This story was produced by Grist, co-published with InfoAmazonia and is part of The Human Cost of Conservation, a Grist series on Indigenous rights and protected areas. Lea esta nota en español.

Albeiro Mendúa was still in elementary school when the blockade began. For 10 days in October of 1998, hundreds of Indigenous A’i Cofán peoples joined together to stop oil workers from entering the community. Outraged by crude oil that had spilled into their streams and rivers, the A’i Cofán demanded the closure of Dureno 1, the well responsible for the contamination, and that Petroecuador — the state petroleum company of Ecuador — leave the area.

“Before the oil companies came, the community always lived in peace and we were all friends,” said Mendúa. “As a child, I went out to play and there was harmony between families and leaders, but that has now changed.”

Over the course of the protest, the Ecuadorian military was called in to monitor the situation. But in the end, the pressure exerted by the A’i Cofán became too much for the company’s management to handle: The government accepted their demands and agreed to temporarily close the well. 

In 1969, Texaco drilled the Dureno 1 well inside the territory of the A’i Cofán peoples. But by 1992, the well had changed hands, eventually becoming Petroecuador’s, as did the mineral estate; in Ecuador, Indigenous communities like the A’i Cofán often hold title to land, but the minerals underneath, like oil and gas, and copper or gold, belong to the state. 

Since the discovery of oil, the A’i Cofán village of Dureno in the northeastern part of the Ecuadorian Amazon has been threatened by a growing energy industry coupled with explosive population growth, the expansion of agriculture, and intense deforestation. More than two-thirds of the deforestation in the last two decades took place between 1990 and 2000. At the same time, the region’s population grew at a rate of about 5 percent each year.

After the closure of the Dureno 1 well, the A’i Cofáns lived in peace. At the age of 18, Mendúa received a scholarship to attend university in the city of Cuenca, 432 miles away. He graduated in 2010, with a degree in Educational Sciences and Research in Amazonian Cultures. His next goal: take what he learned back home in defense of his community. 

When he came home, he noticed a change. Petroecuador had returned, and this time, they had a new tactic: offer incentives to the community, divide, and drill. When it came to economic development or the protection of lands, families had begun fighting and friends were in conflict.

At that time, his community survived by hunting, fishing, and collecting fruits, and Mendúa worked to develop projects that would protect their way of life, and their rights. For some time, Mendúa was vice president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, an Indigenous organization that represents nearly 1,500 communities across the Amazon, and now leads the Fundación Hijos de la Selva, or Children of the Rainforest Foundation, an environmental organization focused on Indigenous rights.

“We continue to fight and resist,” Mendúa said. “But the leaders must be vigilant, and we need to defend ourselves.”

The A’i Cofán peoples hold legal title to more than 1,500 square miles of land across five sovereign territories in Ecuador’s northeast, along the Aguarico and San Miguel rivers, that contain dense tropical rainforests rich with plants and animals. Along the Aguarico, which begins in the Andes Mountains and runs 230 miles, narrow channels and lagoons provide homes to dolphins, manatees, and caimans.

In 2008, Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition, also known by the acronym MAE, approached the A’i Cofán with a proposal to protect their homelands by paying residents to guard their forests.

At first, many residents rejected the idea, fearing it was a ploy by the Ecuadorian government to obtain control of their territory. However, after trying multiple times to court the A’i Cofán and meeting with community members during open assemblies, the A’i Cofán decided unanimously to sign an agreement with MAE, and in 2008, they did just that, joining a national program called Socio Bosque, a cornerstone initiative behind the government’s promise to develop incentives that protect nature and ecosystems from development. 

“The decision was made together, with the participation of young people, elders, women, experts, and leaders,” Mendúa said. “We started with 27 square miles of conservation area, and it was there that we raised our guard. We worked hard on the recovery of flora and fauna, and the community respected the terms.”

Today, the Dureno region is one of 222 Socio Bosque sites throughout Ecuador, consisting of nearly 6,330 square miles of protected land of which almost 5,605 square miles belong to Indigenous communities and other collective landowners. In Dureno, the A’i Cofán receive about $54,000 each year through Socio Bosque, and the money is used to train forest guards, improve surveillance strategies, and protect the territory from illegal miners and other threats. 

“The A’i Cofán have always been caretakers of the forests without receiving anything in return,” said Medardo Ortiz, who is also a member and former treasurer of the A’i Cofán community in Dureno. He says the agreement allowed them “to obtain economic resources and cover the needs of families.”

Forests inside A’i Cofán territory are some of the last remaining areas of pristine forest in the Ecuadorian Amazon, covering nearly 7,000 square miles. Through the Socio Bosque program, about 800 community members receive payment, collectively, each year to protect 30 square miles of land from logging and agricultural land grabs while preserving the land. The money is a windfall in a region where 54.45 percent of the population lives under the poverty line — and the program works. By 2025, the program aims to protect 7,000 square miles of forest across Ecuador.

“In general, deforestation rates in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon have remained relatively unchanged or even decreased in some areas since the early 2000s,” said Santiago Lopez, an associate professor of geography and the environment at the University of Washington, Bothell. “Socio Bosque is a very helpful program that has allowed individuals and communities to financially benefit from preserving their forests.” 

But the expansion of energy development in and around Dureno, again, threatens to undermine the Socio Bosque project, potentially upending decades of conservation efforts and imperiling millions of dollars in international funding tied directly to the state’s protected area program. 

Since 2012, Petroecuador has drilled 70 new oil wells across 155 square miles of rainforest near Dureno, creating the largest oil field in the country and increasing production by approximately 75,000 barrels per day. And in 2017, the Ecuadorian government announced plans to expand drilling. 

Last year, Ecuador produced approximately 482,000 barrels of oil a day, most of which was sourced from the Amazon region. More than 60 percent of the Ecuadorian Amazon is under oil concession, with almost 28,000 square miles of oil blocks in operation. By 2025, production is expected to ramp up to 756,000 barrels per day.

Near Dureno, nearly 70 oil wells drilled before and after 2012 ring the Socio Bosque protected area, and two are producing oil inside the established boundaries. Frequent oil spills from those wells pollute the lands and waters that are connected to Socio Bosque, contaminating waterways and inflicting serious loss and damage on the region’s biodiversity, threatening its last undeveloped forests. Between 2012 and 2022, an estimated 969 cases of oil damage were reported on 51 different Indigenous lands across the country.

