Indigenous communities are at the forefront of climate resilience

Indigenous communities have a vital role in developing climate resilience projects, using deep knowledge of environmental cycles

Fort William First Nation, an Ojibwa First Nation reserve in Ontario, Canada (Photo: Tony Webster/Flickr)

The impacts of climate change on Indigenous peoples are wide and immediate.

Indigenous land encompasses about 22% of the world’s surface and overlaps with areas that hold 80% of Earth’s biodiversity.

Hunters, fishers, herders, farmers, and wild harvesters, indigenous communities depend intimately on this ecological richness for their economic, social, and cultural well-being. This makes them especially sensitive to the effects of extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and cyclones. And at the same time, it makes them powerful actors in the fight against climate change.

For Indigenous peoples in eastern Canada, rising sea levels have led to the salination of freshwater, which in turn affects food security and traditional medicines. In the north, temperature rise has seen disappearing ice roads not only threaten transport systems, but also create profoundly negative impacts on the mental health of increasingly isolated communities.

Additionally, through colonisation, “communities were rounded up and put onto reserve systems,” said Eriel Deranger, executive director of Indigenous Climate Action (ICA). “Climate change has not just destabilised the local biospheres, it’s led to communities needing to move, but because of colonial structures, we’ve been unable to move our communities.”

To combat this “underpinning of imbalance,” Deranger believes that Indigenous knowledge must be at the centre of the climate action discussion. “Many of the richest biodiverse regions are protected largely in part because of the resistance by Indigenous communities to those regions,” she said.

It is a close relationship with the environment, and deeply spiritual, cultural, social, and economic connections with that environment, that makes Indigenous peoples uniquely positioned to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to the impacts of climate change.

Indigenous science is based on building deep, long-term connections with the natural world. “You learn to have a different relationship with the environment, it exposes to you a different way of seeing and relating to the world,” Deranger said.

“It’s critical to have that lens,” she added. “Without that connection to the natural world, we’re doomed to repeat this again.”

The ICA works across Canada to raise Indigenous voices on climate change and is currently developing a toolkit to help Indigenous communities plan climate action together. “The best way for us to build the capacity of our people is through gatherings. It’s part of our cultural makeup, we ground a lot of our work in creating space for gatherings to foster a network of indigenous climate champions,” said Deranger.

Using the toolkit, ICA and its local partner group Dene Nahjo are working with Arctic Indigenous communities to host dialogues and gatherings to build community-driven plans for climate action. The workshops are designed to highlight the importance of the unique Arctic knowledge held by the Dene and other Northern peoples. They also centre Indigenous peoples’ rights and values in developing climate solutions.

In other places across the world, Indigenous knowledge has been effective in developing measures to cope with climate hazards. For example, Inca traditions of crop diversification to strengthen knowledge of genetic diversity and, in the Sahel, the use of water-harvesting strategies and weather forecasting.

“Indigenous peoples are repositories of learning and knowledge about how to cope successfully with local-level climate change and respond effectively to major environmental changes such as natural disasters,” said Myrna Cunningham Kain, chair of the Pawanka Fund.

The Pawanka Fund helps communities across the world to build resilience by promoting and supporting the participation of Indigenous peoples in public policies, strategies, and other decision-making spaces. They also fund Indigenous-led plans and projects for adaptation to and mitigation of climate change.

With funding from the Climate Justice Resilience Fund, they are conducting two special calls for proposals on Indigenous-led approaches to resilience during 2019 and 2020. The fund has a transformational vision for these calls.

“Resilience is no longer just about absorbing shocks, but also about harnessing the changes triggered by external stresses to catalyse the evolution of the social-ecological system in question,” said Cunningham.

“Indigenous knowledge is key in building climate change resilience because it includes the interrelationship between diverse aspects: human being, Mother Earth, and cosmos,” she added. “Indigenous peoples have been living in the same territories and ecosystems for centuries and are the best experts in knowing environmental cycles and processes.”

The article originally appeared on Climate Home News, and is the result of a partnership between CJRF and Climate Home.

