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.”  

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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.

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