not to meet with U.N. officials in Venezuela after being stopped by military forces while on their way to the gathering. 

“We cannot tolerate those who bring critical perspective to the United Nations being silenced,” Vales said in a statement. “We need to do more.”

But even with the increased attention and resources available, UNPFII forum members, U.N. experts, and Indigenous leaders say that the problem is still getting worse. Roberto Borrero, who is president of the United Confederation of Taíno Peoples, has attended every session of the Permanent Forum since it began in 2002 and said that the frequency and severity of reprisals has increased, and that the U.N. needs to do more. 

“It really speaks to the credibility of the U.N. to highlight and follow up on this issue,” he said. “If they don’t, the U.N. is going to be even more increasingly seen as ineffective.”

Last year, Edward Porokwa, an Indigenous Maasai leader from Tanzania, attended UNPFII to call attention to human rights violations carried out against Maasai communities, including forced evictions, land-grabbing, and resource deprivation. At the forum, said Porokwa, Tanzanian officials followed him, took videos and pictures without his permission, and said that he was not a legitimate representative. Porokwa said that throughout the forum, he also received anonymous phone calls saying that what he was doing was not right and the government was watching him. 

In Tanzania, Maasai activists have faced arrest and persecution, and Porokwa, spooked by the warnings, decided not to return home for nearly six months. “It was very terrible,” he said. “I could not meet my family. I could not communicate with everybody, because they made me really feel like my life was in danger.” Despite the incident, Porokwa returned to UNPFII this year with an even larger delegation of Maasai leaders. 

Indigenous leaders believe that governments are targeting their U.N. participation because it embarrasses them on the world stage. Exposing human rights abuses to the international community can also have financial impacts. Just this week, the World Bank announced that it is suspending $50 million in funding for a tourism project in Tanzania that has faced allegations of killings, forced evictions, and rape. 

In a statement delivered at UNPFII, Hamisi Malebo, the executive secretary of the United Republic of Tanzania’s National Commission for UNESCO, denied what he called the “baseless and factually inaccurate” allegations made by Maasai leaders. “Tanzania is guided by the rule of law and respect for human rights,” Malebo said. “The government does not condone acts of threat, intimidation, and harassment of its citizens, human rights defenders, and other nonstate actors pursuing this common objective.”

Brian Keane, director of Land Is Life, a nonprofit that advocates for Indigenous rights, says that although threats at the U.N. tend to be less overt than cases like Rivera’s, intimidation and harassment should be taken just as seriously, especially knowing that they can lead to more serious repercussions back home. “It’s a big issue,” he said. “There’s this kind of constant bullying that goes on trying to silence people that are here to speak up for their rights,” he said. 

On the second day of the two-week UNPFII session, Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, Indigenous Mbororo from Chad and the chair of the forum, delivered a statement condemning any reprisals. 

Last year, a young Indigenous woman from Asia whose name Grist is withholding to protect her identity, was on her way to her local airport to attend UNPFII, when her car was surrounded by a convoy of government vehicles. Officials attempted to drag her out of her car, and it was only after bystanders rushed to her defense that she was eventually permitted to leave. She said she is more careful now. But even after the experience, she returned to UNPFII this year. “I have to continue my work,” she said. “I see my meaning of life that way.”

In July 2022, Yana Tannagasheva, an Indigenous Shor activist from Kemerovo Oblast, Russia, attended a U.N. meeting in Geneva to speak about the harms of coal mining in her community. After she spoke, Tannagasheva and other witnesses say a Russian representative aggressively approached her and demanded to know her name and personal contact information. Tannagasheva, who has lived in exile in Sweden for six years, says the experience shattered her sense of security. “It was so awful. I wanted to cry,” she said. “I was surprised it can happen during a U.N. session.”

Representatives from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the Republic of Nicaragua, the Russian Federation, and the United Republic of Tanzania did not respond to requests for comment.

Binota Moy Dhamai, Tripura from the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh and the chair of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, said that reprisals threaten the entire international system and its goals. “If it continues like this then what is the meaning of talking about the sustainable development goals? What is the meaning of talking about peace-building?” he said.

