Indigenous peoples have inherent rights to the lands on which they have lived since time immemorial. That is the message from Professor , member of the Bigstone Cree Nation and faculty in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. These rights, Alook emphasizes, bring responsibilities to protect the land and the water.

Violation of Treaty rights by the colonial state interferes with these sacred responsibilities to the natural world. This is a matter of sovereignty. It is also a matter of climate justice.

Fossil fuel companies operating on Indigenous lands destroy the land and water. It is against this destruction that First Nations take up their Treaty Rights, Alook explains, led by Water Protectors, who are responsible for the sacred duty to protect the Earth.

Water Protectors became known to international publics in the movement to challenge the Dakota Access Pipeline on the lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Fulfilling traditional and ongoing responsibilities, Alook explains, Indigenous women and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people led the way in honouring their responsibilities to the land and standing against settler colonial ecological violence.

When Water Protectors at Standing Rock were sprayed with hoses and violently detained by the police, their steadfast defense became a stand against settler colonial dispossession, against violence targeting Indigenous women and genderqueer people, and for Indigenous survivance.

As Anishinaabe intellectual Gerald Vizenor explains in his book, , such moments refuse settler colonial attempts to reduce Indigenous peoples to victims. In Alook’s words, survivance means that, “Indigenous peoples have always been here, we are here now, and we will be here for future generations.” Protecting the water participates in the creation of new futures for Indigenous peoples, for their cultures and for their knowledges.

In Alook’s home territory of Treaty 8, Cree and Dene people are fighting to protect the Lower Athabasca River system, which includes the Peace-Athabasca Delta. This water system is critical, Alook explains, if First Nation members are practicing their Treaty rights and maintain relationships with the river and the land that sustain their distinctive ways of living and being. A 2010 study on the Athabasca River done by the Firelight Group, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, and Mikisew First Nation, called emphasizes that the Athabasca river is at the very heart of their Traditional lands.

In keeping with this report, Alook emphasizes that without enough clean water in the river system, “we cannot access areas that matter to us culturally and spiritually and we cannot sustain our families on the traditional foods that keep us healthy.” Similarly, As Long as the River Runs explains, “Losing the ability to access creeks, side channels and tributaries by boat means losing access to the land. Losing access to the land means lost opportunities for language and knowledge transmission, and for maintaining connections between generations, as well as between people, animals,” and “waters that are at the heart of being Dene and being Cree”.

Protecting the river water from climate change is about protecting Indigenous futures. Water protectors enact Indigenous sovereignty by carrying out responsibilities to sacred lands. They delink from settler colonialism and provide gendered relinking to Indigenous knowledges. This renews land-based practices, which are necessary to fight climate change.

Alook concludes, “Our land-based knowledge’s are vital to Indigenous peoples but in an era of climate change, they matter to everyone. There will be no sustainable future without us.”

The post Indigenous Sovereignty, Climate Justice and Water Protectors appeared first on Research & Innovation.

In the struggle for a livable world, for each of us and for all of us, there are many from whom we draw strength. Some are close to us and some we know only through their words. Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, a German Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, is one who speaks directly across a half-century.

In the long shadow of the Shoah, Goldschmidt wrote Contradiction Set Free, first published in German in the 1970s and only recently translated into English. He wrote about his times, but they are familiar to us: he describes false prophets, genocidal violence, totalitarian dreams of domination and fascist hopes for supremacy, nihilistic despair and state surveillance and militarization. He warns of atomic and ecological destruction that threatens the end of human life and the end of much of the natural world. In surveying so much death and so many dangers, Goldschmidt wrote plainly about the “far greater pervasiveness of evil in relation to good”.

And yet Goldschmidt did not counsel despair. Instead, he issued a passionate and anguished call for each of us to respect the singularness of every Other. He reminds us of our profound responsibilities to each human being and to the natural world, in their distinctive differences from ourselves:

Every human being counts, and that means every human being without exception, of every age and of both (sic) sexes, weak and strong, sick and healthy; just as every human being of every skin colour counts and every human being of every faith and every knowledge! And just as every human being has [their] own dignity and value, so does the environment of the human being, from nature to culture, have its own dignity and –especially as nature – its own literally irreplaceable value. 

Hermann Levin Goldschmidt

In a world whose diversity is known to us, Goldschmidt enjoins us to “hold our ground!” by living up to our responsibilities. This means that our own freedoms must serve the freedoms of others, allowing the contradictions among us to be free. This is not inevitable. It is a political and ethical choice we make to put our own freedoms in the service of others, to allow other human beings and the natural world to express their own particular, irreplaceable qualities. This gives life meaning, “as something more than its own existence”. For Goldschmidt, this act is an expression of love and it is upon this love that our survival depends.

