The reality of climate change came home for Dr. Samantha Ahdoot one summer day in 2011 when her son was 9 years old.

An assistant professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, Ahdoot and her family were living in Alexandria, when there was a heat wave. Morning temperatures hovered in the high 80s, and her son had to walk up a steep hill to get to his day camp. 

About an hour after he left for camp, she received a call from a nearby emergency room. Her son had collapsed from the heat and needed IV fluids to recover.

“It was after that event that I realized that I had to do something,” she said. “That, as a pediatrician and a mother, this was something that I had to learn about and get involved in.” 

Dr. Ahdoot made good on that vow. She is the lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ newly updated policy statement on climate change, which appeared earlier this year. The statement urges pediatricians to talk about climate change to their patients. But research suggests that’s not happening very much yet, and there are practical barriers in the way.  

Back in 2007, the AAP was the first national physicians’ group to make a public statement about climate change. The updated statement covers the growing research on the many ways climate disproportionately affects children in particular. Heat raises the risk of preterm birth; infants are among the most likely to die in heat waves. Because their bodies cool themselves less efficiently than adults, children remain more susceptible to heat-related illness as they grow. Children breathe more air per pound of body weight, making them up to 10 times more affected by toxins in wildfire smoke. Excess heat hurts children’s performance in school, especially low-income children with less access to air conditioning. And research suggests that teens and youth are feeling more climate anxiety than older adults.

The new policy statement’s number one recommendation is that its members “incorporate climate change counseling into clinical practice.” This may seem like a tall order, considering the average pediatrician visit is 15 minutes. A 2021 study found that 80 percent of parents agreed that the impact of global warming on their child’s health should be discussed during their routine visits. But, only 4 percent said that it had actually happened in the past year. 

“How do you talk about climate change in a visit where you have to talk about X, Y, Z, do all the vaccines, answer every concern?” said Dr. Charles Moon, chief resident at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York. A member of the AAP Council on Environmental Health and Climate Change, he has been working to build a curriculum at his hospital to start teaching pediatricians and other doctors about this.

 “I don’t think we have all the answers to that yet,” he said. “I do a lot of work teaching other pediatricians, and it requires a little bit of a mindset shift.”   

Dr. Moon sees patients in the South Bronx, nicknamed “Asthma Alley” for its air pollution. Part of his challenge is putting environmental threats in perspective for families who face many different obstacles in their lives, in a way that doesn’t lead to despair or disempowerment. 

Or, as he put it: “If you can’t put food on the table, who wants to hear about climate change?” 

In Oakland, California, Dr. Cierra Gromoff has a lot of experience with families on Medicaid, and she says the pressure on them and their healthcare providers is real. “There are these already incredibly marginalized groups of kids facing other insurmountable things,” she said. “These providers have so little time, they have to focus on the biggest burning fire — whatever systemic problem is going on.” 

A clinical child psychologist, Gromoff has been concerned about the environment since her childhood as an Alaskan Native in the remote Aleutian Islands. She thinks that to overcome these obstacles, state and federal insurance providers should require or reward doctors for taking the time to include environmental health in their assessments. 

She is the co-founder of a telehealth startup, Kismet Health, which is building a tool that could show local environmental threats that are indexed to a patient’s home or school address. 

The tool could help doctors recognize climate risks, by showing if a patient lives near a green space, an urban heat island, or a polluting chemical plant. 

Gromoff said she would like to see free resources that pediatricians can give families on everything from the signs of heatstroke in a baby to eco-anxiety.

“We should have a screening question,” she said. “‘Are you worried about what’s happening to our earth?’ And if they say yes, we should be able to provide some type of handout: What you’re feeling is real. These are small steps you can take.”

The good news, say Moon and Ahdoot, is that interest in the topic is picking up in the medical community. Over half of medical schools are covering climate change in the curriculum, a number that’s more than doubled since 2019. And there are state research consortiums on climate and health in 24 states, Ahdoot said. The American Academy of Pediatrics has been creating continuing education materials on the topic as well. 

Incorporating climate change into clinical practice is not about adding another item to an already long checklist, Ahdoot said. It’s also not about transforming pediatricians into activists, or talking about factors that families can’t do anything about. 

“Pediatricians never want to be proselytizing,” she added. “It always has to be valuable to the individual patient.” 

The goal of the new climate policy for pediatricians is to help doctors translate their climate knowledge into solutions and helpful advice for their patients. A few examples from Ahdoot include: running a test for Lyme disease for patients in Maine, which used to be too cold for ticks; beginning allergy medication in February because pollen arrives earlier in the year; or teaching athletes the warning signs for heat exhaustion.

For Ahdoot, it’s also important to be aware of how climate affects a child’s mental health. Part of the answer, she said, is talking about actions that families can take that benefit both people’s health and the planet, like eating more plant-based diets, and walking or biking instead of driving.

“What’s good for climate,” she said, “is generally good for kids.” 

This story has been updated.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Pediatricians say climate conversations should be part of any doctor’s visit on Apr 19, 2024.

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.

In December, Catherine Murupaenga-Ikenn used a power tool to erase the words on a museum display of the Treaty of Waitangi, an 1840 document that asserted British sovereignty over Aotearoa, also known as New Zealand. 

For years, many Māori, like Murupaenga-Ikenn, had criticized their national museum for displaying the English-language agreement that their ancestors did not endorse, wrongly suggesting the Māori people had agreed to relinquish their sovereignty. Activists had spent years waiting for the museum to change the display; when nothing happened, they took matters into their own hands. Her case is now in court.