Despite the risks, Carlos Hendy Thomas, from Nicaragua, has no plans to give up his fight. In 2020, Hendy Thomas’ son, who would have inherited his title of hereditary chief, was murdered. The murder, which Hendy Thomas believes was orchestrated by the state because of his son’s defense of Miskitu land rights, was never investigated. Hendy Thomas, who lives in the United States, says he is not that worried about his own safety, even though he is concerned about his family back home. 

“I don’t really care about me,” he said. “They already killed my son. I’m afraid, but I’m speaking. If I don’t, who will?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous leaders are risking their lives to speak at the UN on Apr 26, 2024.

In Washington, a dozen dams dot the Columbia River — that mighty waterway carved through the state by a sequence of prehistoric superfloods. Between those dams and the hundreds of others that plug the rivers and tributaries that lace the region, including California and Nevada, the Western United States accounts for most of the hydroelectric energy the country generates from the waters flowing across its landscape. Washington alone captures more than a quarter of that; combined with Oregon and Idaho, the Pacific Northwest lays claim to well over two-fifths of America’s dam-derived electricity. So when a drought hits the region, the nation takes notice.

That happened in 2023 when, according to a recent report, U.S. hydroelectric power hit its lowest level in 22 years. While the atmospheric rivers that poured across California provided the state with abundant energy, the Pacific Northwest endured low summer flows after a late-spring heat wave caused snowpack to melt and river levels to peak earlier than normal. Though dam turbines kept spinning throughout the year — proving that even during a drought the nation’s hydro system remains reliable — last year offered energy providers in the West a glimpse of the conditions they may need to adapt to as the world warms and seasonal weather patterns shift.

While models predict climate change will plunge California and the Southwest deeper into drought, what awaits Washington and Oregon is less clear. The Pacific Northwest will get warmer. That much is certain. But in terms of the rain that places like Seattle and Portland are known for, things get fuzzier.

“Whenever you bring in water precipitation and you’re looking at climate model results, they go in all directions,” said Sean Turner, a water resources and hydropower engineer with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Evergreen and Beaver states could get drier or wetter — or both, depending on the time of year.

Nathalie Voisin, chief scientist for water-energy dynamics at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said much of the latest research suggests an increase in total annual hydroelectric power in the region, but, as Turner noted as well, uncertainties remain. “So as a trend, we see an increase” in annual precipitation, Voisin said, “but we also see an increase in variability of very wet years and very dry years.”

Even during wet years, however, the water won’t fall in a gentle mist evenly distributed from new year to year end. The bulk of it, Voisin said, is expected to come from atmospheric rivers streaming overhead between fall and spring, with rivers running low in late summer as the snow and ice in the mountains that rim the region melt ever earlier and no longer keep the waters as high as they historically have.

These are things that the Bonneville Power Administration — the federal agency responsible for selling energy from the 31 federally owned dams along the Columbia and its tributaries to utilities throughout the region — has a keen eye on. In a fact sheet detailing the agency’s plans to ensure its hydropower resources remain resilient, the administration wrote, “By the 2030s, higher average fall and winter flows, earlier peak spring runoff, and longer periods of low summer flows are very likely.” Those times of lower hydroelectric generation will coincide with periods when rising temps are expected to drive people to demand more from their thermostats to keep comfortable.

Given this, if Western states like California, Washington, and Oregon are to meet the 2045 goals for 100 percent clean energy they’ve set, their utilities are going to have to get creative. As it is, when hydropower fails to meet demand, methane, also known as natural gas, tends to fill the gap — even if power companies can’t say for sure that that’s their backstop.

Seattle City Light, for instance, which provides electricity to over 900,000 people across much of the Seattle area, reportedly has been carbon neutral since 2005 thanks in large part to an energy mix that is nearly 90 percent hydropower — around half of which is supplied by Bonneville Power. But with its standard fleet of hydroelectric plants generating below average, Siobhan Doherty, the utility’s director of power management, said it has had to procure new sources of energy to ensure it can comfortably meet customers’ needs. A fair portion of that power comes from other dams in the area, but some of it is also provided by what Doherty called “unspecified” sources purchased from other providers.

