Tag: Climate Change

Landmark Global Biodiversity Agreement Enshrines Rights of Indigenous Peoples—Providing Hope for Bolivia’s Guarani

After more than four years of negotiations, on Dec.19, 2022, nearly 200 nations adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework—a binding agreement to protect at least 30 percent of the world’s biodiversity within 2030. The agreement represents a significant step forward towards rights-based, gender just and socially equitable biodiversity conservation.

There is hope that the agreement will help to return stolen lands to communities and ensure the rights of Indigenous peoples—like the Guaraní of Laguna Chica, Bolivia, located in the Yaku Agüa territory by Bolivia’s southern border with Argentina.

COP27’s Newest Headliner: Environmental Justice

As the U.N.’s COP27 conference wraps up, we encourage decision-makers to shift their focus to equity-centered solutions such as local clean energy workforce development and training. Governments and businesses can then financially invest in local communities of color after years of colonialism and environmental racism. In this way, those most likely to be impacted will see financial benefits from climate policy. The same way corporations do.

Environmental justice must be at the forefront of every conversation about climate change.

What’s Wrong With This Picture? (COP27 Edition!)

Running from Nov. 6-18, the United Nations COP27 conference brings together political leaders and representatives from 190 countries to discuss climate-related topics including climate change adaptation, climate finance, decarbonization, agriculture and biodiversity.

And from the looks of the photos emerging already from day one, women’s representation at COP27 is practically nonexistent.

‘The Future Is Disabled’: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha on Creating a More Humane Social Order

Writer, disability-justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha knows that it’s possible for society to become more equitable. Piepzna-Samarasinha’s latest book, The Future Is Disabled: Prophesies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, lays out a bare-bones agenda for what is needed to make the U.S. more socially just.

Piepzna-Samarasinha and Ms. contributor Eleanor J. Bader communicated about the book, the disability justice movement and the ways that activists can support each other in the fight for a more ecologically sustainable and humane social order.