“All the waste and pollution from that field goes into the rivers that cross the community,” said Alexandra Almeida, coordinator of oil affairs at Acción Ecológica, an environmental advocacy organization based in Quito, Ecuador. “A’i Cofán people in Dureno are very affected. They can no longer hunt or fish. It is really tragic.”

More broadly, a total of 68 oil wells are located within protected areas governed by Socio Bosque agreements, or within 31 miles of protected borders, while three oil fields owned by the state overlap Socio Bosque lands. One field, the Shushufindi block, produced nearly 12 percent of the country’s total crude oil production in 2022.

As oil exploration begins to eat into Ecuador’s forests, Socio Bosque provides a window into just how protected areas actually are when faced with the lure of oil and gas profit.

“I think it has good intentions,” said Kevin Koenig, the climate, energy and extractive industry director at Amazon Watch. “There’s a whole bunch of questions around if the program is really achieving what it is supposed to achieve.”

In 2008, the Shuar Arutam peoples became the first community to contract with Socio Bosque. With homelands between the Santiago, Zamora, and Kuankus rivers in the southeastern region of Ecuador, the agreement covered nearly 800 square miles of land and supported almost 100,000 people in 27 Shuar communities.

The Shuar received an annual income of $452,000, which was used to conserve forests, improve community finances, and build educational facilities for their children. But despite signing contracts with the government, in 2019, Ecuadorian officials granted several mining concessions to Canadian, Chinese, and Australian companies within the established protected areas. 

“Families who had never benefited from public institutions of the state were given resources for education, health, productive development,” said Jaime Palomino, president of the Shuar Arutam community. “The idea was good, but the Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition took advantage of this opportunity to distract us and continue advancing with the permits for mining concessions, which was not the vision of our people.”

Throughout 2020, former President Josefina Tunki and other campaigners presented a series of demands to the Ecuadorian government, with the main goal of getting the contracts withdrawn. In response, they were subjected to threats and harassment by the mining companies and the state.

In 2020, Ecuadorian authorities carried out violent raids in the community. That same year, Josefina Tunki, who gained prominence as a key leader in the community’s resistance, received death threats from the vice president of the Canada-based mining company Solaris Resources, Federico Velásquez, who reportedly told her, “If you keep bothering me with national and international complaints, we will have to cut someone’s throat.”

As a result of the state granting concessions inside areas governed by Socio Bosque contracts, the MAE has terminated its contract with the Shuar Arutam peoples, claiming that the community failed to comply with the program’s requirements. According to a report issued by Amazon Watch on Socio Bosque, researchers called implementation “rife with irregularities and inconsistencies.”

“The government failed to provide support for proper implementation of the agreement and still allowed mining companies into [the Shuar Arutam peoples’] territory,” said the report. “The termination of the program has created even more economic difficulties for the [Shuar Arutam peoples], creating divisions among communities and families that could drive them into the arms of mining companies — a perverse outcome of a program aimed at forest protection.”

Torsten Krause, a senior lecturer in sustainability science at Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies, has researched the conservation benefits of the Socio Bosque program. 

“People were confused, because the state was coming in and asking them to join this conservation scheme for 20 years and then the same state, only a week later, came back and said they were looking to open a mine or auction the licensing rights for oil drilling there,” Krause said. “They were like, ‘Wait a second, you want us to sign this contract, but then you are also going to approve oil concessions?’ That’s confusing.”

Each Socio Bosque contract lasts 20 years, and the MAE pays landowners to protect their territory. To ensure compliance, the Quito-based Socio Bosque central office monitors each site using remote sensors and semi-annual field visits. Each time communities violate the terms of their contract, a payment is lost. If the violation is caused by someone outside the community — like an illegal logger, for instance — beneficiaries must report the incident to the central office within five days or lose a payment. After three consecutive violations, Socio Bosque can terminate the contract and force landowners to pay back a percentage of the payments received since the beginning of the contract.

In cases where landowners fail to meet their contractual obligations because of state-sponsored projects, communities are still required to pay.

“We acknowledge that there are still challenges to be addressed,” said Luis Suarez, the vice president of Conservation International in Ecuador. “We trust that through coordinated efforts among the government, civil society organizations, and international technical cooperation, these concerns can be addressed while respecting the rights of local communities and conserving nature.”

Socio Bosque areas are considered protected under the National System of Protected Areas of Ecuador and form part of the country’s national REDD+ scheme — a voluntary, international climate change mitigation program developed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change aimed at reducing deforestation and forest degradation by paying communities to stop development and conserve ecosystems. The goal is to incentivize conservation, improve living conditions of communities engaged in the work, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions on approximately 52 million square miles of forest areas in 60 countries. 

Indigenous and civil society organizations often reject programs that provide payments for ecosystem services, also known as PES, which provide landowners and communities monetary transfers to improve conservation outcomes, as is the case with the U.N. REDD+ program, because they say it is “not a real solution to confront climate change.”

A recent study from the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project into the main methodologies used by REDD+ found that project managers often “stretch reality and create a vast quantity of carbon credits for projects that have questionable climate impacts.” Their findings raise doubts about the effectiveness and credibility of REDD+ projects, with experts calling for more transparent carbon accounting and greater safeguards for Indigenous communities.

In Ecuador, the Socio Bosque program also has its critics. Instead of protecting land for conservation, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, or CONAIE, and the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, or CONFENIAE, argue Socio Bosque is a threat to Indigenous lands, traditions, and identities. For them, the program fails to address the true drivers of climate change, such as the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, agribusiness, and deforestation, which threaten the environment and their livelihoods.

In a letter addressed to the Secretary General of the U.N. in 2011, CONAIE said: “We oppose the policies that are being developed in Ecuador, such as the Socio Bosque plan, as well as the new environmental regulations that aim to commercialize our forests, water, and biodiversity. And we similarly reject private initiatives to grab land and sell environmental services.” To combat climate change, policies must respect the rights of Indigenous peoples and stop the expansion of oil and agribusiness, they argued.

More than $50 million has been invested in the Socio Bosque program since the project began. Most of the money comes from Ecuador but is supplemented by international institutions and private donors.

In 2014, Banco del Pacífico, a private sector bank based in Ecuador, signed a three-year contract with Socio Bosque to provide $8,635 a year toward conserving and restoring Ecuador’s ecosystems. That same year, General Motors signed a five-year contract, in which they promised to transfer $23 per 2.4 acres of protected area each year. But the program’s largest donor by far is KfW, a German state-owned investment and development bank, which signed a contract with Ecuador in June 2010 and has provided the program a total of $29.4 million.