Across the West, when utilities like Seattle City Light purchase energy to cover hydropower shortfalls, most of it comes from gas-powered peaker plants, according to Minghao Qiu, an environmental scientist at Stanford University. As a result, emissions rise. Over the 20-year period examined in a study of how droughts impact grid emissions, Qiu and his colleagues found that temporary prolonged hydropower declines led to 121 million tons of carbon emissions. Qiu also found that the plants belching all that pollution often lay far from where the energy is needed.

While the seemingly obvious solution to this challenge is to rapidly deploy wind and solar, Qiu found that this didn’t actually solve the problem.

“So what really happened there is an implicit market that whoever can generate the electricity with the lowest costs are going to generate first,” Qiu said. This means that solar and wind will send all the energy they can because they’re by far the cheapest; hydropower then provides what it can, followed by fossil fuels like methane to plug any holes. “So when hydropower sort of declines,” Qiu said, “the wind power and solar power is already maxed out,” typically leaving gas plants as the remaining option.

Nonetheless, in a bid to keep its grid carbon-free in the long term, Seattle City Light recently signed agreements to buy energy from two independent solar projects, each with at least 40 megawatts of capacity, and is negotiating other, similar arrangements. The fact Bonneville Power has seen a sharp rise in requests from renewable energy developers to connect to its transmission lines suggests other utilities in the region are exploring similar deals.

While those solar farms, in a sense, address the demands that hydro alone can’t meet, the West’s dams help make utility-scale renewables work. Regardless of the inevitable expansion and improvement of turbine and photovoltaic technology, wind and solar will always be intermittent and weather-dependent. In those moments when the gusts stop blowing and the sun stops shining, something has to top off the grid. “Hydro does that better than anything,” Turner said.

Many of the dams administered by Bonneville Power are already equipped to spin up or down as demand dictates, and their ability to meet these moments was perhaps no more apparent than during the lethal heat dome that gripped the Pacific Northwest for one blistering week in June 2021. As streets cracked and power lines melted, the region’s homebound populations drove electricity demand to record levels. To keep the grid going, Bonneville Power relied on the controversial dams along the lower Snake River. The agency released a statement a month after the heat wave, revealing how critical the four lower Snake River dams were during that disaster. At times, they provided well over 1,000 megawatts of power, which is roughly the average draw in Seattle. And while there are credible reasons to remove the dams, Bonneville Power said that without those resources it likely would have had to resort to rolling blackouts to ensure the system wasn’t pushed past its limits.

That experience, and the many more like it that are sure to come, suggest that even as year-to-year dips impact the nation’s dams, the power they provide will long remain a critical component of a carbon-free future.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rivers are the West’s largest source of clean energy. What happens when drought strikes? on Apr 26, 2024.

This week’s quote is from author Bill McKibben about humans’ environmental impact: “We have the…

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Struggling to harness your sustainability data amidst increased disclosure requirements? Learn how you can ride the ESG regulation wave and use technology to drive a competitive advantage.

A new study on plastic pollution in 84 countries has linked half of branded plastic pollution to only 56 firms, with about 24% of the branded plastic waste analyzed connected to only five companies, including The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Danone and Altria.

A team of researchers analyzed plastic pollution data from the Break Free From Plastic Brand Audit. The data spanned a total of 1,576 brand audit events over five years, from 2018 to 2022. 

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The analysis revealed about 52% of the 1,873,634 plastic items in the study were unbranded, which could be because sunlight, water or other environmental factors caused fading on labels.

“We found over 50% of plastic items were unbranded, highlighting the need for better transparency about production and labeling of plastic products and packaging to enhance traceability and accountability,” the authors wrote in the study, which was published in the journal Science Advances. “We suggest creation of an international, open-access database into which companies are obliged to quantitatively track and report their products, packaging, brands, and releases to the environment. Additionally, we recommend development of international standards around the branding of packaging to facilitate their identification.” 

Of the remaining plastic items that did have visible branding, the study revealed the highest amount could be linked to one firm, The Coca-Cola Company, with 11% of the plastic waste items. The other brands linked to the highest number of analyzed plastic pieces include PepsiCo (5%), Nestlé (3%), Danone (3%) and Altria (2%). In total, these five brands made up about 24% of the branded plastic waste items.