Around the world, young people are driving climate innovation

From the Arctic to a Kenyan wildlife reserve, young people are helping their communities adapt to an uncertain future.

Newly-trained Maasai safari guides at a graduation ceremony in 2018, Maasai Mara, Kenya. (Photo: MMWCA)

2019 will be remembered as the year young people took to the streets around the world to fight for their future.

Inspired by Greta Thunberg and other outspoken teens, millions of young people have been making headlines to raise global awareness of the dire consequences climate change could have for their generation’s future.

Meanwhile, more quietly, but also around the globe, young people have been charting that future as they help their communities adapt to the changes already happening.

“Everywhere our fund works, we see young people making change happen, though their activism and also though their jobs and livelihoods,” said Heather McGray, director of the Climate Justice Resilience Fund, which makes grants to support climate resilience. “Youth are both demanding action and taking action, and a lot of it is very innovative.”

In the Arctic, for example, sea-ice travel is essential for Indigenous communities: hunting, public services, and social visits all require travel on sea-ice. But climate change has made the ice environment increasingly unpredictable, making it harder for the younger generation to learn how to navigate it.

20-year-old Shawna Dicker is an Inuit person from Nain, in north-east Canada. “Climate change is affecting Indigenous communities most deeply and permanently, it affects our knowledge of the land and we are unsure of the future,” she said.

Rex Holwell, 44, has seen how the ice has changed over his life. “We have people with years of experience who would know the ice inside and out. It’s changed so much, they can’t predict it anymore,” he said.

Inuit like Dicker and Holwell used to be able to go out on the sea ice as early as October, but with climate change, the ice doesn’t freeze enough to be reliable until late December or even early January.

But there are new solutions aimed at supporting communities in the Arctic in dealing with the unpredictability. In Nain, Dicker and Holwell are working with SmartICE, a social enterprise developing tools to help bring some certainty back to the ice.

SmartICE have developed the @SmartBUOY to measure the thickness of the sea-ice and give insights into local ice conditions, allowing for safer travel. The stationary sensor provides reliable near-real-time sea-ice thickness measurements and delivers this information by satellite. It is then put onto app-based maps together with traditional Inuit travel routes, hunting grounds, and other indigenous knowledge from elders.

The high tech SmartBUOY being installed in Pond Inlet (Nunavut), Canada. (Photo: SmartICE)

Holwell is the Northern Production Lead for SmartICE and trains young people for employment making the buoys. “They’re going to help make a change,” he said. “Projects like the @SmartBUOY’s mean traditional knowledge is still being handed down to young people [alongside] the implementation of new technology, and they are still using Inuit knowledge of the ice.”

Dicker also works with SmartICE as their Northern Logistics Coordinator and is excited about the innovation and opportunity this work brings. It highlights the transfer of traditional Inuit knowledge to Dicker’s generation through the new technology, and how, because of climate change, it’s the younger generation that will use this knowledge differently.

Unpredictability is a similar problem in the Maasai Mara, a wildlife reserve in south-west Kenya. In the Mara, the rainy season used to be guaranteed in the months from March to May. But this has changed dramatically over the last five years due to the changing climate.

“Even in the months where a lot of rain would be expected, it doesn’t come anymore,” said Daniel Sopia, Chief Executive Officer of the Maasai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Association (MMWCA). Rain is essential for pasture for livestock, land conservation, wildlife tourism, and sustainability in the greater Mara ecosystem.

MMWCA supports community-led wildlife conservancies, through which local landowners team up to manage the savannah together to provide multiple benefits. MMWCA works to support young people, especially young women and girls, by building their skills in land and natural resource management and involving them in the conservancy process so that together the Maasai community can adapt to the changing weather patterns.

Youth opportunities at MMWCA take into account the importance of gender. “Climate change affects women most of all,” said Angela Paswa, MMWCA’s gender officer. “In the prolonged drought season, women spend more hours getting water.” This makes young women and girls much more likely to drop out of formal training and education programmes to help their families make ends meet, with serious consequences for their employment and income over the long term.

So MMWCA has been supporting a new generation of young women, who are trained as guides, rangers, and in hospitality. They will have a very different experience and role in the Mara than their mothers and grandmothers.