“The existing legal framework of Ecuador creates the possibility that mining areas overlap with Socio Bosque areas, which in our view is definitively not ideal,” a representative of KfW said. “We consider the Socio Bosque program an overall success story in tropical forest protection. However, we surely also continue to carefully regard any upcoming changes, unintended impacts, or technical flaws of the program prior to any additional financing.”

Then there’s the details. When Petroecuador wants to drill for oil on a new site, they must obtain an environmental license. To do so, they have to get an intersection certificate from the MAE proving that the proposed drilling area doesn’t overlap with a nationally protected area. Under the National System of Protected Areas of Ecuador, Socio Bosque areas are protected, but Petroecuador denies this. “Our environmental licenses do not require intersection certificates for private areas within the Socio Bosque program,” said a representative of the company, adding that “Socio Bosque is not a protected area.”

According to Verónica Andrade Estrada, Socio Bosque’s technical director, in areas where concessions are granted by the Ecuadorian government for oil and gas development, “these areas are removed from the conservation polygon, since within the properties under conservation it is not possible to carry out extractive industries,” she said.

“According to our understanding of the legal framework, a breach of the agreement due to, for example, government-sponsored activities does not result in a partner being in breach of contract, and therefore the partner does not have to repay the incentive,” said a representative of KfW. “In this case, a mutually agreed termination of the agreement should be reached.”

Representatives with Socio Bosque did not respond to requests for clarification or detailed questions about communities needing to pay the state for its development activities in contractually protected areas.

While Socio Bosque channels $7.9 million in investments per year into the environment, that income pales in comparison to oil profits: In the first three months of 2023, the Ecuadorian government received $1.5 billion in income from Petroecuador’s oil exports.

“In order to maintain a harmonious coexistence with projects that are implemented to benefit the development of the country, Socio Bosque carries out a thorough review of the environmental management plans that are presented prior to the licensing of projects that overlap with Socio Bosque areas,” said the Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition. In those cases, they establish “specific preventive, mitigating, and compensatory measures” and, “if the state prioritizes resource extraction, the area is removed from the conservation scheme.”

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In 2021, when Guillermo Lasso, the nation’s outgoing president, came to power, he announced that he wanted to “extract every last drop of benefit from our oil” in Ecuador. In 2022, his administration began negotiating with Silverio Criollo, former A’i Cofán president of Dureno, for more oil wells inside the Socio Bosque borders — a negotiation that ignited divisions within the community.

“It was a huge blow,” Albeiro Mendúa said. “We complained to the government and said that we had an agreement signed and that they should respect it.”

Just months after meeting with Criollo, the Ecuadorian government authorized the construction of 30 new oil wells by Petroecuador, and by June of 2022, the A’i Cofán had again constructed a blockade to prevent oil workers from entering the community. The standoff lasted until January 12, 2023, when members of Ecuador’s Armed Forces and the National Police tried to evict them, resulting in a violent confrontation that left six people seriously injured.

Then, on February 26, Mendúa’s brother, Eduardo, one of the most prominent faces in the community’s resistance to Petroecuador and then-president Criollo, was assassinated outside his home in his garden.

CONAIE, and other nongovernmental organizations, along with Mendúa’s family members, have accused Petroecuador of being responsible for the attack. Petroecuador denies the allegations and adds that the company has “been in constant conversations with the communities, and the A’i Cofán are fully informed about the intervention of the oil company in their territory,” said Petroecuador’s deputy manager María Soledispa.

“Dureno has become a conflict zone,” Mendúa said. “I have had to leave the community to live somewhere else for my personal safety.”

Mendúa now spends his days in exile from Dureno, campaigning against oil operations from a distance. Living at home, he says, comes with constant death threats from oil workers and community members in favor of oil exploration, and the murder of his brother makes for a reminder of how real those threats are. 

In August, 60 percent of Ecuadorians voted to free Yasuní National Park, a 3,948-square-mile protected area and home to many uncontacted Indigenous communities, from oil exploration in a historic referendum. The outcome, which will require Petroecuador to leave over 726 million barrels of oil underground, was hailed as a victory by environmental advocates across the globe.

“It shows us that the greatest national consensus at this time is in the defense of nature, the defense of Indigenous peoples and nationalities, the defense of life,” said Pedro Bermo, a spokesperson for the environmental collective Yasunidos, in a statement.

But Mendúa feels less hopeful about the results. He says communities in territories outside of Yasuní aren’t safe. “We are sure, or at least I am, that the government will try to enter with force.”

Mendúa says he is now working to come up with alternative projects the community can undertake to protect their homes and keep oil companies away. He and others are fighting for the legal right to manage more of their historical and ancestral territories, which they believe would strengthen the survival of the Cofán peoples and represent a huge victory for conservation.

“We have the capacity to manage and defend these territories,” Mendúa said. “Our fight is not just for the Cofáns — we are also fighting against climate change.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In the Ecuadorian Amazon, oil threatens decades of Indigenous-led conservation on Dec 15, 2023.

The legacy of the COP28 climate summit, which concluded this week in Dubai, hinges on the success of a new international fund that was announced to great fanfare on the very first day of the conference. The stakes could hardly be higher: The so-called loss-and-damage fund is considered an essential resource for the survival of the countries most affected by the 1.2 degrees Celsius of global warming that has already occurred.

The loss-and-damage agreement represents a different kind of climate fund: The money isn’t meant to help climate-vulnerable countries mitigate their emissions or plan adaptation projects like sea walls or water reservoirs. Instead, it’s supposed to help them pay for damages that have already been caused by a specific climate-linked incident, like a storm, flood, heat wave, or other extreme weather event. 

The fund is primarily intended for use by relatively poor, developing countries in the Global South for two related reasons. The first is that these are the sorts of countries that have already seen the most severe losses and damages tied to climate change: record-breaking floods in Bangladesh, historic drought in the Horn of Africa, life-threatening sea-level rise in the Marshall Islands, and infectious disease outbreaks in South Asia. The second is that, due to their late or still ongoing industrialization, these nations did much, much less to cause the climate change that is already harming them than their counterparts in rich and early-industrializing regions like the European Union and United States.

For decades, developing countries fought for the existence of a loss-and-damage fund. Now that it’s finally operational — it’s being housed, temporarily at least, at the World Bank — the hard part has arrived: filling up the fund, and getting the money to the countries that need it. More than $650 million has come in so far, with $100 million apiece from Germany and the United Arab Emirates, $75 million from the U.K., $17.5 million from the U.S., and $10 million from Japan. But these pledges, some portions of which the contributing countries relabeled or pulled from existing climate pledges, are insufficient to cover the scale of loss and damage developing nations are facing. Researchers estimate that countries need anywhere between $290 billion and $580 billion every year by 2030.