In an era of climate change, we might follow Goldschmidt in seeking “a fundamentally new way” of being together with each other and with nature. This will require us to embrace all the distinctive ways that we know, together and as singular individuals, while holding ourselves accountable to each other. This demands scientific studies that root observation of climate change in systematically gathered evidence, spiritual and existential appeals that remind us of our duties to protect all life, immediate actions to mitigate and adapt to local effects of climate change, and artistic expressions that stir our imaginations and help us realize the urgency of transformation. As Goldschmidt reminds us, commitment to the Other, both human others and the others of the natural world, means embracing the irreducible and irreplaceable plurality of ways of being, knowing and doing.

Yet even in the act of writing, Goldschmidt worried that his arguments might not persuade anyone to action. “[W]ords” he observed, may “lead only to more words whose protest fails to eradicate the oppression against which they are aimed”. The possibility of failing to act against the oppression and destruction of other human beings, and of the earth, is always there. There are powerful actors who prefer profitable self-interest to the survival of many forms of life, including human life and the earth which sustains all of us. Many others suffer in circumstances of conflict and hunger that leave them with little beyond the immediacy of struggles for survival. The urgencies and exigencies of everyday life, even for the relatively more privileged, often loom larger than the most pressing existential questions.

Goldschmidt knew all of this from the agony of his own experience. He knew both the costs of inaction and the costs of standing against the destruction of human others and the other of nature. And yet he insisted, in an unashamedly moral and theological vocabulary, upon the possibility that each of us might act to turn away from evil towards the good. As the most profound and serious commitment, he asked us to respect the distinctive forms of life in other humans and in nature.  He called upon us to be accountable, to each other and to the earth that sustains us, not only in our sameness but in our distinctive differences. When freely chosen, taking up this responsibility for new, more livable ways of being all together is an act of love -- and so our most serious duty and our most joyful possibility. 

*The reflections in this contribution draw from a paper, for a special issue of Philosophy Now, on the recent English translation of Hermann Levin Goldschmidt’s Contradiction Set Free (Bloomsbury 2020).

The post Climate Change and Joyful Possibility appeared first on Research & Innovation.

Written by Elaine Coburn, Director of the Centre for Feminist Research

The United Nations’ conference on climate change, the COP 27, held in Egypt in November 2022, was a massive failure. The Climate Finance Delivery Plan, established in 2009, for instance, promised 100 billion American dollars per year to support climate change mitigation and adaptation in the developing countries. This promise remains largely unfulfilled. This failure to come to a global agreement will have consequences for our planetary biosphere, and so for human health, argues the Director of the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, Professor James Orbinski.

There is already massive human suffering directly linked to ongoing failures to take up the climate change, which is the existential crisis of our times. Food security is a major crisis worldwide, Orbinski said, so that about 800 million people today are not able to meet their basic food needs. He noted that famine-like conditions exist in 43 countries today, directly caused or accelerated and exacerbated by global warming. For other forms of life, climate change is causing the sixth great extinction and this time, unlike the extinction that killed off the dinosaurs, the cause is not a meteorite hitting the earth, but global warming and ecological degradation, caused by human beings. 

Given the crisis, action is required. Locally, this demands responses that are community based and that take up the complexities of the ecosystem upon which all life, including human life, depends.

In the Chilwa Basin in Malawi, Orbinski’s team is taking an approach that seeks to engage the community and policy makers together. The aim is to produce research that can inform practices that will help local actors mitigate and adapt to the human health impacts climate change. This demands a careful understanding of the realities of a particular community, for instance, including gender dynamics and differences in health status across different age groups. Housing, fishing, animal husbandry, access to the water and the quality of water, and an appreciation of what is held sacred, Orbinski emphasized, all matter to creating meaningful models of complex local ecosystems.

Combining community knowledge with other sources of data from across different ministries, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), United Nations Agencies, and  satellite-based data, and across different disciplines, is another challenge. This is necessary for better understandings of local ecosystems, Orbinski argues, but there are political, logistical and technical solutions that have to be found to make that knowledge compatible, analyzable and then usable.