When MMWCA first started working with conservancies, of 307 local committee members, only five were women. Now, that has increased to 25%. “This is still not good enough,” said Paswa. “But we have created a space for Maasai women now. The forum has influenced younger women and girls to take up more roles. Young women have more options in life.”

The article originally appeared on Climate Home News, and is the result of a partnership between CJRF and Climate Home.

Putting local actors in the driving seat of climate finance

An advocacy coalition provides vulnerable local communities increased access to vital global climate funds

Farmer tending her nursery, Cameroon (Photo: AWDF)

Food security is an increasing challenge in Nigeria, with 54% of households food insecure in 2016.

Production is largely dependent on natural environmental resources like fertile land, rainfall, temperature and humidity. Much of the country’s agricultural land has been redeveloped for the oil and gas industry and the forest destroyed to give way to big infrastructure projects.

Not only is the land for food changing hands, but the effects of climate change on sea level has made what is left increasingly unsuitable in many rural areas. Many rural farmers have migrated to cities in search of better economic prospects.

In order to adapt to these developing problems, previously rural farmers have turned to urban agricultural practices, such as hydroponics, where plants are grown without soil, and local community-run gardens where high yields can be raised even in small containers. Still, they are faced with flooding, which washes plantings away.

When it comes to facing the effects of climate change, local communities are at the forefront. “Communities in Nigeria are grappling with the different impacts of climate change,” said Gbemisola Akosa, Executive Director at the Centre for 21st Century Issues (C21st).

But transforming food production doesn’t come for free. Big adaptations in urban agriculture like larger-scale urban farms require expensive inputs, such as land, water infrastructure, farming know-how, and a range of agricultural technologies.

“Local people are on the frontline of climate change and they need finance to implement adaptation initiatives and long term adaptation actions that can boost their resilience to climate change and ensure that they have a fair chance at surviving the impacts of climate change,” added Akosa.

As part of the Paris Agreement, developed countries have promised to mobilise $100 billion of climate finance for the developing world annually by 2020. The Green Climate Fund (GCF) was announced in 2010 as one of the key vehicles to help deliver that goal.

Accessing GCF funding, however, is a difficult, bureaucratic process that many local organizations are ill-equipped to slog through. The first step in this long process is to get GCF accreditation. Once you are an official Accredited Entity you are able to send in specific proposals for the GCF to fund. The accreditation process itself often takes several years, there is a large queue to apply, and there has been little-to-no success among local organizations in gaining this accreditation. For many local communities already confronting climate change, time is not on their side.

Addressing the challenge of local access to the GCF is one objective of an advocacy coalition that includes C21st and Netherlands-based NGO Both ENDS.

“We need to take our partners from the South seriously,” said Daan Robben, from Both ENDS. “The ideal is that we break out of this system where big institutions from the Global North keep playing a big role and allow our partners from the South take the driver’s seat. We have to be really serious about changing this picture.”

Both ENDS seeks to help bridge the gap for those looking to access global climate finance, by connecting local voices to the processes that govern climate funding at the GCF. They do this is in partnership with local organizations like C21st in Nigeria, plus global advocacy groups Tebtebba and the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL).

“The money needed for these kinds of shifts is vastly more than many small, developing countries can afford on their own, that’s why climate finance is needed,” said Erika Lennon, a senior attorney at CIEL.

“But more importantly than the money itself, is the involvement and investment of local communities in the design and implementation of climate adaptation and mitigation projects,” she said. “Access to global climate finance at the local level can help ensure that the money is being used in the best and most efficient way,” added Lennon.

Furthermore, for Lennon, it’s essential that climate finance is rooted in the protection of human rights.

This requires not only ensuring that climate finance projects are designed and implemented in a way that respects human rights and ensures local communities have a voice and role in doing so, but also that the “substantial amounts of money needed to address this crisis are available and provided primarily from those countries who have contributed most to climate change.”

Through their targeted efforts, Both ENDS, CIEL, and their partners are raising the voices of local groups to inform and influence the largest and most politically significant climate finance initiatives. Their success would help to bridge the gap by opening new revenue streams to local communities that are already at the forefront of fighting climate change.