As debates continue over how to finance and deploy the fund such that it serves those most in need, one aspect is frequently lost in the conversation: how countries will use the money when they receive it.

To begin answering this question, Grist reporters spoke with representatives of 10 developing nations to understand their needs and aspirations for the fund. While we received a wide range of responses, national leaders were united in their emphasis that the fund would not only pay for past damages, but also fortify their people against future losses. 

They were also unanimous in their opposition to a debt-based structure that would saddle them with costly interest payments, preventing them from making the future investments needed to continue fortifying their countries against climate change. And they were clear, above all, that they haven’t been waiting on the fund to figure out how they’re going to survive climate change. Indeed, many countries already have the knowledge, preparation, and expertise needed to confront the climate crisis — they are just seeking the resources necessary to act on them.

Here is what we learned from each country.

Vanuatu

It started with the rain. During the first two months of 2022, torrential rain poured down on the western coast of Santo Island in Vanuatu. Then, in March, the rain-soaked mountainside buckled and a landslide sent soil, rocks, and debris plummeting, burying the village of Molpoi. Susan Balmet, a local fisherwoman, later said the loss of her village felt like the loss of her identity. 

“Had I known in advance, we would have spent time taking pictures of the reef, moving some of the huge giant clams to other, safer areas, and telling our kids the stories of each stone and coral patch before it was taken from us,” she told the country’s Loss & Damage Taskforce. “There are things that can help us grieve, if they are done before it is too late.”

For decades, Vanuatu has been at the forefront of advocating for loss-and-damage funding. The South Pacific country is home to about 400,000 people across 83 islands, about 98 percent of whom are Indigenous Melanesians who speak more than 100 Native languages. But ocean acidification, sea-level rise, coral bleaching, extreme rainfall, extreme drought, and cyclones are increasingly battering the islands’ land and waters. 

International loss-and-damage funding would allow Vanuatu to create its own national loss-and-damage fund, which would allow communities to apply directly for money to support the work they’ve been doing to recover from climate disasters for decades, said Christopher Bartlett, head of Vanuatu’s climate diplomacy.

That money could help rebuild lost villages, reestablish taro gardens, and plant thousands of coconut and cacao trees. It could build schools, houses, and clinics. With additional loss-and-damage resources, Vanuatu could also develop micro-insurance programs to help local farmers and fishers receive compensation when their crops are destroyed by extreme weather events. And perhaps most urgently, the funding could help Indigenous people document their traditional knowledge before it’s lost forever.

— Anita Hofschneider

Mozambique

Earlier this year, Cyclone Freddie struck Mozambique not once but twice, spiraling out to sea after its initial landfall only to regain strength off the southeastern coast of Africa, breaking records and becoming the longest-lasting cyclone of all time. Nearly 200,000 people were displaced, crops were lost, and new outbreaks of cholera followed the storm’s path. Like its neighbors Malawi and Madagascar, the country is still rebuilding. Deadly cyclones have been a regular occurrence in the region in recent years, and more are likely to come as warmer waters create more ideal conditions for cyclones to develop. As a result, loss-and-damage funding is an urgent priority for the country’s leaders.

“Mozambique discovered that it is necessary to have a fund for losses and damages a long time ago, when the climate change situation began to intensify,” said Luis Machatine, who is in charge of planning and cooperation for Mozambique’s National Institute for Disaster Risk Management and Reduction. “For example, Cyclone Idai [in 2019] destroyed a lot of things that the state budget alone could not cover. But a fund could help in reconstruction of the losses suffered.” 

At the top of the list of priorities is housing for those displaced.

“In the housing area, we have a lot of work linked to the resettlement of affected populations,” said Machatine. “We would also allocate it to boost our economy by rebuilding various infrastructures.”

But some things destroyed by climate change can never be replaced, according to Machatine. 

“The real cost is tireless,” he said. “The damage caused is incalculable as it ranges from the loss of human life [to] flora and fauna [to] land and lakes.”

— Siri Chilukuri

Botswana

Thanks in large part to its enormous diamond mines, Botswana enjoys a better financial situation than many of its neighboring countries in southern Africa — but the desert nation is still highly vulnerable to climate change. Farmers and pastoralists rely on rainfall to feed crops and keep livestock alive, but drought cycles in the country are intensifying as the world warms. Recent dry periods saw thousands of cattle and goats perish as seasonal harvests failed. Even wildlife have begun to migrate in search of water: Elephants have rampaged through villages and destroyed homes, and some pastoralists have woken up to find lions on their verandas.

The national government already distributes aid packages with emergency food supplies and subsidies to farmers who lose their harvests, but this aid effort puts a strain on the country’s budget, according to Antoinette Moleele, a sustainable agriculture expert who serves as the consultant for Botswana’s national delegation to COP28.

“People in marginalized areas of the country, they’re poor, so they’re highly stressed by the droughts,” she said. “If we had a fund that is just there to be able to cover the relief, we would be able to feed children and pregnant women during these periods.” 

Moleele said Botswana would also use loss-and-damage funds to invest in what she called “capacity building.” This would allow the government to design early-warning systems to alert pastoralists about dry spells. It would also increase scientific research into drought cycles and train young people to plant drought-resilient crops.

— Jake Bittle

Senegal

Idy Niang, a regional director at the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development in Senegal, describes climate change in his native country as a “slow-onset” disaster. While the frequency of extreme weather events such as flash floods has increased over the years, the greatest impacts of global temperature increase can be felt along the nation’s 330-mile coast, where sea-level rise is salinating farmland and forcing villagers to retreat from the shore. Islands in the southern part of the country are starting to disappear. 

These gradual yet devastating effects have catalyzed an uptick in migration to the capital city, Dakar, which is suffering the complications of rapid urbanization: a lack of adequate planning, insufficient public services, frequent power outages, and water infrastructure problems.

Niang said that loss-and-damage funding will ideally help pay for the reclamation of salinated farmland using imported technology. It could also assist with the “very expensive” relocation of residents away from land that is getting swallowed by the sea. Niang emphasized that this climate migration would entail “non-economic losses” that cannot be quantified: the loss of culture and native land. Coming from a small fishing village himself, he understands this intimately. 

“What we need to define is how to finance the non-economic losses,” he said. “That is a very big question.”  