In the Chilwa Basin, one concern is that fuel needs are met through charcoal burning, which contributes to global warming and local deforestation. The deforestation then leads to soil erosion, which in turn, with its high nitrogen content, causes eutrophication of lake water, leading to the proliferation of disease-causing pathogens, making people sick. If alternative, nature-based, sustainable solutions to meeting fuel needs can be found, Orbinski observed, then local community health can be improved and climate change can to some extent, be mitigated. Creating effective and equitable solutions to these kinds of practical problems are at the heart of the institute's pragmatic approach to climate change and planetary health.

Another example of modelling climate change events in the Chilwa Basin is the successful development of models around flooding, Orbinski noted. For that project, the team used satellite data, and data from governments, community organizations, NGOs and others, to map and quantify relationships across a wide range of variables. Graphic representations of those relationships were then mapped onto the relationships of other sub-systems, enabling a new understanding of complex correlations across sub-systems. The aim is then to develop applications that can be used by local people and policy makers in health adaptations, early warning and disaster management.

In all cases, Orbinski emphasized, it is critical to recognize that how a given variable is valued depends on who is looking at it. A community actor may understand a piece of land as especially significant, while the same land may be seen as relatively unimportant by an engineer from outside the community seeking to modify a flood plain. When modelling outcomes or simulations, attentiveness to the community partner and to the range of values is important, if solutions are to be effective, equitable and politically acceptable.

There is a global governance process that includes the COP conferences, that aims to mitigate climate change. Those processes are failing, but must succeed if we are to take up climate change as the existential crisis of our times. But there are immediate, local needs that must be addressed, Orbinski remarked, since climate change is already here. These demand community-based local solutions that recognize the complexity of local, life sustaining ecosystems.

Ultimately, the solutions to climate change are not technical. For those of us who grew up with the Enlightenment narrative about human beings’ dominion over nature, Orbinski emphasized, we need a new story:

 “We need a new way of relating to each other and to our biosphere on which we depend, which is not extractive, which it is not about power over nature and power over others. Finding and creating that story is not declarative. Instead, it is a dialogical process that emerges across cultures, across communities, and across time, and it begins with looking to our responsibilities now and to future generations.”  

The post Climate Change and Planetary Health appeared first on Research & Innovation.

Organized by the CERLAC student caucus and hosted by 91��ɫ doctoral students Natasha Sofia Martinez and Alex Moldovan. 

is a Jamaican human rights lawyer and founder of Freedom Imaginaries, an organization that uses human rights law to tackle legacies of slavery and colonialism. She holds a Master of Laws degree from Harvard Law School and a Master of Advanced Studies degree from the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva. She is qualified to practice law in Guyana and Jamaica. 

, PhD is a Jamaican independent film maker, writer, educator and linguist with over thirty-five years of media productions including television programming, documentaries, educational videos, multimedia and feature film. Her activist film making gives voice to those outside of mainstream media and focuses on the perpetuation of local and indigenous knowledge and cultures, the environment, social injustice, and community empowerment. Figueroa’s films include Jamaica for Sale(2009), Fly Me To The Moon (2019). In 2013, Figueroa was Distinguished Writer in Residence at University of Hawai’i English Department. Her environmental novel Limbo (2014) was a finalist in the 2015 National Indie Excellence Awards for Multi-cultural Fiction.

“When you think of the Caribbean, it is likely that you think of the region as a victim of climate injustice” Dr. Figueroa observes. “Certainly, in their calls for reparations, Caribbean governments stress the innocence of the region. But Caribbean governments promote extractivist models of development, whereby tourism, plantation agriculture and forestry, industrial fisheries, the extraction of hydrocarbons, metals and minerals, car-centric development and urbanized built environments are the engines of their growth economies.” This is in keeping with the role of Caribbean peoples as the early industrial modernizers in and through sugar plantations, leaders within a world system of colonialism and capitalism. In their scale and complexity, the sugar plantations anticipated later industrial developments in Britain and Europe, Dr. Figueroa argues, creating enormous profits for British colonial owners and funding the expansion of British empire, which at one time included a quarter of humanity. In short, through the plantation system, the Caribbean was central to world processes of industrial modernity, empire and global capitalism. 