In total, 56 companies were responsible for over 50% of the branded plastic items, while all of the branded plastic items were linked to 19,586 companies.

Much of the plastic waste could be traced back to companies that produce food, beverage or tobacco products, according to the study.

In addition to analyzing the plastic waste and tracing it back to brands via the Break Free From Plastic Brand Audit data, the study authors also used data from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to look into plastic production rates by companies.

In comparing the two datasets, the researchers found that a 1% increase in production was followed by about a 1% increase in branded plastic waste.

“The industry likes to put the responsibility on the individual,” Marcus Eriksen, study author and plastic pollution expert at The 5 Gyres Institute, told The Guardian. “But we’d like to point out that it’s the brands, it’s their choice for the kinds of packaging [they use] and for embracing this throwaway model of delivering their goods. That’s what’s causing the greatest abundance of trash.”

Some of the study’s researchers are participating in the ongoing UN Treaty for Plastic Pollution talks this week, and they told The Guardian that the study findings highlight the importance of such a treaty in reducing plastic pollution at the source: plastic producers.

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For much of its 53-year history, the Environmental Protection Agency let civil rights complaints languish. From Flint, Michigan, to the industrial corridors of the Deep South, communities attempting to use federal civil rights law to clean up the pollution in their neighborhoods were largely met with years of silence as their cases piled up in the agency’s backlog. That changed in 2020, after a federal judge ruled that the EPA must conduct timely investigations of civil rights complaints, and staffers began looking into cases where they identified potential discrimination. 

Now, a slate of red-state attorneys general are trying to stop the EPA from taking race into account at all. Twenty-three Republican attorneys general filed a petition with the Biden administration’s EPA last week asking the agency to stop using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to regulate pollution. Advocates described the move, spearheaded by Florida’s Ashley Moody, as an attempt to strip the EPA of an avenue for tackling environmental justice, which the agency defines as “the just treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of income, race, color, national origin, tribal affiliation, or disability, in agency decision-making.” In their petition, the Republican attorneys general argued that in practice, environmental justice “asks the states to engage in racial engineering.”

The petition “reads as the next step in a series of actions designed to undermine our civil rights laws,” said Debbie Chizewer, an attorney at Earthjustice leading the organization’s efforts on Title VI. She described petitions to the EPA as important legal mechanisms to compel the agency to act. “It’s a real tool,” she said. “This is an abuse of that tool.”

Moody’s office told the Associated Press that the attorneys general would sue the EPA if it didn’t change its ways. 

The most recent high profile civil rights complaint submitted to the EPA came from residents of Cancer Alley, the stretch of land on the lower Mississippi River in southeast Louisiana home to hundreds of industrial facilities, including a notorious plant owned by the Japanese chemical giant Denka. Starting in the fall of 2022, the EPA spent months negotiating with Louisiana’s environmental and health regulators about how to ease the toxic pollution around Denka and other plants that surround the region’s predominantly Black towns. But the whole process was called off after then-Louisiana Attorney General  Jeff Landry (now the state’s governor) filed suit in May 2023.

Landry’s lawsuit attacked decades-old policies on environmental racism, challenging the EPA’s authority to regulate under Title VI. Even though the EPA dropped the complaint in June, the state pursued its litigation, and a federal judge ruled in Louisiana’s favor in January. Judge James Cain said that Louisiana and its “sister states” had found themselves “at the whim of the EPA and its overreaching mandates.” 

Considered one of the most important provisions of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in any program that receives funding from the federal government. This includes state agencies, which use federal dollars to administer pollution prevention laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Chizewer described the provision as vital, because “our environmental laws are not protecting all communities. ZIP codes determine your exposure to environmental harms and Title VI provides a backstop to eliminate that.” 