— Naveena Sadasivam and Lylla Younes 

Gambia

Like many other countries in West Africa, this tiny nation of around 2.6 million people depends heavily on cash crops that are vulnerable to climate change. Agriculture makes up around a quarter of Gambia’s $2 billion annual economic output, and well over half the country’s labor force works growing crops like peanuts, millet, sorghum, and rice. During drought periods like the one that has wracked the country over the past few years, farmers delay planting and harvests fail altogether. 

A cohort of African countries has created an insurance scheme called the African Risk Capacity program that pays out farmers who lose their crops to drought. The program paid out $187,000 in cash transfers to around 17,000 farmers in the drier eastern half of Gambia earlier this year. This infusion of cash allowed the farmers to buy food supplies and substitute their lost income from the drought. But Gambia’s government has struggled to make premium payments to the insurance program in recent years as it deals with a high debt load and rampant poverty, so the payments reached only a sliver of the affected farming population.

Isatou Camara, a development planner at the finance ministry of Gambia, says her small country would likely use loss-and-damage funding to pay into this existing insurance plan, rather than trying to stand up a new fund for drought relief.

“From 2015 to now, the government was actually able to pay [for insurance premiums] from its own budget resources only twice,” Camara told Grist. “Having this loss-and-damage fund in a way could provide subsidies for farmers to at least receive payout when they experience these climate-related events.”

— Jake Bittle

Panama

Situated at the center of the isthmus connecting Central and South America, Panama is “like an island under the influence of multiple oceans,” said Ligia Castro de Doens, the director of climate change in the nation’s Ministry of the Environment.

Strings of hurricanes and short, powerful rainstorms have battered the country in recent years, damaging infrastructure and displacing Indigenous people. Loss-and-damage funding would be used to rebuild bridges and highways, de Doens said, and to compensate for economic losses from the country’s vulnerable tourism sector.

Beyond these immediate threats, Panama is projected to lose more than 2 percent of its landmass by the midcentury. And while three Indigenous communities are poised to relocate to new government-built villages in January, another 63 are expected to require similar assistance over the next 25 years. Officials are also in the process of addressing an impending energy crisis stemming from changing rainfall patterns. Reservoirs in the western part of the country are shrinking due to a lack of consistent rainfall, imperiling the region’s hydroelectricity-heavy energy supply. The eastern end of the country has the opposite problem: Torrential rains threaten to overtop a reservoir and damage energy infrastructure. The loss-and-damage fund could help finance all of these efforts. 

— Lylla Younes

Dominican Republic

With more than 1,000 kilometers of Caribbean coastline, the Dominican Republic is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world. Beyond the expected hurricanes and torrential rain storms, this exposure has led to a type of microalgae known as sargasso blanketing the island’s pristine beaches, driving away tourism as a result. Milagro de Camps, the vice minister of Climate Change and Sustainability at the Dominican Republic’s Ministry of the Environment, told Grist that the unwelcome weed used to visit the island once a year, but now it sticks around all year long, sucking oxygen out of the sea and threatening biodiversity. It’s a relatively new problem that only impacts the Caribbean, she said, and officials are struggling to figure out the best way to address it. 

“We’re talking about millions of tons [of the algae] across multiple countries, and we don’t even have a disposal site for it yet,” she said. “It’s a huge problem.”

In addition to dealing with the extremely costly sargasso buildup, the federal government is hard at work on numerous climate preparedness projects, like implementing a multi-hazard early-warning system and climate-proofing public infrastructure. But their efforts to make progress on those initiatives are often hindered by extreme weather events, which drain critical funding and resources. The average economic loss from hurricanes in the Dominican Republic is $345 million per year, which is roughly 0.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. That number is expected to rise to 3.4 percent by 2030.

That’s why a loss-and-damage fund is so important for the Dominican Republic, de Camps said: Having quick access to funds in the immediate aftermath of destructive storms would help the country rebuild without causing any setbacks to its ongoing adaptation efforts. 

— Lylla Younes

Barbados

Barbados is drowning in floods and debt. The low-lying island nation is one of the most prosperous Caribbean countries, but sea-level rise, saltwater intrusion, and drought have handicapped the country’s agricultural industry. And when it does rain, it pours, destroying infrastructure and forcing the nation to borrow money from multilateral development banks and the private market, trapping it in a cycle of debt. 

“Half of our debt increases are due to an event that we didn’t cause,” Avinash Persaud, the climate envoy to Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, told Grist. 

Persaud says the government is trying to waterproof Barbados: It has built sea walls in the form of concrete structures or large rock conglomerations along the coastline, which it has then covered with a boardwalk. The resulting infrastructure both aids in preventing coastal erosion and also creates a public space for tourists and locals alike. With inland flooding becoming more common, Barbados has also installed drainage infrastructure and flood defenses inland. As in the Dominican Republic, warmer ocean temperatures have led to the proliferation of sargassum, and the seaweed is choking the country’s coral reefs and interfering with local fishing practices. The government, along with nonprofit groups and the private sector, is helping fishermen track the spread of sargassum and identify fertile fishing spots. Many of these programs are part of Barbados’ national strategy for climate resilience, which is called Roofs to Reefs.

A loss-and-damage fund would ease the burden of paying for some of these programs and help the country respond to both rapid and slow-onset climate events, said Persaud. If a natural disaster strikes Barbados, the loss and damage fund’s managers could conduct an assessment of the damage and provide assistance accordingly. For slow-onset disasters such as drought and sea-level rise, the country could apply for grants to fund projects that offset its losses. Farmers suffering from crop failure due to drought or flooding, for instance, could be relocated to new fields with built-in irrigation, reducing the risks of an unpredictable weather system. Persaud said the total cost of responding to climate change for the country is about $5 billion — 100 percent of Barbados’ gross domestic product.

— Naveena Sadasivam

Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad and Tobago has been part of a vital coalition of small island nations pushing for the creation of the loss-and-damage fund. The Caribbean island is warming two and a half times faster than the global average, and sea-level rise is so severe that it’s starting to topple local monuments. Extreme heat has destroyed harvests, pushing crops to their limit and limiting the vital rainwater that irrigates the country’s farmland. 

No amount of loss-and-damage funding can neutralize these effects, according to Kishan Kumarsingh, head of multilateral environmental agreements for Trinidad and Tobago. He works within the country’s Ministry of Planning and Development, which coordinates government entities working on economic, social, and environmental development.  

“There is no impact or set of impacts from a climate event, like a flood or drought, that allows you to be pristine or set back to zero,” said Kumarsingh. “There will always be residual losses and damage.” 