This matters for the contemporary climate crisis here and now, Dr. Figueroa insists, because the age of European imperialist expansion accelerated what some call the Anthropocene, an era in which human presence has irrevocably transformed the natural world. European imperialisms were marked by the genocide of tens millions of Indigenous peoples, the theft of their lands and waters, and the repurposing of them as natural resources. “A more accurate conceptualization of the Anthropocene is therefore the Plantationocene”, Dr. Figueroa observes, “a patriarchal, colonial, racist capitalist world political economy that began in the late 15^th in the Americas and in the Caribbean, rooted in the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Africans and the profitable destruction of the natural world.” The Caribbean’s history of extractivism continues today in Guyana, as Dr. Figueroa describes:

“Guyana is now positioned to become the largest oil producer in the world transforming from a carbon sink, whereby its immense intact forests hold carbon and supply oxygen, to a carbon bomb, with 10 billion barrels of oil slated to be extracted. It is estimated that burning that oil could release over 4 billion tons of greenhouse gases…And in keeping with the Caribbean’s extractivist tradition, the agreement between the government of Guyana, Exxon and other multinational oil corporations, saddles Guyana with debt and liability while enriching the oil companies. Yet the Guyana government portrays their new role as the largest oil producer as one that will catapult Guyanese society into great wealth and prosperity…”.

Caribbean leaders beholden to billion-dollar corporations and wealthy oligarchs adjust to a violent, racist capitalist world by selling off the last of the Caribbean’s so-called natural resources. “The Caribbean is not innocent,” Dr. Figueroa concludes, “despite its calls for reparations given climate injustice.” What is required is a fundamental transformation beyond the global plantation economy that carries so much violence against human beings, especially Indigenous peoples and the natural world.

“The climate crisis is the logical consequence of a racial capitalist system, which normalizes resource plundering, Indigenous dispossession, and the relegation of former colonies to sacrificial zones of extraction,” Malene Alleyne observes. Communities are becoming uninhabitable due to extreme weather events linked with climate change. In Bahamas, people are still recovering from Hurricane Dorian, which in 2019 caused loss of life and massive displacement, with many living today in what were originally conceived as temporary, emergency housing. In Trinidad and Tobago, wildlife and fishing are threatened by oil spills, while in Jamaica, bauxite mining is contaminating water sources and destroying agricultural lands in Cockpit Country. “What I am describing is a system of global racial inequality,” Alleyne continues, “in which Caribbean nations remain trapped in a cycle of dependency on extraction and climate vulnerability.” Migrants, Indigenous people, and Afro-descendent rural people are marginalized within the Caribbean and, when faced with natural disasters created and exacerbated by climate change, they are most likely to suffer from death and displacement. 

A rights-based decolonial approach to justice demands a transformative approach that shifts power to these communities, Alleyne emphasizes, so that they can defend their way of life and environment against unsustainable development. This human rights-based approach to climate justice includes the following three pillars:

• environmental rights, including the right to clean air and water, as well as procedural environmental rights, such as the right to access climate information, participate in climate decision-making processes, and access remedies in cases of harm; 
• a racial equality framework based on international treaties that prohibit racial discrimination, including with respect to climate change;
• climate reparations, including just economic and social systems enabling a postcolonial future; 

This is much more than a matter of financial reparations. Since a racist world capitalist system engenders climate change, Alleyne argues, challenging climate change requires that we dismantle that system and join together to build a more socially, economically and racially just world.

The post Climate Change in the Caribbean: The Role of Capital in the Climate Crisis and the Movement for Climate Justice appeared first on Research & Innovation.

World Water Day: A Solutions-Driven Workshop on Climate Impacts on Freshwater was co-hosted by CIFAL 91��ɫ and the Office of the Provost, in partnership with the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, 91��ɫ. The event is part of CIFAL 91��ɫ’s In-Focus Knowledge Exchange Series for Nature, Climate, and People curated by Idil Boran.

The convenors of the workshop were , Associate Professor of the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, CIFAL 91��ɫ and Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, and , Associate Professor in the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science and Provostial Fellow.

The event participated in World Water Day events, which have been held around the globe since 1993.

Professor Sharma observes that today, two billion people do not have access to clean water at home, while in Canada, more than 800 communities are subject to long-term drinking water advisories. Among communities that have not had clean water for more than ten years, two-thirds are Indigenous, characteristic of the inequitable distribution of fresh water in Canada and around the world. These facts frame the discussions for the workshop, bringing together concerns about access to fresh water and inequities within and across nations during an era of climate change.