The article originally appeared on Climate Home News, and is the result of a partnership between CJRF and Climate Home.

‘There is no coming back from disappearing coastlines’

The landscape is changing drastically in Alaska, where the climate is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet.

Kotlik Natives in Alaska survey usteq damage on the riverfront (Photo: ANTHC)

In the past, Alaska Native communities on the Bering Sea coast had miles of solid ice in their bays and harbors most of the year, and they built their homes on tundra that stayed permanently frozen. Now, the ice is gone except for a few months, and the permafrost is thawing.

However, Alaska Natives have a long history of resilience, and they are working together to manage the adaptation of their communities through the collection of data on a new environmental hazard: usteq.

As Alaska’s natural buffer – ice – disappears, the coast is battered by a combination of storm surges, rising seas, and river flooding. This combines with the melting of the fragile tundra to frequently cause instances of catastrophic land collapse, otherwise known as “usteq”. It happens much faster and more severely than natural coastal erosion; villages have seen up to three meters of land collapsing into the sea in one night.

Usteq, which is a Yup’ik word, is a different and more serious environmental hazard than simple erosion. The changes to the landscape as a result of usteq are so dramatic that they have forced indigenous communities to face a difficult decision: whether they should leave their land, and if so, how they can relocate together as a community.

“We do not have the funding to move the whole village away from the water banks, so we started with the buildings most in danger of collapsing because of the erosion,” said Harold Okitkun of the Kotlik community.

Kotlik is just one of around 12 Alaska Native communities that participate in regular teleconferences where they discuss cost-effective ways to help deal with usteq. “We work on erosion monitoring, measure the bank and keep records of how many feet we are losing per year, and mark the bank along the village comparing it to previous years,” Okitkun said.

Villages have begun documenting their usteq damage in order to help make the case for government support with their adaptation and relocation. Since 2017 usteq monitoring devices have been installed in eight communities, as well as permafrost monitoring in two.

“These are great changes to the landscape, miles of thick ice is melting, it is a huge ecosystem shift in the Bering Sea that will have worldwide consequences,” said Delbert Pungowiyi, the tribal council president for the Native village of Savoonga.

Savoonga is one of two coastal communities located on St Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. Pungowiyi has seen how the island’s shoreline has changed over almost 60 years. Winter arrives late and leaves early. Where the island used to have up to nine months of solid ice, it is now down to just three months in recent years.

Coastal erosion between 2006 and 2016 as a result of usteq in Newtok, Alaska (Photo: Sally Russell Cox/Romy Cadiente)

The ice is essential for the traditional livelihoods and food security of communities like Savoonga. Hunting and fishing methods rely upon ice, as do many of the animals hunted. With shortening winters and more unstable ice, hunters face greater risks when traveling and more difficulty reaching food sources.

The food yield has dropped to less than half in the last ten years, said Pungowiyi. “This affects our way of life, which we have done for thousands of years living on the island,” he said. “We’re really working hard adapting to the changes that will face us, but we want to be careful to ensure that there will be little to no impact on the environment.”

Currently, there is no governing framework to help communities decide if they should stay where they are located. Neither does the key national disaster response policy, called the Stafford Act, recognize usteq as a hazard. This means that the communities critically affected by usteq are not eligible for emergency funding, because coastal erosion is considered an ongoing environmental change process, not an emergency.

It is this lack of a framework that underscores the severity of usteq, and the need for it to be recognized as a hazard has pulled Alaska Native communities together to monitor change and share experience in preparation for community-wide relocation.

“We are working to change the laws that currently are inadequate to address the crisis upon us,” said Robin Bronen, the Alaska Institute for Justice’s (AIJ) executive director. AIJ has been helping Kotlik and other coastal communities monitor usteq in order to get it legally recognized as a hazard. This would, in turn, help communities obtain government funding to relocate.