Murupaenga-Ikenn is now in New York City this week, attending the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the largest annual global gathering of Indigenous advocates and leaders. There, she spoke on the United Nations General Assembly floor on Wednesday, drawing a connection between the disillusionment her people feel with their state government and the frustration Indigenous people feel with the United Nations as a whole. 

A decade ago, global leaders stood in that same room and agreed to respect and promote the rights of Indigenous peoples. At the World Conference of Indigenous Peoples in 2014, they negotiated a 40-paragraph agreement — known as an outcome document — loaded with promises like providing equal access to health care for Native peoples; respecting their contributions to ecosystem management; and working with Indigenous peoples to address the effects of extractive industries. To date, little has been accomplished, and now many like Murupaenga-Ikenn want the United Nations to urgently course-correct.  

“Ten years on from the adoption of the outcome document, what I see is the U.N. is suffering a crisis of Indigenous peoples’ mistrust,” Murupaenga-Ikenn said. 

Wednesday’s meeting, where Murupaenga-Ikenn spoke, was particularly important because it featured Dennis Francis, the president of the General Assembly, a high-ranking official of the United Nations, second only to the secretary-general, António Guterres.

But unlike the conference in 2014, this conversation focused heavily on the climate crisis. The original outcome document features the phrase “climate change” only once. 

“It is thanks to Indigenous peoples, as guardians as 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity, that the sophisticated traditional knowledge and practices they employ, that we have seen gains in the conservation and sustainable use of our increasingly threatened biodiversity,” Francis said in his remarks to attendees. “We must harness the potential of Indigenous knowledge and innovations to mitigate the effects of climate change.”

A decade ago, the world hadn’t yet experienced month after month of record-shattering heat. Global leaders hadn’t met in Paris to sign international agreements to prevent catastrophic warming. Far fewer people drove electric cars and relied upon renewable energy. The European Union and the U.S. had yet to sign their landmark climate laws.

Now, the United Nations’ weather agency is warning that the world is close to surpassing 1.5 degrees of warming. Scientists are proving that climate change is already exacerbating extreme weather events like heavy rainfall. And leaders say now is more important than ever for U.N. member states to take seriously both the concerns of Indigenous peoples and the potential for their traditional knowledge and practices to provide much-needed solutions.

“So many brothers and sisters have come to this meeting year after year to call to humanity, to states, to multinationals, to ask them to comply with these agreements,” said Leonidas Iza Salazar, a Kichwa-Panzaleo activist from Ecuador, who spoke on behalf of Central and South America and the Caribbean region at Wednesday’s meeting. 

In the 2014 outcome document, such promises include recognizing Indigenous peoples’ knowledge when creating national climate change response plans and protecting Indigenous rights, which include “free, prior and informed consent” to projects on their land. This would mean giving Indigenous peoples the opportunity to agree to energy developments like pipelines and lithium mining on their land before such projects are underway. 

“However after 10 years of having established these mechanisms and having this declaration, the states — rather than creating conditions to meet the commitments they have made to the Indigenous peoples of the world — they have forged ahead with economic policies, mining, extraction, despoiling Mother Earth without limits,” Salazar said. “All of that has brought with that terrible consequences.”

Throughout Wednesday’s meeting, Indigenous peoples took turns sharing their frustration and disappointment with the lack of follow through from state governments, whose officials intermittently stood up to describe their progress and restate their commitments to Native peoples and nations.

Some state governments were more willing to embrace reform than others: A representative from Colombia said the country would support enhanced participation of Indigenous peoples in the U.N. system through the creation of a separate status for them. Right now, Indigenous nations are lumped in with non-governmental organizations in the U.N. system like advocacy groups, and can’t serve on key committees where important conversations happen between U.N. member states.

Many Indigenous advocates spoke up about the need for such enhanced participation in United Nations processes, which states promised to consider in the outcome document. Indigenous peoples’ status at the U.N. still hasn’t changed in the last decade.

Ghazali Ohorella, an Alifuru Indigenous rights advocate from the Maluku Islands in Indonesia, spoke on behalf of the Pacific region and was one of several advocates who urged Francis, president of the General Assembly, to schedule a high-level meeting in 2027 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the signing of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Those meetings, Ohorella said, are a key part of Indigenous advocates’ efforts to hold states accountable for their promises. And while there’s no way to actually hold states accountable, a major event can help Indigenous advocates shine a light on failures, highlight any successes and ensure their concerns are not forgotten. 

“The thing is, with Indigenous peoples, because we’re like a mighty mouse fighting an 800-pound gorilla, you need to keep the pressure on,” Ohorella said. “What we’re here to do is definitely to challenge the status quo and make sure that we’re not just participating in the system, we’re changing it.”

That optimism resonates with Murupaenga-Ikenn from Aotearoa. Murupaenga-Ikenn used to attend the Permanent Forum frequently but then got disillusioned by the lack of progress and stopped attending. 

But recently she decided it was time to come back. A new right-wing government elected last fall in Aotearoa pledged to roll back many of the progressive Indigenous policies that Māori peoples spent decades fighting for. Already, the new government abolished the Māori health agency, despite entrenched health disparities, is minimizing the use of the Māori language, and exploring how to withdraw the country’s support of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Thousands have taken to the streets to protest the changes. 

Murupaenga-Ikenn feels like this is the time to speak out again, and to find allies internationally. Yet halfway through the first week of the Permanent Forum, she’s already frustrated with how repetitive the gathering has been as Indigenous advocates ask state governments over and over to respect their rights. 