Keynote speaker Professor Orbinski, Director of the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, began with the observation that freshwater is precious. The contemporary narratives about our relationship with the natural world are inadequate, however, to the challenges we face, given shrinking freshwater supplies due to climate change and inequitable access to water. “We need a different story about how we view ourselves, how we view our relation to each other and to the biosphere,” Professor Orbinski emphasized, adding, “This demands an understanding of the complexity of the hydrosphere and more broadly the biosphere within which all human life exists.” We are now an urban population of close to eight billion people on this fragile earth. The impact of climate change and biodiversity loss is massive, making it very difficult to make accurate predictions about the consequences of these disruptions for the biosphere and human communities. We do know, however, that as climate change diminishes the access to freshwater, competition and conflict increases, as different communities struggle to secure water access for fishing, farming and other subsistence and cultural activities. To begin to address these challenges, Professor Orbinski argues, requires us to let go of tenacious ideas about human dominion over nature so that we may grasp the fundamental truth that, “We are part of nature and we depend on nature for our very being and survival.”

Professor Daniel Olago, Chair of the Department of Earth and Climate Sciences at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, spoke about the continent of Africa, which holds 25% of the world’s surface water. Despite the abundance of freshwater sources, these have been negatively impacted by human activity, including deforestation and overfishing, as well as by climate change. Biodiversity suffers with cascading consequences. Flamingo populations in Lake Nakuru are decreasing, negatively affecting tourism and the economic health of the region, while in Lake Malawi, the loss of native fish leads to hunger and malnutrition among communities dependent on healthy fish stocks. Solutions are made complex by the dozens of political jurisdictions acting in lake areas and sectoral approaches to management, leading to poor coordination in addressing systemic challenges. An Integrated Lake Basin Management approach is required, Profesor Olago argues, bringing a holistic approach that balances conservation with sustainable development goals. 

As Dr. Syed Imran Ali, Research Fellow at the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, observes, floods and droughts are the spectacular face of climate change and its devastating effects on freshwater sources. Equally important, but less noticed, are changes to the quality of the world’s water due to contamination. Inadequate sanitation always poses risks to the quality of the water supply, but these risks are experienced unequally. Worldwide, rural populations and refugees displaced due to conflict and disaster experience acute difficulties in accessing clean fresh water. The consequence is the proliferation of deadly water-borne infectious diseases, like cholera, watery diarrhoea and hepatitis E. Preventing deaths means improving water quality through chlorination at the point of consumption, where World Health Organization “universal standards” for chlorination are inadequate in many humanitarian crisis contexts. To improve water quality in refugee camps and similar contexts, Dr. Ali and his team have developed machine learning and numerical modelling tools that determine adequate levels of chlorination to ensure water remains safe. This is one example of solutions-driven research that responds to the challenge of providing clean water in crisis situations and that is now in use by seven major humanitarian organizations working around the world.

Dr. , Assistant Professor in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies and a member of the Bigstone Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory, observes that water crises are not only outside of Canada, but affect many First Nations communities on lands claimed by the Crown. She warns:

“There is something happening beneath our feet. It will stop the rivers from flowing and the water from filling the lakes in the spring. We will lose our fish, our moose and our traditional ways of living…The water will be stolen… All Canadians should be concerned, because the hunger of the oil industry has no limits. If we contaminate waters upstream, we contaminate all water downstream and the ecosystems upon which they depend.”

If Indigenous nations have shown remarkable resilience, they have been impoverished by the colonial theft of Indigenous land and left traumatized by genocide, including the infamous residential school system that sought to extinguish Indigenous kinship and ways of knowing and doing. The oil industries step into this context, making false promises to Indigenous communities that feel they have few choices as they seek to recover the power and knowledges that colonial actors have forcibly wrested from them. Dr. Alook emphasizes that this must end now through the recovery of Indigenous sovereignty, especially taking up responsibilities towards the land: “As long as the sun shines, as long as the rivers flow, let it be the sovereignty of our people that takes precedence over the capitalist and colonial theft of our lands…This is our land, this is our water, and let us be stewards of all that the Creator has bestowed upon us.” 

Dr. Catherine Febria is Canada Research Chair of Freshwater Restoration Ecology at the University of Windsor. Dr. Febria describes the Healthy Headwaters Lab, which she directs, as seeking to “connect land, water and people for future generations” using a decolonial, community-centered interdisciplinary approach. River restoration now involves billions of dollars worldwide but moving forward demands more than money – it requires coordinated actions at every level from the most local to the global. In coordinating, Dr. Febria emphasizes, “Science matters, but so does communication if diverse communities are to be meaningfully involved in river restoration. Best practices foreground local involvement.” In Canterbury in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Māori community members, farmers and community groups came together with scientists to create healthy rivers. “The relationships come before the science” Professor Febria observes, “It’s about building trust by listening and mobilizing lived knowledge alongside science.” 