AIJ has had success in getting usteq included Alaska’s hazard mitigation plan and in turn recognized by Fema, the agency that oversees emergency funding. “Being able to define usteq through indigenous knowledge holders was huge and the identification of it in Fema was critical,” she said. The next step is for usteq to be included in the Stafford Act.

The organisation also works to facilitate tribal engagement with state and federal agencies in the United States to provide these agencies with insight on how they could enable community-wide relocation. “There is no coming back from disappearing coastlines,” said Bronen, who added that millions of people worldwide who live on coastlines will soon have to deal with their lands disappearing.

It is important for Pungowiyi that the efforts of Native communities to protect the environment are noticed. “We need to be self-generating, self-sustaining economies so that we can better take care of ourselves and Mother Earth,” he said. “We are not seeking protection for our people or for Alaska alone, we are seeking protection for all of humanity, for all human beings on our Mother Earth.”

The article originally appeared on Climate Home News, and is the result of a partnership between CJRF and Climate Home.

Indian farmers tap old and new knowledge to cope with erratic monsoons

A volunteer writes the local five-day forecast and agro advisory in West Bengal (Photo: Linus Kendall)

Automated weather stations, data collection and organic farming science – mixed with indigenous knowledge and traditions – are helping Indian farmers work with an increasingly unpredictable rainy season.

A weather forecasting project in the north-eastern state of West Bengal aims to collect data that farmers can generate into five-day forecasts. Unlike the usual regional forecasts, transmitted by text message or on television, here people discuss their interpretations of the data to create community-specific forecasts that are written on a chalk board in the village.

The automated weather stations track wind speed and direction, while volunteers record the temperature, humidity and rainfall every day. The Development Research Communication and Services Centre, which is leading the project, also creates “agro advisories” to accompany the forecasts. These warn farmers about problems such as fruit fly attacks, for which they’re advised to spray their crops with a mix of neem oil, water and bar soap.

“Because you have the data, it allows people to have their own understanding and sense of whether forecasts are accurate, and allows them to generate the data themselves,” said Linus Kendall, a technical consultant working with the Development Research Communication and Services Centre. “Then you’re building the capacity to look at seasonal forecasts and even longer-term, which is what you need with climate change.”

It’s an example of how farming communities in India, and around the developing world, are combining science and technology to adapt to the effects of climate change – while shunning less helpful innovations such as hybrid seeds and chemicals.

The monsoon season in West Bengal has grown fickle with climate change, with heavy rainfall and dry gaps, said Kendall. The forecasts can help farmers judge whether it will rain enough to flood their rice fields when it’s time to transplant the seedlings, and the best time to cut and dry the harvest in the sun, he said.

Farmer Hermanta Murmu, for instance, saved about 325 rupees ($4.70) in pumped water and labour costs when he decided to delay irrigation of his mixed crop fields, because he saw rain in the forecast. “The incident helped to enhance faith among fellow farmers on this weather forecast system,” according to the centre. Mongal Kisku also saved about 470 rupees by irrigating his vegetable field with rainwater, while others have used the advisory to fight off insect infestations in their mango and potato crops.

But not all advancements help people adapt to climate change. Some — like cash crops that can be exported for money — can make farmers more vulnerable.

In the drought-prone western state of Maharashtra, farmers have switched to cash crops such as sugar, cotton and soy over the past decade. These take longer to grow than cereals or vegetables, and need more water, according to the grassroots women’s organisation Swayam Shikshan Prayog. The use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides also increased during the longest dry spell in the region’s history, between 2012 and 2016, which decimated the land forced the government to send water in by train.

Swayam Shikshan Prayog researched sustainable and nutritional agriculture in the state over three years, then turned to teaching women farmers to work with less water. The aim is simultaneously empower women in Maharashtra, who are traditionally treated as labourers rather than decision-makers, but carry the responsibility of feeding their families.

“We’re trying to connect women and traditional knowledge with research scientists, so they can adopt additional knowledge,” said Nasreem Shaik, from Swayam Shikshan Prayog. “It keeps the cash flow in women’s hands, because they can sell the excess like eggs and milk.”