“You just want to keep on doing this for another 100 years?” she said. “Good on you, but not me. And certainly not our young people. Because there will be nothing left, nothing left to salvage if we keep on doing this, and only this.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline At UN conference, Indigenous peoples say little has changed after promises made a decade ago on Apr 19, 2024.

By Cristen Hemingway Jaynes and Olivia Rosane

This year marks the 54th year of Earth Day! What better way to celebrate than to explore opportunities to join others in helping combat the climate crisis and make our planet cleaner, greener and more sustainable? Here are a few suggestions to get you started.

1. Square Up Against Plastic Pollution 

EARTHDAY.ORG, a global environmental group that grew out of the first Earth Day in 1970, has announced that the official theme of Earth Day 2024 is Planet vs. Plastics. The organization hopes to mobilize its worldwide network to demand a 60 percent cut in plastic production by 2040, with a view toward eliminating the toxic petroleum products entirely. 

“The word environment means what surrounds you. Now plastics do more than surround us; we have become the product itself — it flows through our blood stream, adheres to our internal organs, and carries with it heavy metals known to cause cancer and disease. Now this once-thought amazing and useful product has become something else, and our health and that of all other living creatures hangs in the balance,” EARTHDAY.ORG President Kathleen Rogers said in the press release announcing the theme. “The Planet vs. Plastics campaign is a call to arms, a demand that we act now to end the scourge of plastics and safeguard the health of every living being upon our planet.”  

To help anyone join the campaign, EARTHDAY.ORG has published an Earth Day 2024 Action Toolkit that includes a petition for an ambitious Global Plastics Treaty, resources to learn about the relationship between plastic pollution and fast fashion and advocate for a sustainable clothing industry and an invitation to take the #PlasticDetox Challenge on social media and reduce your reliance on single-use plastics.

You can also either search for or create your own Earth Day event or tackle plastic pollution directly by organizing or joining a Great Global Cleanup near you. If you want to go even deeper, you can sign up to Dive for Earth Day and remove trash from vulnerable ocean ecosystems like coral reefs or marine protected areas. 

2. Sound the Alarm

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Earth Day 2024 follows closely on the first 12-month period on record in which global temperatures breached 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. While some of this heat likely comes from an ongoing El Niño event, it’s exacerbated by global heating caused chiefly by the burning of fossil fuels. Several youth climate organizations including Sunrise Movement, Fridays For Future US and the Campus Climate Network are using Earth Day as a chance to pressure President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency. 

“Congress grants the president various national defense powers that can be deployed during times of genuine emergency,” the groups explain in a petition. “Since the National Emergencies Act was enacted in 1976, every president has declared at least one national emergency during their term of office. By declaring a national climate emergency, Biden can unlock these emergency executive powers to aggressively combat the crisis.” 

Declaring a climate emergency would allow Biden to take steps including pausing oil exports and oil and gas drilling, using the Defense Production Act to bolster renewable energy installations and create green jobs and provide free healthcare and housing to people impacted by extreme weather events. 

To add your voice to their call, you can sign the petition to Biden; join the Global Climate Strike on Friday, April 19; or sign up for a Sunrise Movement Earth Day teach-in taking place from April 19 to 23. If you’re a university student, you can also attend a Reclaim Earth Day protest calling on schools to divest from fossil fuels, sever any connections with the fossil fuel industry and eliminate their greenhouse gas emissions. 

3. Concert to End Fossil Fuels

If you find yourself in Washington, DC this Earth Day weekend, the Earth Day DC 2024 Concert to End Fossil Fuels will be held from 4 to 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 20, at the National Mall.

“This Earth Day weekend we are coming together to continue the fight to End the Era of Fossil Fuels! Communities around the globe are plagued by severe storms and weather events, and politicians have been ignoring the scientific warnings for decades,” Action Network said in its press release on the event. “But we have the solutions. We know that we need an immediate just transition to renewable energy. We’re fighting back against green washing and false solutions that fail to address the root cause of the climate crisis. We demand that giant fossil fuel companies be held accountable and pay for the harm they have caused. Our future lies in the will to pass bold policies and make systemic change.”

The concert will feature local bands, artwork and speeches from community and youth activists.

“We are gathering this Earth Day weekend with music and art to continue this fight, to strengthen our movement and hear from youth voices. We will also be hearing from youth in the constitutional climate lawsuits around the country, such as Juliana vs. Gov and Held vs. Montana as part of Our Children’s Trust!”

What better way to celebrate Earth Day than to get your groove on in the nation’s capital while being inspired by others at the forefront of the climate fight.

4. Earth Day 2024 Virtual Stage 

Another opportunity for community connection is the Earth Day 2024 Virtual Stage, presented by Earth Day Initiative and March for Science New York City. Programming begins at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Earth Day itself.

This online collaboration features activists, filmmakers, artists, authors, actors and podcasters engaged in conversation about climate action, environmental justice and green living. 

Some of the presenters scheduled to grace the Earth Day 2024 Virtual Stage include:

• Environmentalist and drag queen Pattie Gonia with artist and activist Benjamin Von Wong and Maggie Kervick, global head of sustainability at Kiehl’s skincare, speaking about how to make the beauty industry more circular.
• Actor, author and podcaster Angourie Rice with a special message on climate action.
• Author and CBC Sunday Morning correspondent David Pogue and Earth Day Initiative’s Executive Director John Oppermann on “How to Prepare for the Climate Crisis.”
• Emily Fano, National Wildlife Federation senior manager for climate resilience education, and Alyssa Shearer, March for Science NYC’s director of programming, with a discussion on climate change education. 
• Leslie Ann St. Amour, RAVEN’s campaign director, speaking with actor, filmmaker and environmental activist Luke Mullen about the “Indigenous Fight Against Climate Change.”
• A conversation about “Reducing Food Waste at Home” by JacobSimonSays LLC founder and climate educator and creator Jacob Simon and Jeremy Lang, who is the co-founder and vice president of sustainability at LOMI.
• An explainer on sustainable furnishings by actor, writer and director Megyn Price and Laurence Carr, CEO and founder of Laurence Carr Inc. and Studio Laurence.