Recent attacks on the EPA’s use of Title VI can be traced back to the final days of the Trump administration, when the Department of Justice attempted to push through a rule that would have changed the interpretation of Title VI to only cover intentional discrimination. For decades, federal agencies like the EPA have interpreted Title VI to include in their definition of discrimination “disparate impacts,” the idea that a policy or an agency decision can disproportionately hurt a specific group of people, regardless of whether it’s deliberate. The legal argument underpinning the Trump administration’s rule, as well as the Louisiana lawsuit and the most recent petition, is based on the Supreme Court case Alexander v. Sandoval. The 2001 decision, written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, said that private citizens do not have the right to sue parties under Title VI, meaning the law’s protections could only be advanced by agencies like the EPA. The Republican attorneys general now want to peel back the agency’s ability to use Title VI, too. 

Claire Glenn, a criminal defense attorney with a background in civil rights law, told Grist that the disparate impact interpretation of Title VI is necessary for keeping communities safe, since companies are wary of appearing discriminatory. 

“We’re in an era where intentional discrimination is increasingly hard to prove, but discriminatory impacts are not going away,” Glenn said.

Title VI is one of a handful of federal regulations that can be used to protect communities from toxic pollution. The Clean Air Act requires states to regulate plants by industry, with each type of facility required to abide by certain standards that limit their emissions. But when companies try to build plants in already polluted areas, Title VI can be used to stop local governments from granting them permits. Over the past five years, the chemical industry has made a concerted effort to expand its footprint in Louisiana. Since the EPA dropped its Title VI case there, residents and advocates have had to find new ways to fight the expansion. 

The EPA has not yet acknowledged Florida’s petition publicly. Chizewer said that the agency could choose to reject it out of hand, or accept it and start a process to change its own regulations. 

“I think it’s a test for the EPA,” Chizewer said. “The EPA needs to stand firm and show the importance of this tool.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Republican attorneys general mount a new attack on the EPA’s use of civil rights law on Apr 25, 2024.

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For the first quarter of 2024, electricity generation from wind power sources exceeded the amount of electricity generated by fossil fuel sources in the UK. Further, electricity from fossil fuels reached a record low on April 15.

According to data from Ember, a not-for-profit energy think-tank, electricity generation from wind energy sources reached 25.3 terawatt hours (TWh), or about 39.4% of total electricity generation, in the first three months of 2024. By comparison, electricity from fossil fuel sources reached 23.6 TWh, about 36.2% of total electricity generation, during the same time period, Reuters reported. 

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In January, electricity generation from wind energy was at 9.07 TWh, followed by 8.24 TWh in February and 7.96 TWh in March. Electricity generation from coal reached 0.48 TWh (January), 0.22 TWh (February) and 0.34 TWh (March), while gas contributed to 9.65 TWh, 6.27 TWh and 5.90 TWh for January, February and March, respectively. Other fossil fuel sources made up 0.25 TWh in January, 0.24 TWh in February and 0.23 TWh in March.

As Reuters reported, wind and solar energy combined to provide 27.1 TWh of electricity generation in the UK during the first quarter of 2024, leading to a record high of 42.2% share of electricity generation from renewable energy sources.

Progress appears to continue into the second quarter, as electricity generation from fossil fuels in the UK reached a record low on April 15, according to a report from Carbon Brief. The report showed that electricity output from fossil fuel sources made up an all-time low of 2.4% for one hour on April 15.

These milestones are moving the needle on a target from the National Grid Electricity System Operator (NGESO) to run the electrical grid in the UK without fossil fuels, at least for short periods, by 2025, Carbon Brief reported.

“This hasn’t just happened overnight. It’s been a culmination of a significant amount of effort over a number of years,” Craig Dyke, director of system operations at NGESO, told Carbon Brief. “That’s not just us [NGESO] operating in isolation, that’s planning and collaboration with industry, with [energy regulator] Ofgem and with the government… It’s not just about technologies, it’s about hearts and minds and processes and systems and people working together.”

The UK has targeted net-zero by 2050, including through the transition to renewable energy sources.

According to Ember, in 2010, about one-third of the UK’s energy generation came from coal, and by 2022, coal power generation fell to only 2%. As Carbon Brief reported, about one-third of electricity generation in England, Scotland and Wales was from all fossil fuels as of 2023, while renewables made up about 40% of electricity generation.

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