For Trinidad and Tobago, this means that getting a loss-and-damage fund up and running as quickly as possible is key — and the first step after that is intensive research to better understand the country’s needs. For example, because water availability affects everything from agriculture to sanitation, Kumarsingh believes that research into the country’s water problems will yield insights that can allow it to tackle multiple challenges with speed and efficiency.

All of this — the years of negotiation pushing for loss-and-damage funding and all the efforts that will accompany the money when it comes through — is in service of the most vulnerable residents of Trinidad and Tobago, according to Kumarsingh. He believes that to tackle an issue as vital and complex as climate change, only holistic solutions beyond merely decarbonizing can truly give communities a fighting chance.

“It’s not only about energy transition,” said Kumarsingh. “It is also about the loss of livelihoods of persons impacted directly by climate change [who] have very low carbon footprints — for example, coastal communities [that] depend on the natural environment for income.”

— Siri Chilukuri

Guyana

In January 2005, the South American nation of Guyana experienced a devastating flood that lasted for weeks. A round of heavy rains coincided with a high lunar tide to overwhelm drainage systems around the capital of Georgetown and its neighboring cities; more than two-thirds of the capital went underwater and thousands of homes were destroyed. The floods highlighted an extreme vulnerability that climate change will exacerbate with heavier rains: The vast majority of the nation’s population lives in coastal areas that sit well below sea level.

Pradeepa Bholanath, a senior official at Guyana’s Ministry for Natural Resources and the Environment, says the country needs around $1.6 billion by 2025 for a series of big investments that would protect the coast against future flooding. These include building new sea walls along coastal cities like Georgetown, restoring mangrove forests that can protect shorelines from flooding, and expanding agricultural drainage canals to prevent crops from going underwater.

But the country also needs money for its direct response efforts in future floods: In 2020, while it was in the midst of planning coastal adaptation projects, the country suffered another flood that displaced residents, destroyed harvests, and forced the government to relocate key health and education infrastructure. Bholanath believes that the new loss-and-damage fund needs to support both long-term resilience efforts and short-term disaster response.

“Whilst we were doing all that preparing for the future, adjusting economic activities that are impacted by climate, making ourselves more climate resilient, the flooding happened,” she said. “Then what ended up being the priority was finding ways in which we can address health impacts, move people to higher ground, and save whatever crops could be saved.”

— Jake Bittle

Grist staff writer Zoya Teirstein also contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate reparations are becoming a reality. Here’s what they could look like. on Dec 14, 2023.

This story was co-published with The Public Source.

For the second year in a row, world leaders met in the Arab world to negotiate the future of the planet. As a backdrop to the United Nations climate conference in Dubai, it’s a fitting venue for a planet-wide shift that scientists say needs to happen: The region has extensive deposits of oil and gas, but also immense, untapped potential for renewable energy.

Over the past several years, European governments and corporations have made moves to capitalize off this potential, investing in sprawling mega-projects to capture the sun’s energy from the region’s vast deserts and export the electricity north. The oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf, which constitute the region’s financial and geopolitical powerhouses, are also developing green hydrogen plants and wind and solar farms, with the aim of using renewable energy domestically in order to free up more of their fuel reserves for export. Activists and locals worry that the flurry of new mega-projects will reproduce the same exploitative practices associated with the fossil fuel industry: land grabbing, unchecked pollution, and the disenfranchisement of Indigenous people. 

More than a decade after the start of the Arab Spring, when popular protests against repression and economic stagnation erupted from Tunisia to Syria, many of the same or equally oppressive power structures remain in place. Some of these governments appear to be prioritizing European countries’ renewable energy needs before meeting the demands of their populations. Given these challenges, what might a shift away from fossil fuels look like in the Arab world, one that distributes the benefits across the population, and what might other countries stand to learn from it? 

This is the question that Hamza Hamouchene, an Algerian researcher and activist, has been exploring over the past five years. As part of his work with the Transnational Institute, an international research and advocacy institute based in Amsterdam, he has interviewed people across the region to ask about their experiences living near oil and gas deposits and planned renewable energy mega-projects. One of the products of that research is a new book of essays, edited by Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell, also of the Translational Institute, titled Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region. 

Underlying the book is the unequivocal urgency of moving away from fossil fuels in this part of the world. Large swaths of the Middle East and North Africa are warming at almost twice the rate of the global average, with devastating effects: blazes in the forests of Algeria and Syria, sandstorms choking the air in Iraq, and deadly heat waves gripping urban centers. But rather than serve the communities of the Arab world, many of the proposed renewable projects are for exporting energy abroad, and will do little to serve local people. Meanwhile, Gulf states have indicated their determination to extract every drop of fuel from their land, with COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber even casting doubt on the science of climate change at the conference in Dubai earlier this month. Grist sat down with Hamouchene to discuss COP28, the new book, and the future of the region’s renewable energy. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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Lylla Younes: Why should people who care about getting the world off fossil fuels pay attention to what’s happening in the Arab world. 

Hamza Hamouchene: First of all, clearly, there are many examples in the region of what some people call sacrifice zones [to serve] the energy transition in Europe, through export-oriented projects and land grabbing. Second, if we look at the numbers, just in 2021, 35 percent of the oil produced in the world was produced by the Middle East. The region is a nodal point of the global fossil fuel regime. This is described by Adam Haniah, in his excellent chapter of the book. He’s raising a warning to the climate justice movement and saying that the Middle Eastern countries, especially the Gulf countries, are going to be indisputable protagonists in any discussion around phasing out fossil fuels. And we are seeing this right now, in COP28 in the Emirates, where Sultan Al Jaber, the president of COP28, is an oil executive and the president of the Abu Dhabi Oil Company. 

LY: And last month, several newsrooms reported on leaked briefing documents that revealed Al Jaber’s plans to use COP28 to secure fossil fuel deals, and the following week he came under fire for denying the science of climate change. 

HH: Right, that’s the thing. These Gulf countries will constitute a really huge challenge to that transition away from fossil fuels. So for the global climate justice movement, if they just focus on Western companies like BP, Shell, or Exxon Mobil, they are missing the point. You need to focus on Gulf capital as well, and that is tied up with the question of democratization in the region and the redistribution of wealth in the region. 

When we talk about the Arab region, there is the tendency to put every country in the same basket, like Saudi Arabia and Yemen, or Lebanon and the Emirates. These countries are in completely different categories. It’s not just that the Gulf is richer, much richer actually, than its neighbors, but it also participates in the capture of profits at the regional level, reproducing the same practices that we see from colonial countries — land grabbing in Egypt, Sudan, and even East Africa.