Past segments of the virtual stage can be viewed here.

Whatever you choose to do to celebrate our planet this Earth Day, we hope it includes time in the outdoors, inspiration and community!

The post From Cleanups to Concerts, EcoWatch’s Guide to Earth Day 2024 appeared first on EcoWatch.

Climate change damage worldwide will cost approximately $38 trillion annually by 2050, according to a new study by Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

The impacts will be felt all over the world, but will most affect countries that have contributed the least to the climate crisis.

“Our study highlights the considerable inequity of climate impacts: We find damages almost everywhere, but countries in the tropics will suffer the most because they are already warmer. Further temperature increases will therefore be most harmful there. The countries least responsible for climate change are predicted to suffer income loss that is 60% greater than the higher-income countries and 40% greater than higher-emission countries. They are also the ones with the least resources to adapt to its impacts,” said co-author of the study Anders Levermann, PIK’s head of research department complexity science, in a press release from PIK.

The study, “The economic commitment of climate change,” was published in the journal Nature.

“Our analysis shows that climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries around the world, also in highly-developed ones such as Germany and the U.S., with a projected median income reduction of 11% each and France with 13%,” said study co-author Leonie Wenz, a PIK climate scientist and economist, as The Associated Press reported.

The severity of the impacts will almost definitely increase as humans continue to burn fossil fuels, reported Reuters.

“These near-term damages are a result of our past emissions. We will need more adaptation efforts if we want to avoid at least some of them. And we have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately – if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100. This clearly shows that protecting our climate is much cheaper than not doing so, and that is without even considering non-economic impacts such as loss of life or biodiversity,” Wenz said in the press release.

The research team used empirical models along with climate simulations and also examined the persistence of climate impact effects on the past economy. In assessing how changing climatic conditions would affect future economic growth, the researchers looked at 40 years worth of data from more than 1,600 regions across the world.

“Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected. These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labour productivity or infrastructure,” said Maximilian Kotz, a PIK climate scientist and first author of the study, in the press release.

The range of economic damages is estimated to be from $19 to 59 trillion by mid-century. The cause will mainly be rising temperatures, with additional impacts from rainfall changes and variations in temperature. Additional weather extremes like wildfires and storms could also increase the economic costs.

“[W]e find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices,” the researchers wrote in the study. “These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2°C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices.”

Levermann emphasized the need for a rapid shift away from fossil fuels.

“It is on us to decide: structural change towards a renewable energy system is needed for our security and will save us money. Staying on the path we are currently on will lead to catastrophic consequences. The temperature of the planet can only be stabilized if we stop burning oil, gas and coal,” Levermann said in the press release.

Wenz said the extent of the inequity of the impacts was unexpected.

“It’s devastating,” Wenz said, as The Guardian reported. “I am used to my work not having a nice societal outcome, but I was surprised by how big the damages were. The inequality dimension was really shocking.”

The post Climate Damage Costs Could Total $38 Trillion per Year by 2050, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

A new report from Consumer Reports has found pesticide residue at levels that posed significant risks on about 20% of the foods analyzed. Among the foods with the highest risks are popular produce like strawberries, green beans and potatoes.

Consumer Reports evaluated 59 common produce items using seven years’ worth of data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Pesticide Data Program (PDP) to compile the nonprofit organization’s most comprehensive study on pesticides in food.

Of the nearly 30,000 samples from 59 types of fruits and vegetables analyzed, about 20% were found to have significant risks from pesticides. Green beans, one of the produce types identified with the most significant risks, even had residues from a pesticide, acephate, and one of its breakdown products, methamidophos, both of which have been banned from use on vegetables for at least 10 years, Consumer Reports noted. 

“When you grab a handful of green beans at the supermarket or pick out a watermelon, your chance of getting one with risky pesticide levels may be relatively low,” James Rogers, food safety expert at Consumer Reports, said in a statement. “But if you do, you could get a much higher dose than you should, and if you eat the food often, the chances increase.”

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Risks from pesticides weren’t just found in fresh produce — the analysis revealed risks for frozen, canned and even organic produce, The Guardian reported. 

Bell peppers, blueberries, potatoes, strawberries, collard greens, celery and green beans were all found with very high risks from pesticides, although risk level varied by fresh or frozen produce, conventional or organic, and whether the produce was grown in the U.S. or imported. For instance, U.S.-grown conventional celery and collard greens revealed moderate risks, but imported varieties came with very high risks; organic versions of these two vegetables posed very low risks. 

Many of these findings align with the popular Dirty Dozen list for 2024 by Environmental Working Group, which has named produce such as strawberries, collard greens and green beans as the produce with the most pesticide contamination.

Other produce, including apples, peaches, grapes, spinach and tomatoes, revealed a moderate risk in the Consumer Reports study; apples, grapes, spinach and peaches are all named in the Dirty Dozen 2024 list.

So what do the risk levels mean? Consumer Reports based risk levels on chronic toxicity of pesticides as well as the amount of produce a 35-pound child could safely consume per day. According to Consumer Reports, most people should limit consumption of foods ranked with very high risks, and children and pregnant people should eat less than half of a serving a day of the very high risk foods. Further, the organization recommended that children and pregnant people consume less than one serving per day for high-risk produce.