The initiative provides women with small plots of land and encourages them to grow nutritious food such as cereals, corn, pulses and vegetables, plus livestock feed. Swayam Shikshan Prayog has also helped farmers create bore wells and farm ponds to manage their water, and use more efficient drip irrigation, bio-fertilisers, and vermicompost (where earthworms turn organic waste into compost).

“We go from lab to land,” Shaik said of the research they are applying. “First they see it work on the land, and then they use it more.”

The article originally appeared on Climate Home News, and is the result of a partnership between CJRF and Climate Home.

Empowered Communities Adapt to Climate Change

By Hilary Heath

The rains have been slow to arrive this season. In Kenya, the “long rains” historically fall March to May. Not anymore. When I traveled to Kenya in April, the rain still hadn’t come. Communities feel the burden of this unpredictability. Almost everyone that we spoke with had the same lament: without the rains, we struggle. This situation reflects an all-too-common story. As weather changes, communities seek stability.  

Situations like this underscore the importance of gatherings like the 13th annual Community Based Adaptation Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. CBA13 brought together practitioners, grassroots representatives, local and national government planners, policymakers and donors to discuss the best ways to empower local communities in building and implementing their own solutions for climate adaptation. After attending the conference, I visited organizations in Ethiopia and Kenya demonstrating the power and effectiveness of community-based adaptation measures.

Community buy-in is key for adaptation measures to succeed. In Kajiado County, Kenya, CJRF partner Il’laramatak Community Concerns hosts community dialogues about climate change so that community members can better understand the issue and come up with solutions that work for them. These dialogues also allow for solutions that integrate traditional community knowledge. I heard participants raise concerns about the extended dry period and the many ways the water shortage was affecting their lives.

Longer and more extreme dry seasons are not unique to Kenya, and they’re not the only climatic changes East Africans are contending with. Farmers in Ethiopia have implemented small-scale water interventions that respond to both droughts and flooding brought on by climate change. In 2015, the Global Resilience Partnership awarded Mekelle University and MetaMeta with a Global Resilience Challenge grant to transform the way roads are planned and built. Now, carefully designed roads channel water runoff so that rains recharge ground water instead of flooding fields. MetaMeta and Mekelle University have worked with local authorities to help plan road locations so that they help farmers harvest rainwater, prevent soil erosion, and improve the use of roadside land. By using heavy rains for recharging the ground water, farmers have a water source during the dry seasons.

Terracing on the mountainside allows farmers to control runoff and direct water.

Additionally, farmers have been implementing simple technology interventions, such as terracing the mountainside, and digging trenches and ponds, all of which control runoff. The trenches and ponds also have the added benefit of recharging the groundwater. Small-scale irrigation has also become an effective stability tool for many farmers. By using the water from a nearby dam, farmers have been irrigating their crops, leading to green and productive lands, even during the dry season.

Trenches on the land collect run off, decreasing flooding and recharging the groundwater.

In Abreha Weatsbeha, which was historically one of the most food insecure areas in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, these interventions have been truly transformational. The community has been able to use wells and water storage ponds to effectively recharge the groundwater. The result? Over 80% of households benefiting from water harvesting in Abreha Weatsbeha are now food secure. 

A pond filled by a nearby dam supplies water for farmer-installed irrigation pumps.

A farmer’s land shows the benefits of small-scale irrigation. This picture was taken during the dry season, yet the land remains green.

Back in Kenya, Agnes Leina, Executive Director of Il’laramatak Community Concerns and community leader, has become the go-to woman to consult on community-based adaptation efforts in Kajiado County. Leina, who in the past was instrumental in the creation of Kenya’s first county law prohibiting female genital mutilation (FGM) and made Kajiado County the national lead in FGM reduction, has now turned her attention to climate adaptation.

Leina’s community, faced with the diminishing returns of a traditional pastoral lifestyle, has turned to alternative livelihood measures. The results have been dramatic. No longer must the community depend solely on the weather for their livelihoods. Instead, the community creates products that do not depend on a stable and predictable rainfall. At a new community-built center, women sew garments. The community also makes traditional Masai jewelry and mats. All the goods get taken to market and sold via a newly paved road.

Women sew garments at a new community center. Garments will be taken to market.