LY: And all of these places are experiencing the escalating severity of the climate crisis. 

HH: There have been deadly wildfires in Algeria in the last two, three years, flooding in Libya that killed, I think, more than 10,000 people, droughts that have impacted small-scale farmers and food production. We have seen sea-level rise threaten some islands in the Mediterranean like Djerba and Kerkennah in Tunisia. Desertification, heat waves — the impacts are there and people are suffering from them right now. And they just exacerbate the multidimensional crisis that is already in the region. It’s not just an ecological or climate crisis, but also a food, energy, social, economic, political crisis that creates a kind of powder keg.

LY: Let’s talk about the idea for the book. Why did you bring these researchers together to write it?

HH: Most of the writing and the analysis out there around the ecological crisis, the climate crisis, the energy transition, are dominated by international neoliberal institutions like the World Bank, international aid agencies, the European Union agencies, USAID, and so forth. And their analysis is biased toward the most powerful. They do not take into account questions of class, race, gender, power, colonial history. The solutions that they propose are, let’s say, superficial. They do not go into the root causes of the ecological crisis, the food and energy crisis. So the book wanted to remedy this state of affairs by centering voices from the Arab region and to shine a light on some of the aspects of the energy transition there, and how to make it a just and equitable process for the communities and the working people in the region.

LY: Can you describe what climate injustice and fossil fuel extraction has looked like in the communities that you’ve researched across North Africa?

HH: In Algeria, I’ve done some fieldwork in two towns, Ouargla and Ain Saleh. Ain Saleh is the site of the anti-fracking uprising of 2014-2015. I thought it was important to study the case there and to interview people and leaders and activists who participated in that uprising. It was a proper intifada because all elements of the community erupted — women, old people, young people, students, workers — because they saw it as, how can I say, another example of accumulation by dispossession. The Algerian military regime, along with national and foreign companies, came in there just to extract fuel and then created a new sacrifice zone by polluting the water, and the local communities did not benefit. 

And then Tunisia and Morocco have phosphate mining. If you visit those sites, you will really understand the meaning of sacrifice zones. It really [affects] peoples’ bodies, their health, their environment, their air. Near the mine in Gabès, Tunisia, where the first part of the phosphate is processed for export, you see how the fishers are affected, the small farmers are affected, the water is plundered.

LY: You’ve described the exploitative legacy of the fossil fuel industry in North Africa and the Middle East. I’m wondering if you can also offer a vision of what you think it should move toward?

HH: It’s not going to be the same in every country. If we’re really talking about a just transition, we need to challenge the power of the Gulf, in terms of their authoritarianism, but also in terms of their capital accumulation and how they are dominating various sectors in the Arab region. We want to move away from an extractivist, fossil fuel, environmentally destructive, socially exploitative system, to a more sustainable, just, and equitable system for all its members. People call this different things. I call it eco-socialism. I’m not sectarian about this, as long as we agree on the principle and we want a more just and more sustainable future.

LY: That is a daunting aspiration.

HH: It is a utopia, right? What can we do right now? Let’s say we focus on the energy question. Energy shouldn’t be a commodity. It should be a public good for everybody. And there are a lot of examples that show how this is not impossible to do. So we need to de-privatize, wherever the energy sector has been privatized, and we need to resist all attempts to privatize renewable energy as we’re seeing in Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, and even Algeria. At the same time, the local communities and the workers need to be involved in those projects. And that’s where the question of democratization comes in. We’re not talking about elections, in the liberal, bourgeois sense of democracy. We’re talking about the communities really shaping those projects, embracing those projects. Nothing is going to be perfect, there will be compromises, there will be mistakes, but if we want to avoid creating new green sacrifice zones, that is what we want.

LY: Given that all countries, not just the United States and in Europe, need to shift away from fossil fuels, how should we think about the renewable mega-projects being proposed in the region?

HH: All countries have a responsibility to move toward renewable energy. But because the historical responsibility of causing the climate crisis lies within the industrialized West, these countries need to move swiftly and rapidly to invest a lot of money to move toward renewable energy. And it’s not just the West, I would put the Gulf as well in there. They have a big responsibility. I would put China in there as well.

But for the Global South, you cannot go and tell Tunisia you need to move as fast as possible toward renewable energy, right? These countries have the right to develop. They have the right to provide a decent livelihood [for their people] before thinking of exports, but what we are seeing right now is the opposite. We are seeing these countries shoulder the burden of the energy transition. All these mega-projects are being implemented for export, not to produce energy for local markets — Desertec in six countries across North Africa, Xlinks in Morocco, TuNur in Tunisia. They are developed by the private sector, by foreign companies. They tend to be either Western or Gulf companies and some of them are Chinese as well. And all these projects are done through private-public partnerships, which is a euphemism for privatizing profit and socializing the losses. I’m not against those mega-projects, because we need to move fast toward renewable energy, given the current escalating climate crisis. Compromises need to be made, but not at the expense of local communities, not at the expense of the development goals of less advanced countries, not at the expense of access to energy.

LY: It’s depressing that a lot of the places developing renewable energy for export are not meeting the electricity demands of their own population. 

HH: Let me give you this example. In Namibia, there is a big green hydrogen project being built right now with the former colonial power, Germany. The project is owned by the Germans and the British. They are building a huge project, building solar panels, wind farms, and then using desalinated water to break the hydrogen molecule and export green hydrogen to Germany. In Namibia, 45 percent of the population does not have access to electricity, and the electricity it uses is imported from South Africa. This project would make sense if you were building solar plants and wind farms to produce green electricity for your own usage, right? But not to produce green electricity for export. 

LY: In Palestine, the situation is even more challenging, because Israel’s military occupation limits people’s access to electricity.

HH: The colonial dynamics I mentioned in the export-oriented projects are clearly discernible in the renewable projects erected and being built in occupied territories such as Palestine, the Golan heights, and Western Sahara, because they take place at the expense of colonized people and go against their right for self-determination. Israel has portrayed Palestine pre-1948 as an empty, parched desert, which has become a blooming oasis after the establishment of the state of Israel. Israel covers up its war crimes against the Palestinian people by posing as a green and advanced country, in a superior position to a fearsome and arid Middle East. This position has been reinforced with the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan in 2020, and through agreements to jointly implement environmental projects — renewable energy, agribusiness and water, which are are a form of what is described as eco-normalization — the use of “environmentalism” to greenwash and normalize Israeli oppression.