Human and environmental health depends on clean fresh water. On World Water Day 2022, these researchers came together to emphasize the importance of holistic approaches that take up science in collaboration with those most immediately affected by the contamination of freshwater sites, including Indigenous and other communities marginalized from power and decision-making. New ways of doing science with diverse knowledge holders and new/old ways of understanding human relationships within the natural world are necessary, they emphasize, for freshwater to be restored and for the flourishing of all life in generations to come.

The post World Water Day: A Solutions-Driven Workshop on Climate Impacts on Freshwater appeared first on Research & Innovation.

Dr. Kam Sripada is a neuroscientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and currently manages the Centre for Digital Life Norway, a national biotechnology innovation centre. Dr. Sripada has studied how social and environmental factors influence child brain development and can contribute to global health inequalities. Dr. Sripada’s research, science communication and advocacy seek to strengthen international collaborations that promote healthy brain development starting in early life. Dr. Sripada’ is a member for the (ISCHE), an affiliate member of the University of British Columbia’s Social Exposome Cluster, and previously Research Fellow at UNICEF. You can learn about her work .

Speaking at the LaMarsh Centre for Child and Youth Research, Dr. Sripada explains that “children are uniquely vulnerable to climate change.” Childhood is a time of rapid brain development and growth, which means that trauma experienced during early childhood can have permanent, life-long consequences for brain development and health. Climate change creates sudden traumatic events, including flooding, heat waves and wildfires, and slower onset impacts like rising sea levels, water scarcity and the spread of vector-borne diseases. This has immediate, negative impacts families and for children, the effects may last into adulthood.

When water and food are scarce, children suffer from undernourishment. Vector-borne diseases experienced in childhood lead to worse health outcomes for these children as they grow into adulthood. There are other, less direct impacts of climate change for children. Confronted with decreased access to food and water, families may withdraw their children from schools to place them in paid employment or, for girls, into marriage. In these ways, climate change has far-reaching consequences for children, in the immediate and for the adults that they will become. Risks from climate change are compounded by early life exposures to air pollution, toxic chemicals, and other contaminants that are harmful to children’s health and brain development, said Dr. Sripada.

New actions are being taken to mitigate and to adapt to climate change in ways that protect children. Internationally, the United Nations Child Fund (UNICEF) has recently broadened its health focus to include the impact of climate change on children. Dr. Sripada co-led the creation of the new UNICEF programme, , which launched in 2021 and directs stronger actions by the organization to protect children from including . In addition, the new UNICEF Children’s Climate Risk Index seeks to measure the impact of climate change for children. In 2021, UNICEF estimated that one billion children worldwide are at extreme risk due to climate change, in particular through greater exposure to heat waves, cyclones, and riverine and coastal flooding. Fifty percent of victims of such “natural” disasters, caused or exacerbated by climate change, are children (Save the Children, 2007). For some, the trauma created by experiencing disaster and displacement can lead to lasting mental health problems into adulthood.

Locally, nationally and internationally, children are acting to call attention to climate change, on their own terms and in their own voices. , a climate change justice advocate from Kenya, is speaking out to challenge white saviourism and ensure that the children most immediately affected by climate change, in the Global South, have a voice and are heard. Around the world, Fridays for Futures climate change strikes by children remind both children and adults of the urgency of taking action to mitigate climate change, despite a difficult present and challenging futures. 

Dr. Sripada concludes that it is critical to engage the next generation about climate change. She observes that children are taking up the challenge, all the way up to high-level United Nations meetings, where they are demanding that governments do more to protect them and their right to healthy futures. “We are at a moment when the decisions we take to mitigate and adapt to climate change can aggravate risks, creating greater inequality,” Dr. Sripada warns, “or we can join with activists like Eric to protect children’s well-being now and into the future.” 

The post Children in a changing climate appeared first on Research & Innovation.

Written by Elaine Coburn, Director of the Centre for Feminist Research, 91��ɫ

Biography

is an Assistant Professor at the School of Environment at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on religion and environment, faith-based environmentalism, faith-based environmental ethics, and religious legal approaches to environmental protection. He is particularly interested in the themes of wastefulness, consumption, and simplicity. Dr. Yoreh is currently researching environmental engagement in faith communities in Canada, the United States, and Israel. He is the author of Waste Not: A Jewish Environmental Ethic (2019). You can find his talk .