Additional adaptation measures allow communities to continue to maintain livestock. Solutions address the challenges and costs of feeding animals during extended dry periods. In Leina’s community they grind down corn and bean stalks left over from harvest to store for feeding the animals when fresh grass is scarce. This approach provides security when the community needs it most.

When the rains do not fall in East Africa, communities immediately feel the devastating impacts. A long dry season means loss of livestock, decreased food security, and crop failures, among other things. Despite this, with support for community-driven initiatives, people find simple and powerful ways to adapt.

Freshly ground animal feed will nourish the community’s livestock during the dry season.

Climate justice can't wait

By Heather McGray and Heather Grady.

A young girl interviews a local fisherman in Bangladesh. Picture credit: COAST

A growing public and political awareness and a growing grassroots power base is shaping 2019 as a year of expanded opportunity around climate change solutions.  

Impatient with federal policies, U.S. states, cities and the private sector are stepping up like never before.  Consider that 29 states plus the District of Columbia have adopted specific greenhouse gas reduction targets to address climate change. In parallel, individuals and organizations working on climate change at the local level have claimed ever-greater room to speak on national and international stages. The Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, youth strikes around the globe, and the Green New Deal all represent this new energy and action.

This new momentum on climate solutions comes in part from a powerful shift in how the public thinks about climate change. Where once it was a facts-and-figures matter for scientists to debate, it is now a set of increasingly immediate concerns about the safety and wellbeing of people across the U.S. and the wider world. 

Everyone has seen the news of thousands displaced by fires in California. They feel the heat in their hometowns, or the latest extreme storm. The risks have become tangible, and personal, and along with this we hear a growing call for “climate justice.”

Linking climate change and equity

The core of climate justice is giving those people and communities that feel the impacts of climate change first, and worst, a central role in how political, business and non-profit leaders take action. It ensures that solutions are driven by those who know the problem first-hand, and that the risks and benefits of climate change are shared equitably across the divides of class, gender, race, ethnicity and age.

For example, in coastal Bangladesh, teenage girls are especially vulnerable when storms hit. A stressed farming family with a damaged home and flooded fields may pull their daughter out of school to save money or arrange an illegal early marriage in hopes of finding her a better home.

The long-term consequences of these actions are dire, so organizations like COAST are re-writing the equation by putting girls on air with local radio stations. As members of radio clubs, the teenagers have researched and reported on climate change in their communities, helping to raise awareness around emergency protocols and highlighting techniques for farmers and fishers to adapt to their changing environment. 

The reality is those hit first by climate change are not only the first to suffer; they are also the first to respond and the first to adapt. As they confront climate change in their daily lives, those on the frontlines are hard at work crafting creative solutions, through technology, policy and new forms of investment in their communities’ welfare and safety.

Climate solutions are also coming from outside local communities, whether closing coal plants or erecting large wind and solar farms, there is a need to respect the rights of those communities. For example, safeguards requiring a mining company to obtain prior and informed consent from local communities before using their land. 

Climate justice advocates are calling on businesses and policymakers to make certain the era of renewable energy unfolds equitably, without harming or displacing communities as other forms of energy often have. 

Optimism and action

In a convening of philanthropic funders committed to climate justice in New York this winter, Former Irish President Mary Robinson called for “a moonshot level of ambition” that combines a focus on local leadership and an exponential expansion of innovation and investment in developing new climate-friendly technologies and industries.  

We saw a potential step toward just such an investment last year when 29 philanthropies committed over $4 billion to addressing a host of climate challenges. But for this investment to achieve its maximum potential impact, taking a climate justice approach will be crucial. 

We need to capitalize on both the UN Climate Convention and the Sustainable Development Goals as unifying frameworks, recognizing that we share one planet and one atmosphere. And we need to more rigorously apply principles of gender equity, indigenous rights, human rights and transparency to all of our climate change efforts. 

Heather McGray is the director of the Climate Justice Resilience Fund. 

Heather Grady is a vice president for Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. 