“When possible, replace a food rated high or very high with a lower-risk one, or choose organic. Keep in mind that the risk comes from repeated servings over time,” wrote Catherine Roberts, associate editor of health at Consumer Reports. “If you usually choose produce with the best ratings, you can reduce the chance of future harm.”

The report also noted that while about 20% of the foods analyzed posed risks from pesticides, most of the popular produce we consume had low risks, especially for organic varieties. These lower-risk foods can be consumed at three or more servings per day safely, according to the report.

Further, the analysis reveals that many of the higher risks come from only a small group of pesticides, which could help inform government policy on pesticide regulations in the future.

The post 20% of Common Produce Contains ‘Risky Pesticide Levels’: Consumer Reports Study appeared first on EcoWatch.

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.

When around 70,000 Indigenous Maasai were expelled from their lands in northern Tanzania in 2022, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. For years, the Tanzanian government has systematically attacked Maasai communities, imprisoning Maasai leaders and land defenders on trumped-up charges, confiscating livestock, using lethal violence, and claiming that the Maasai’s pastoralist lifestyle is causing environmental degradation—a lifestyle that has shaped and sustained the land that the Maasai have lived on for centuries. This rise in criminalization, especially in the face of mining, development, and conservation is being noted in Indigenous communities around the world and was the key focus of a report released this week at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, the largest gathering of Indigenous activists, policymakers, and leaders in the world.

“It’s a very serious concern because the Indigenous people who have been resisting the taking over of their lands and territories, they are the ones who most commonly face these charges and criminalization,” Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples told a packed panel on the topic on Tuesday. “There is a need to focus on criminalization because this is what brings fear to Indigenous communities and it is also what curtails them in their capacity to assert their right to self-determination.”

The report “Criminalization of Indigenous Peoples’ human rights” lays out the mechanisms by which Indigenous Peoples around the world are increasingly facing criminalization and violations of their rights with impunity. Indigenous land, subsistence and governance rights are often poorly implemented if at all, leading to violations when they intersect with government and third party interests, especially in extractive industries and conservation. In addition to historical discrimination, a lack of access to justice for Indigenous rights holders—including environmental and human rights defenders, journalists, and communities—leads to higher rates of arrests and incarcerations. The report provides recommendations for UN bodies, states, and other relevant actors to better address this growing threat.

The use of criminal law to punish and dissuade people from protesting or speaking out is typically the way people understand criminalization, said Fergus Mackay, a Senior Legal Counsel and Policy Advisor to Indigenous Peoples Rights International, an organization that works to protect Indigenous Peoples rights defenders. But the bulk of criminalization Indigenous Peoples face actually stems from the inadequate recognition or non-recognition of their rights by governments. “The lack of recognition of Indigenous rights in national legal frameworks is at the heart of this issue,” Mackay said.

This is especially prevalent when those rights intersect with public or protected lands, or areas that overlap with extractive interests, conservation, or climate mitigation measures. For example in Canada, First Nations Fishermen are being arrested and harassed by federal fisheries officers for fishing–rights protected by treaty. In the Democratic republic of the Congo, Baka Indigenous peoples have been beaten, imprisoned, and prevented from using their customary forest by eco guards hired to protect wildlife. A 2018 study estimated that more than a quarter million Indigenous peoples have been evicted due to carbon-offset schemes, tourism, and other activities that lead to the creation of protected areas.

“The criminalization of Indigenous People could also be considered the criminalization of the exercise of practicing Indigenous rights,” said Naw Ei Ei Min, a member of Myanmar’s Indigenous Karen peoples and an expert UNPFII member at Tuesday’s panel.

Defamation and smear campaigns through social media are often used in the lead-up to false criminal charges, especially when Indigenous peoples speak up against government-supported private companies investing in large-scale projects on their traditional lands, said Tauli-Corpuz. Berta Cárceres, the renowned Indigenous Lenca environmental defender who opposed the development of the Agua Zarca dam in Honduras, had previously been detained on fabricated allegations of usurpation of land, coercion and possession of an illegal firearm before she was killed in 2016. Tauli-Corpuz, the former Special Rapporteur, along with around 30 other Indigenous leaders, was herself placed on a terrorist list in 2018 by the Philippine government, a move that was criticized harshly by the UN.

Criminalization comes with serious consequences. In 2021, of the 200 land and environmental defenders killed worldwide, more than 40 per cent were Indigenous. According to Indigenous Peoples Rights International, an organization founded in part to address the growing concern over criminalization of Indigenous Peoples, despite representing only 6% of the global population, Indigenous defenders suffered nearly 20% of attacks between 2015 and 2022 and were much more likely to experience violent attacks.

The UN report also pointed to the high rates of incarceration of Indigenous People, and their disproportionate risk of arrest. In Canada, dozens of members of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, who have long protested the creation of the Coastal GasLink pipeline that will cross their unceded territory, have been arrested and await trial in Canada. That trial is currently on hold because of allegations of excessive force and harassment of the police. 

In countries like New Zealand and Australia, Indigenous peoples are already massively overrepresented in prisons. In Australia, despite making up only 3% of the population, Aboriginal Australians make up almost 30% of the incarcerated population. “This really speaks about the racism and discrimination that exists, which is the foundation for filing the criminalization cases against them,” said Tauli-Corpuz.