At the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies, Dr. Tanhum Yoreh (PhD Humanities, 91��ɫ) spoke about “Faith Based Environmental Action: The Jewish Experience”. In his talk, he considered possibilities and tensions around religiously rooted environmentalism, turning first to the words of the philosopher Roger S. Gottleib: “For as long as human beings have practiced them, the complex and multifaceted beliefs, rituals and moral teaching known as religion have told us how to think about and relate to everything on earth that we did not make ourselves.”

This observation is helpful, Dr. Yoreh argues, in part because it does not presume the usefulness of religion for understanding environmental questions. Rather, Gottlieb leaves open the possibilities that theology may be helpful or harmful to our interactions with the natural world.

Certainly, many religious people who are active in the environmental movement understand themselves as having a responsibility, even a moral imperative, to respond to the environmental crisis. If religion is life-giving and the ecological crisis is life-destroying, being a responsible part of the Created World demands action to protect life.

Practically, being able to mobilize religious communities around environmental causes, including their ability to organize and their financial and their political clout, makes them at least potentially powerful actors. The United Church, for instance, is actively divesting from fossil fuels. Diverse faith communities are present at events like COP-26 at Glasgow in 2021, asking that we make difficult decisions to reduce ecologically destructive practices and support life in the natural world.

At the same time, Dr. Yoreh observes, religious communities may have entrenched habits that make new engagement with environmental questions difficult or environmental questions may seem irrelevant to the central spiritual mission. In some cases, religious communities may hold ideas antithetical to ecological activism, for instance, theologically rooted fatalisms make action meaningless, since the Book of Life is already written. Some monotheistic communities may understand environmentalists as spiritually wrong-headed, even dangerous, associating “tree hugging” with idol worship.

Prevailing Orthodox understandings of Jewish law, the halakhah, view environmental commitment as morally good but as extra-legal, praiseworthy but not legally necessary. Yet, other aspects of Jewish law may support environmental activism. For instance, if environmental damage is viewed as a form of self-harm, the live-privileging halakhah would be activated in full force to protect human life.

Ecclesiastes Rabbah, a commentary on the book of Ecclesiastes, includes a passage in which God reviews “each and every tree” in the Garden of Eden and warns Adam:

 “Behold my creations how pleasant and praiseworthy they are. All that I created, I created for you. Pay heed that you do not ruin and destroy My world. For if you ruin it, there is no one after you who will fix it.” (7:13)

Such passages speak powerfully to many contemporary Jewish environmental activists, enjoining all of humanity to take care of the natural world, understood as God’s Creation.

In contrast to those who understand Judaism as demanding stewardship for God’s Creation, Reform and Orthodox communities may rely on very different vocabularies, for instance, evoking the need for cleanliness to urge an end to littering and pollution. Varying approaches and vocabularies within a diverse Jewish faith community speaks to the need, within the environmental movement, to mobilize a range of language that resonates with different religious actors.

In short, these are matters of different worldviews, different motivations that bring people of faith to the environmental struggle.

What is clear is that faith-based actors are important to environmental struggles. Scientists can measure risks, but they cannot answer the moral and spiritual questions that the contemporary ecological crisis poses. For the faithful, theological imperatives and religious responsibility provide an impetus to act that they find nowhere else.

The post Faith-Based Environmental Action appeared first on Research & Innovation.

(91��ɫ PhD 2005) is Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Global Women’s Issues. She is also a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. Professor Baruah specializes in interdisciplinary research at the intersections of gender, economy, environment, and development; gender and work; and social, political, and economic inequality. Her current research aims to understand how to ensure that a global low-carbon economy will be more gender-equitable and socially just than its fossil-fuel-based predecessor. She has published one book, Women and Property in Urban India, (University of British Columbia Press 2010) and more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, working papers, policy briefs and professional reports, in journals like World Development, Feminist Economics, Development in Practice, Water Policy, and Labor Studies. Her work can be found .

In her presentation at the Centre for Feminist Research at 91��ɫ, “Gender Equality In Low Carbon Economies: Continuities, Contradiction, Disruptions”, 91��ɫ alumni and Canada Research Chair Bipasha Baruah observes that, “Globally, women represent only 22 per cent of the oil and gas industry and 32 per cent of the renewable energy workforce. Women are particularly underrepresented in the energy sector in jobs that require science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) training (28 per cent) compared to non-STEM technical jobs (35 per cent) and administrative positions (45 per cent).” For Baruah, this underrepresentation is not only a problem but an opportunity, as nations around the world are confronted with the urgent need to re-orient the energy sector for environmental sustainability. In developed, emerging and developing economies, the energy sector can be transformed to support more sustainable energy -- and better jobs and more equity for women.