This article was originally published in The Hill

Beekeepers and seaweed farmers bring entrepreneurial flair to climate adaptation

A seaweed farmer in Zanzibar (Photo: IIED, which supports the Zanzibar Climate Change Alliance)

Mahfoudh Haji, a climate change activist from Zanzibar, left a conference in Ethiopia earlier this month charged with fresh ideas for helping beekeepers, farmers and children on his island earn money while restoring the environment.

The inspiration came from efforts to deal with a very different problem in Malawi – the influx of refugees. The project, which Haji heard about from fellow conference delegates, assigns plots of unused land for refugees to farm. This gives them a source of food and income, helps reduce costs on the government, and quells tensions with locals.

In Tanzania, Haji hopes to create new work from unused land and forests in eco-friendly ways.

“What I have learned is that there are people in the world dealing with similar problems,” he said, sitting with his mother by the Zanzibar Climate Change Alliance’s exhibition stand in Addis Ababa. “I can apply this knowledge to my society; even the youth can establish projects on unused land in Zanzibar to plant and increase incomes.”

The 13th annual Community-Based Adaptation Conference (CBA13), organised by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), brings together environmental advocates and community organisers from around the developing world to talk about how they’re responding to the weather extremes and seasonal changes linked to rising global temperature.

The impacts vary widely, from shortages of water for farming, drinking and hydropower; to floods that wash away crops; to heat so intense that people can’t work. But they all impede development and contribute to poverty in some of the world’s poorest and least developed areas.

Delegates came to CBA13 looking for ideas on how to adapt, and support from funders, aid agencies and non-profits. But rather than listening to speakers or watching PowerPoint presentations, at this conference it was the audience that did most of the talking and brainstorming.

People compared indigenous climate forecasting to new technology, shared stories of overcoming obstacles or failures in their work and perfected pitches for funders. They showcased their projects in an exhibition area, with local products such as traditional jewellery, essential oils and Zanzibar honey.

“This has grown out of a bottom-up, vulnerable communities-based agenda of how they can understand climate change, understand adaptation, do adaptation and help each other do adaptation,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development and a senior fellow at IIED. Huq started the CBA conference in Bangladesh 15 years ago.

But funding remains a big challenge, getting stuck with governments rather than trickling down to projects that are conceived and driven by communities.

“Local solutions are grounded in local realities and build local capabilities,” said Heather McGray, director of the Climate Justice Resilience Fund, a sponsor of the conference. “This makes for adaptation that is more effective and more sustainable. Channels for getting finance from the global level into local hands exist, but they need strengthening.”

Faced with funding shortages, community projects in Kenya, Uganda, India, Nepal and elsewhere are designed to adapt to the climate changes they’re feeling while also promoting development.

The Zanzibar Climate Change Alliance, a network of civil society organisations, created cooperatives to help seaweed farmers, beekeepers and others cope with changes such as rising sea levels and temperatures.

The warmer water is blamed for killing seaweed. So the alliance has provided boats for the farmers – many of them women who don’t know how to swim – to venture into deeper water. It has also encouraged tree-planting in deforested areas. More trees help beekeepers expand their business and reduce water evaporation in catchment areas that are drying up.

Similarly, in rural eastern India, the Development Research Communication and Services Centre combines science with indigenous traditions to grow food and generate income. It teaches people to garden nutritional plants, harvest water for drought periods, store seeds and forecast the weather.

And in Kenya, community organisers are helping women sell their colourfully beaded jewellery and cloths online, while the private Africa Agency for Arid Resources buys natural gum and resins from locals to make hair and skin oils, drinks, vitamins and other products to sell in Asia and Europe.

By growing their income and diversifying their livelihoods, these communities create options beyond their traditional farming and herding activities, which are becoming less reliable under increasingly erratic weather.

“We would like to be self-reliant,” said Agnes Leina, executive director of the NGO Ill’laramatak Community Concerns, which supports Kenyan pastoralist women and girls. “We would like to have capacity to become entrepreneurial – to do our own businesses and to earn our money, so that we can use our money to do our development, so that we are not always dependent and asking for handouts.”

The article originally appeared on Climate Home News, and is the result of a partnership between CJRF and Climate Home.