We must always ask: Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? Who wins and who loses? And whose interests are being served? Because if we don’t ask these questions we will go straight to a green colonialism, with an acceleration of extraction and exploitation, in the service of a so-called common “green agenda.”

LY: We’ve talked about how both fossil fuel and green energy projects often extract resources from communities and give little in return. Can you think of a successful example, one that offers a sort of guide for equitable climate solutions?

HH: In 2011, at the time of the Tunisian revolution, the revolutionary council in the southern oasis town of Jemna recaptured land that had been taken away from them during colonial times. Even after independence in 1956, the state offered the land to two investors who captured all of its wealth. So in 2011, the people of Jemna recaptured the land and started managing the whole oasis, in terms of agriculture, in terms of selling the dates, in terms of marketing them. And all the proceeds that they got, they invested in the community. They remodeled the school, they bought an ambulance. That was truly inspiring. When people are given the power, and especially in a revolutionary context, people can do a lot. 

LY: We are more than 10 years out from the Arab Spring, with some pretty discouraging results. How can communities across the region end their dependence on fossil fuels without sacrificing aspirations for democracy and freedom? 

HH: What you’re asking me is how are we going to make the next revolution successful, right? There is no easy answer for this. From history, we’ve seen how most revolutions fail. This is the reality, and some revolutions take other revolutions to succeed. We’ve seen the French Revolution; it took more than a century to become a republic. It’s the same thing in the Arab region. We have seen two waves of uprisings, the first in 2011. Most of them have been defeated. This is the reality. And then we saw the second wave [in 2018], and most of them have been defeated. But what it shows is that there is a protracted, long-term revolutionary process taking place, with ups and downs, sometimes victories, sometimes failures, sometimes defeats. What we know is that the people in the region are not passive victims. They say, “We are here. We are going to resist.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What abandoning fossil fuels could look like in the Arab world on Dec 14, 2023.

California’s wildfire season gets worse every year for Avroh H. The smoke and grime that envelopes the 14-year-old’s home in Palo Alto heralds coughing fits and congestion that make it difficult to concentrate. Lately, he’s been prone to nosebleeds; he recently had one so severe it required cauterizing a blood vessel. He’s also an environmentalist who feels a deep and spiritual connection with nature. His passion has escalated from starting a nature club at school to suing the Environmental Protection Agency because, he says, the fight to save the climate is a fight that ties his health to that of the natural world.

Avroh is one of 18 young people who have joined the latest in a series of lawsuits filed on behalf of youth who are struggling with the physical and emotional effects of the climate crisis. They accuse the EPA of failing to adequately protect children nationwide from environmental catastrophe, a novel argument in environmental justice. It also claims the agency has discriminated against them by discounting the economic value of their lives and their futures as it decides how to regulate climate pollution.

Genesis B. v. the United States Environmental Protection Agency, filed on their behalf by the nonprofit environmental advocacy group Our Children’s Trust, asks a federal court to hold the EPA accountable for what the plaintiffs consider negligence in violating “their constitutional fundamental right to life and equal protection under the law.” It also seeks clarification on the status of children as a protected legal class in the United States, claiming that environmental regulations typically disregard their specific needs.

“We are experiencing what no one should have to experience,” Avroh, who is identified only by his first name due to his age, said in a statement. “We’re facing constitutional negligence. We’re challenging the EPA’s failure to protect us. The air we breathe has become a casualty of their opposition.”

The EPA has for decades “known that allowing climate pollution would harm children, yet it has intentionally allowed the U.S. to become one of the world’s biggest contributors to climate change,” Our Children’s Trust said in a statement.

Many of the plaintiffs suffer from asthma, which had been linked to toxic exposures. Increasingly severe wildfires throughout the West compound their health issues. That, the suit states, leaves many of them unable to enjoy the same quality of life as their peers, because they cannot pursue the outdoor activities and team sports young people typically enjoy.

The EPA, according to attorneys for Our Children’s Trust, has recognized the unique vulnerability of young children to climate change and environmental toxicity. “Children can be at a greater risk to environmental hazards due to unique activity patterns, behaviors, and biology,” the agency’s 2021 Policy on Children’s Health states. 

According to the Center for Disease Control, children are immensely more vulnerable to pollution than adults, and not only because of their smaller size. Children consume more food and water per body weight than adults, they more often touch their eyes and mouths, and their bodies are not as adept at breaking down pollutants. Particulates like those released during wildfires can cause lasting cognitive impairment. The earlier in life, and the more repeatedly, toxic exposure occurs, the more likely a person is to develop chronic health issues and deadly diseases like cancer. It’s also a leading cause of childhood mortality; in 2016, 600,000 deaths of people younger than 15 were attributed to air pollution.

This is not the first time a federal lawsuit has revolved around children — that is, after all, how the groundbreaking desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education was structured. It’s also not the first environmental lawsuit against the EPA, but it is unique in that its language focuses on the particular environmental vulnerability of children.

“Analysis like equal rights or due process [is] very oriented toward adults,” said Phil Gregory, a lawyer working with Our Children’s Trust on the case. Gregory refers to the EPA’s analysis of environmental harm as a “discount-rate analysis” — adults take the highest priority, with children and future generations largely an afterthought.

“The only way youth have an effective voice in our federal system is through the courts,” he said.

This approach may have some international backing; the U.N. recently affirmed children’s right to a clean, healthful environment, in line with international human rights law. 

Last June, in the similar case Held v. Montana, 16 youth accused the state of Montana, through its fervent support of the fossil fuel industry, of violating the state constitution’s provision that all residents have an inalienable right to a clean and healthy environment. The kids won in a historic first. In August, 14 youth in Hawaiʻi suing the state Department of Transportation on similar grounds learned that the case will go to trial. These successes leave Gregory hopeful that precedents are being set — with more lawsuits running concurrently in Utah, Virginia, and Florida. 

The judge in the Held case issued a declaratory judgment calling the government’s conduct unconstitutional. Gregory hopes to see a similar judgment against the EPA, which the suit alleges has presided over a massive increase in fossil fuel pollution during its 50-year tenure and, thus, has failed future generations.  

Michael Burger, a law professor at Columbia University, said that is a thorny question for the EPA, which is subject to changes in administration, and is, he said, “severely constrained by the Supreme Court.” However, he is hopeful that such a judgment, while not an injunction or other more forceful maneuver, could push government toward action. “I don’t think it’s just symbolic,” said Burger. “I think a declaration of what the law is and where the government is falling short would be a great deal on many fronts.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The latest youth climate lawsuit tries a novel argument: The unique environmental vulnerability of children on Dec 13, 2023.