Indigenous journalists were included in this year’s report as being increasingly at risk of criminalization. In 2020 Anastasia Mejía Tiriquiz, a Guatemalan Kʼicheʼ Mayan journalist was arrested and charged with sedition after reporting on a protest against the municipal government. And just this year, Brandi Morin, an award-winning Cree/Iroquois/French journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta was arrested while covering an Indigenous-led homeless encampment in Edmonton.

Indigenous Peoples are also affected by the growing use of criminal law to deter free speech and protests. Since the Indigenous-led protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock reservation in 2016 lawmakers in two dozen states in the US have taken up bills that ratchet up penalties for pipeline protesters. Globally, laws targeting everything from anti-terrorism, national security, and free speech only add to the ability for states to lay criminal charges on Indigenous activists. 

Olnar Ortiz Bolívar, an Indigenous Baré lawyer from Venezuela who works to defend the rights of Indigenous communities, has been the target of both physical violence and harassment for his work in the Amazon, an area where illegal miners, criminal organizations, and the government are competing for control of resources, especially gold. He has been an outspoken critic of the Government-designated mining area in southern Venezuela known as the Orinoco Mining Arc.  Now he fears that a new bill introduced by the Maduro regime into congress, that effectively turns dissent against the government and protesting into a criminal act, will severely affect his ability to continue to speak out against such projects.

“It’s a contradiction because we have rights in theory, but we don’t have the right to practice those,” he said. “What they are doing is taking away the freedom of expression of Venezuelans and, evidently, of the Indigenous People, who are increasingly vulnerable.”

As countries attempt to reach their goals of protecting 30% of their lands and waters by 2030 along with growing demand for transition minerals, criminalization of Indigenous Peoples is likely to grow, say experts. A survey of more than 5000 existing “energy transition mineral” projects found that more than half were located on or near Indigenous Peoples’ lands; for unmined deposits, that figure was much higher. 

The report set forth a series of recommendations to counteract criminalization, emphasizing the importance of revising national laws, improving measures to protect Indigenous human rights defenders and access to justice, and promoting efforts to prevent, reverse and remedy criminalization and its consequences.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline UN puts spotlight on attacks against Indigenous land defenders on Apr 18, 2024.

Have you ever considered how our perspective of climate change might shift if we focused…

The post Land and Sea Change for Earth Day, Expanding the Climate Change Narrative appeared first on Earth911.

To build all of the solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, and other technologies necessary to fight climate change, we’re going to need a lot more metals. Mining those metals from the Earth creates damage and pollution that threaten ecosystems and communities. But there’s another potential source of the copper, nickel, aluminum, and rare-earth minerals needed to stabilize the climate: the mountain of electronic waste humanity discards each year. 

Exactly how much of each clean energy metal is there in the laptops, printers, and smart fridges the world discards? Until recently, no one really knew. Data on more obscure metals like neodymium and palladium, which play small but critical roles in established and emerging green energy technologies, has been especially hard to come by.

Now, the United Nations has taken a first step toward filling in these data gaps with the latest installment of its periodic report on e-waste around the world. Released last month, the new Global E-Waste Monitor shows the staggering scale of the e-waste crisis, which reached a new record in 2022 when the world threw out 62 million metric tons of electronics. And for the first time, the report includes a detailed breakdown of the metals present in our electronic garbage, and how often they are being recycled.

“There is very little reporting on the recovery of metals [from e-waste] globally,” lead report author Kees Baldé told Grist. “We felt it was our duty to get more facts on the table.”

One of those facts is that some staggering quantities of energy transition metals are winding up in the garbage bin. 

Two of the most recyclable metals found abundantly in e-waste are aluminum and copper. Both are slated to play essential roles in the energy transition: Copper wiring is prevalent in a range of low- and zero-carbon technologies, from wind turbines to the power transmission lines that carry renewable energy. Aluminum is also used in some power lines, and as a lightweight structural support metal in electric vehicles, solar panels, and more. Yet only 60 percent of the estimated 4 million metric tons of aluminum and 2 million metric tons of copper present in e-waste in 2022 got recycled. Millions of tons more wound up in waste dumps around the world.

The world could have used those discarded metals. In 2022, the climate tech sector’s copper demand stood at nearly 6 million metric tons, according to the International Energy Agency, or IEA. In a scenario where the world aggressively reduces emissions in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, copper demand for low-carbon technologies could nearly triple by 2030. 

Aluminum demand, meanwhile, is expected to grow up to 80 percent by 2050 due the pressures of the energy transition. With virgin aluminum production creating over 10 times more carbon emissions than aluminum recycling on average, increased recycling is a key strategy for reining in aluminum’s carbon footprint as demand for the metal rises.

For other energy transition metals, recycling rates are far lower. Take the rare-earth element neodymium, which is used in the permanent magnets found in everything from iPhone speakers to electric vehicle motors to offshore wind turbine generators. Worldwide, Baldé and his colleagues estimated there were 7,248 metric tons of neodymium locked away in e-waste in 2022 — roughly three-quarters of the 9,768 metric tons of neodymium the wind and EV sectors required that year, per the IEA. Yet less than 1 percent of all rare earths in e-waste are recycled due to the immaturity of the underlying recycling technologies, as well as the cost and logistical challenges of collecting rare earth-rich components from technology.

“It’s a lot of hassle to collect and separate out” rare-earth magnets for recycling, Baldé said. Despite the EV and wind energy sectors’ fast-growing rare-earth needs, “there is no push from the market or legislators to recover them.”