This is true in the developed nations, like Canada, where skill shortages in the renewable energy sector are a challenge but, Professor Baruah emphasizes, also an opportunity, “to train, recruit and promote women, Indigenous peoples, new immigrants, workers with disabilities, and other groups that have historically been marginalized in the energy sector.” This requires support for women to obtain degrees and diplomas in the better-paid science and technology fields, for instance, but also more flexibility for women who take maternity and parental leave to return to work and mandatory quotas for women in upper management and administrative positions. 

Developing nations face their own challenges in the energy transition, but some offer useful models for ways forward for the rest of the world. In a chapter with Rabia Ferroukhi and Celia García-Baños López published in 2021, “Global Trends in Women’s Employment in Renewable Energy,” Professor Baruah and her colleagues point to Zambia’s gender-transformative approach as one helpful example. “Zambia’s National Energy Policy identifies measures to mainstream gender considerations in all energy access programs” they observe, “and highlights the role of women not only as beneficiaries but as also active energy providers and entrepreneurs within the sector.” They conclude that “This is a good example of a[n]…approach that views women not simply as primary end users and beneficiaries, but as actors in the design and delivery of energy solutions.” 

If the energy transition to sustainable industries is necessary and urgent, Professor Baruah’s work is a reminder that there is hope in this transition for creating a more gender-just world. This will require women’s active role as decision-makers, not just in the energy sector but in the social, political and economic structures that now reproduce inequities. They can and must be transformed to bring about both environmental sustainability and gender equity in the critical years ahead.

The post Gender Equality in Low-Carbon Economies appeared first on Research & Innovation.

Dr. is Assistant Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at 91��ɫ. A member of Bigstone Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory, her research focuses on the political economy of oil and gas in Alberta. She is a co-investigator on the SSHRC-funded (Partnership Grant) Corporate Mapping Project, where she completed research with the Parkland Institute on Indigenous experiences in Alberta’s oil industry and its gendered impact on working families. Angele is also a member of the Just Powers research team, a SSHRC-funded Insight Grant, enabling her to produce a documentary called Pikopaywin: It is Broken. Featuring stories on the land, Indigenous traditional land users, environmental officers, and elders bear witness to the impact that the fossil fuel industry, forestry and climate change has on traditional Treaty 8 territory. With Dr. Deborah McGregor, Osgoode Hall Law School and Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change (EUC), Angele is co-investigator on the project, funded by 91��ɫ. 

“The ways that bureaucracy deals with Indigenous peoples is to assign a group of experts to talk to us and the rest simply continue as they always have,” observes Professor Alook. Government, often working hand in hand with corporations, together speak to Indigenous peoples. “But they do not consult us,” continues Professor Alook, “Nor do they respect their treaties with us.” In the words of community Elders, the consequence is that the land that makes up Treaty 8 territory is now broken, devastated by oil and gas wells and the infrastructure that supports them.

In the film produced by Professor Alook, Pikopaywin: It is Broken, she speaks to Elders from her community who bear witness to the devastation that the oil industry has wrought. “We care for the water. We care for the land. Because it is our diet, it is our livelihood,” emphasizes Elder Albert Yellowkneee. Since the oil industry has destroyed much of the land that gives life and livelihood, Yellowknee fears that he is the last generation to experience the land in this way: “What about my children, my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren? Will they have a place to go out into the woods and meditate? Like we do?” For Professor Alook, such conversations were difficult: “Elder Albert brought me and the film crew close to tears. Because he has a trapline, which has been in his family for many generations, and it has been literally cut down, destroyed, by the oil and forestry industry. He is no longer able to offer traditional, land-based teachings in the same way. We are no longer able to practice our treaty rights.”

To create a future for the children of Bigstone Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory means challenging the government, for its failure to respect treaty rights. This demands confrontation with corporations, who fail to consult with the Bigstone Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory, much less respect Indigenous self-determination. If this is a very unequal struggle, it is a vitally necessary one. As Elder Verna Orr observes, “If we have no trees, there is no life out there.” And she continues, “My hope is for people to stand together, pray together and be strong. And hopefully, the government and the oil companies will stop taking our trees.” 

Pikopaywin: It is Broken is available through the website.

The post Bearing Witness to Climate Change in Treaty 8 Territory appeared first on Research & Innovation.