The metals present in e-waste aren’t necessarily useful for every climate tech application even when they are recycled. Take nickel. The lithium-ion batteries inside electric vehicles gobble up huge amounts of the stuff — over 300,000 metric tons in 2022. The amount of nickel required for EVs could rise tenfold by 2050, according to the IEA. But while the world’s e-waste contained more than half a million metric tons of nickel in 2022, most of it was inside alloys like stainless steel. Rather than getting separated out, that nickel gets “recycled into other steel products,” said Kwasi Ampofo, the lead metals and mining analyst at energy consultancy BloombergNEF. Some of that recycled steel could wind up in wind turbines and other zero-emissions technologies. But it won’t directly help to fill the much larger nickel demands of the EV battery market. 

In other cases, e-waste might represent a significant supply of a specialized energy transition metal. Despite being present in tiny amounts, certain platinum group metals — found on printed circuit boards and inside medical equipment — are already recycled at high rates due to their value. Some of these metals, such as palladium, are used in the production of catalysts for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, said Jeremy Mehta, technology manager at the Department of Energy’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office. “Recycling palladium from e-waste could help meet the growing demand for these metals in fuel cell technologies and clean hydrogen production, supporting the transition to clean energy,” Mehta said.

For the energy transition to take full advantage of the metals present in e-waste, better recycling policies are needed. That could include policies requiring that manufacturers design their products with disassembly and recycling in mind. Josh Blaisdell, who manages the Minnesota-based metals recycling company Enviro-Chem Inc., says that when a metal like copper isn’t getting recycled, that’s usually because it’s in a smartphone or other small consumer device that isn’t easy to take apart. 

In addition to design-for-recycling standards, Baldé believes metal recovery requirements are needed to push recyclers to recover some of the non-precious metals present in small quantities in e-waste, like neodymium. To that end, in March, the European Council approved a new regulation that sets a goal that by 2030, 25 percent of “critical raw materials,” including rare-earth minerals, consumed in the European Union will come from recycled sources. While this is not a legally binding target, Baldé says it could “create the legislative push” toward metal recovery requirements.

Harvesting more of the metals inside e-waste will be challenging, but there are many reasons to do so, Mehta told Grist. That’s why, last month, the Department of Energy, or DOE, launched an e-waste recycling prize that will award up to $4 million to competitors with ideas that could “substantially increase the production and use of critical materials recovered from electronic scrap.” 

“[W]e need to increase our domestic supply of critical materials to combat climate change, respond to emerging challenges and opportunities, and strengthen our energy independence,”  said Mehta of the DOE. “Recycling e-scrap domestically is a significant opportunity to reduce our reliance on hard-to-source virgin materials in a way that is less energy intensive, more cost effective, and more secure.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Staggering quantities of energy transition metals are winding up in the garbage bin on Apr 18, 2024.

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.

Sometimes when a storm hits and the waves are high in the Straits of Mackinac, which connects Great Lakes Michigan and Huron, Whitney Gravelle wonders if she’ll get a call: Maybe there will be a breach, and oil from the Line 5 pipeline under the strait will spill into her homelands. Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, has been working to decommission Line 5, run by Enbridge, for years. The pipeline was built in the strait in 1953, without consultation with Bay Mills or other tribes. In 2010, a nearby pipeline also overseen by Enbridge spilled 1 million gallons of oil into Michigan waters.

“I have routine nightmares about Line 5,” Gravelle said. “I think it’s because we are so involved in the issue — we work on it every single day.” 

In 2023, Gravelle brought the issue of Line 5 in front of the U.N. Permanent Forum of Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, the largest annual gathering of Indigenous peoples in the world. In response, the U.N. recommended that the U.S. and Canada decommission the pipeline because of its “real and credible threat” to Indigenous rights. That has not yet happened. This week Gravelle was at UNPFII again to bring attention to Line 5.

Gravelle was also there to speak on a panel about how the United States has — or hasn’t — applied the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Also known as UNDRIP, the declaration is the international standard for Indigenous rights. While legally non-binding, UNDRIP encompasses the rights of Indigenous peoples to maintain lifeways, language, sovereignty, and political autonomy, free from assimilation and colonizing forces.

The discussion — put on by the Implementation Project, a partnership between the Native American Rights Fund and University of Colorado Law School — included U.S. officials like Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, also a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community, and others from the Department of Commerce and Agency for International Development. There, Newland highlighted the Biden administration’s recent policies to increase inclusion of tribal nations’ priorities and perspectives.

U.S. history with the declaration is rocky. When Indigenous leaders from across the globe first introduced it in 2007 the U.S. voted against it, saying that it “should have been written in terms that are transparent and capable of implementation.” Three years later, under the Obama administration, the U.S. became the last country to adopt UNDRIP, acknowledging it as a “moral and political force.” But today, there is still a “vast implementation gap,” said former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples James Anaya at the forum Tuesday. 

The declaration is an articulation of basic human rights to things like life, religion and self determination in an Indigenous context, said Kristen Carpenter, a law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and past appointee to the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which helps governments implement UNDRIP. “United States law and policy often still fall short of those basic human rights. It’s easy to get lost sometimes in the nuts and bolts and the very difficult work of policy,” Carpenter said at the discussion Monday. “But this work could not be more important, in my perspective, because of the issues that are on the table.”

In the U.S., concerns range from land protection to cultural continuity to reckoning with America’s past policies of genocide. A critical part of the declaration is that governments should get Indigenous nations’ informed consent on projects and policies that could impact them. And while UNDRIP considers such consent to be the bare minimum, many countries, including the U.S., interpret it as the highest standard, and have failed to enact it. 

Free, prior, and informed consent could give tribes and Indigenous communities more control over decisions that currently rest solely with the federal government, like Line 5 or the massive copper mine proposed at Oak Flat that is opposed by the San Carlos Apache Tribe. 

Consultation with tribes has been federal policy — in name, if not in practice — since 2000, but has been widely interpreted by agencies and officials. Even though the U.S. hasn’t adopted consent as the basis for its relationships with Indigenous nations, it has begun to incorporate it into specific policies, Newland said at the forum discussion on Monday.

Last December, for example, the department revised the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, first passed in 1990, which determines how burial sites, sacred objects, and human remains are handled and returned to tribal nations. The revision uses consent language directly from the declaration, and includes the requirement that federally funded museums, agencies, and universities receive the free, prior, and informed consent of descendants or tribes before exhibition, research, or access to human remains or sacred objects. The change has already been impactful, if narrow, and some museums have taken action to avoid violating the law.

Newland also said the department has instituted a new model to find consensus with tribes when an activity impacts tribal health, jurisdiction, sacred sites and rights. The policy applies to everything from mining to green energy development. 

In addition to improvements in consultation policies, Newland cited the Department of Interior’s report on the history of boarding schools in the U.S. as one way the department is upholding article 8 of the declaration, which deals with forced assimilation. The department is also in the process of consulting with tribal nations on a 10-year national plan for Indigenous language revitalization.

While acknowledging the Interior Department is the “shining star” of tribal consultation in the U.S., Gravelle said that’s just not the case with other agencies the tribe has to engage with, such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The result is an uneven dynamic across the government. “We touch so many different federal agencies,” Gravelle said. “They all have to honor those obligations that were made with our tribal nations, and yet we continue to see that failure over and over again.” 

There is also the shifting ground of policy changes from one administration to the next. The changes at the Department of Interior are positive, but can be undone — or go unused — by a new administration. “It does continuously feel like that you are trying to prove that you are worthy of life, and that you are worthy of having a home, and that you are worthy of being able to raise your children with your cultural values on the lands that your ancestors lived,” Gravelle said of the struggle to be heard by federal governments. 

That domestic discord, Gravelle said, “has prevented the United States from emerging as a leader, especially in the international field, when it comes to international Indigenous rights.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline At UN, Indigenous leaders fight for application of rights on Apr 18, 2024.

April 17 is International Bat Appreciation Day! In celebration of these sometimes unsung nocturnal pollinators, a new study has demonstrated how bats can be allies of agriculture, as they feed on important crop “pests.”

The researchers found that encouraging bats can be beneficial for conservation efforts, as well as local farmers, a press release from University of Oxford said.

“Bats often get a bad rap. Our study highlights their significance, revealing that while their nocturnal habits and secretive lifestyle make them elusive to many, insectivorous bats play a crucial role in the ecosystems they inhabit and, through the ecosystem services they provide, they can help humans in multiple ways,” said co-author of the study Dr. Ricardo Rocha, an associate professor in the biology department at University of Oxford, in the press release.

Because of bats’ ability to fly, they have colonized a variety of oceanic islands, including Portugal’s sub-tropical Madeira, and their presence has been beneficial for the island’s farmers.

About one-fifth of mammal species are bats. They play an especially vital role in island ecosystems, since these environments usually have much fewer mammals than mainland habitats. However, the diets of island-dwelling bats have traditionally been understudied.

The research team looked at three bat species living on the island of Madeira — the Madeira Lesser Noctule (Nyctalus leisleri verrucosus), the Madeira Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus maderensis) and the Grey Long-eared Bat (Plecotus austriacus).

The team collected droppings from more than 100 individual bats, then extracted DNA from their feces to determine what they were eating. The researchers found that the diets of all three bat species were highly diverse. They ate more than 50 distinct species between them, including flies, beetles, butterflies, moths and spiders. Of the identified species, 40 percent were either likely or confirmed forestry or agricultural pests.

“We anticipated that all three species would primarily feed on nocturnal butterflies; however, we did not expect that over 40% of the species detected in the bats’ diet are likely or confirmed agricultural or forestry pests,” said the study’s lead author Angelina Gonçalves of the University of Porto in Portugal in the press release.

The research team discovered that the bats consumed a well-known agricultural pest, the banana moth (Opogona sacchari), which impacts banana trees, an economically important local crop.

The bats also feasted upon insects such as golden twin-spot moths (Chrysodeixis chalcites) and turnip moths, who frequently damage cereals and vegetables. Bats also ate a human parasite called Psychoda albipennis, which causes urogenital myiasis, leading to burning sensations, abdominal pain and diarrhea.

The study, “A metabarcoding assessment of the diet of the insectivorous bats of Madeira Island, Macaronesia,” was published in the Journal of Mammalogy.

Collecting the bats was challenging for the researchers at first, as it involved the use of mist nets to capture and hold them until the collection of their fecal samples. Through their use of echolocation, the bats were initially able to easily avoid the nets.

“Fortunately, we discovered that the bats lowered their guard when they came to drink so we changed tactics slightly and waited at strategic water points,” Gonçalves explained. “In this way, we were then able to capture enough individuals to conduct our research.”

The expansion of agriculture is one of the biggest causes of biodiversity loss globally, but some species like bats are able to exploit its resources. The study shows that encouraging bats can benefit  conservation while supporting island farming communities.

“An increasing number of farmers are using bat boxes to attract insectivorous bats to their fields,” Rocha said. “During our study, we experimented by placing some in the protected area where we were working, and to our excitement, some of these are now inhabited by the vulnerable Madeiran Pipistrelles. This suggests that deploying simple artificial bat roosts might lead to win-win outcomes for both conservation and local farmers.”

The post Despite Their ‘Bad Rap,’ Bats Can Help Farmers appeared first on EcoWatch.