The climate book, p.20
The Climate Book, page 20
This is the case for Indigenous communities all over the world. Biodiversity is our best partner. Because we don’t regard nature as a tool, something you can own, use and destroy. Nature is our supermarket, our pharmacy, our hospital, our school. And for many Indigenous communities, it is even more than that: it is the essence of our spiritual life, our culture, the source of our language. It is our identity. /
3.14
Winter in Sápmi
Elin Anna Labba
Sápmi is beautiful now. The trees are heavy with frost, so white they merge with the clouds. Reindeer are visible on the mire. A calf lies in the snow. She has put her head down, curled up like a soft stone with her vertebrae up against the sky. If you stroke your hand over her woolly winter fur, you can feel her thin heartbeat. She looks peaceful, like a breastfed baby fast asleep.
But the people who have followed the reindeer since they were little, they see. A calf curled up in this way will not make it. They know it’s too late. The calf has come here from the summer and followed her mother all the way down from the mountains, but she will go no further. They’ve tried to feed her, but she was already too weak. She’s been starving for too long.
Sápmi is a country within four countries. It is located in the northern parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. The Sámi, Europe’s only Indigenous people, have a long tradition of reindeer herding, and a strong tradition of animal care. For as long as we can remember, people here have adapted to the reindeer. It is a life shaped around the snow, because summer in the north is only a bright and brief memory. If you live with snow for much of the year, you learn to follow the shape of the snow cover. This is required to survive. Even before climate change was a fact of life in the world, the unrest had begun to spread like a whisper in the Arctic Indigenous world. Something is happening to the snow. It comes early, and then comes the rain. Then it freezes again. Why do the winters now eat their way into the marrow? The dying reindeer calf’s hooves have trampled in snow that shouldn’t be there this early.
The place where my family lives is called Dálvvadis in Sámi – the ‘winter settlement’. In Swedish, this small community is called Jokkmokk. It is located in the forestland in Sweden, not far from the mountains. Not many years ago, large reindeer herds grazed here during winter. They moved freely and dug into the thick, yet still porous, snow cover. When the snow packed harder as winter wore on, the reindeer stretched up towards the lichen in the trees. In the spring they turned their noses towards the mountains again. This year, Jokkmokk is a landscape of enclosures. The whole community is surrounded by pastures where reindeer are fed, to the north, east, south and west. Bony reindeer are brought into garages so they can regain their body heat. The smell hits you when you open the doors, it fills the nostrils, occupies the crevices. Wild animals should not be locked up; they respond by getting sick. Pus bursts from infected eyes. Their stomachs break.
And the panic spreads in our bodies as well. We took the animals’ freedom so that they would not die in the forest, but we were not able to protect them. What is it that we are forever changing? There have always been years of famine and desperation, and for them the Sámi has its own word: goavvi. Goavvi is a year of difficult grazing conditions, but the word also means ‘harsh’ and ‘ruthless’. It is a mythical word which spreads fear, especially among the elders. During a famous goavvi almost a hundred years ago, the forest seemed to be full of new bushes. Only when you got closer did you see that the bushes were the antlers of dead reindeer, sticking up through the snow.
When the ruthless winters came, the reindeer herders scooped up food by hand and cut down lichen to help the animals. You can work such a long winter if you know that the year of emergency is almost over, that better times are coming.
The elders are now talking about an emergency year that has lasted for over a decade, the end of which we cannot see. Climate change is not a future fear; it dwells in the bones and the skin. ‘The world has changed. We keep thinking that’s not true, even though we know it’s true,’ says an elderly reindeer herder. When she was young, there were still pristine forests. Now the clear-cut forests and the wind farms stand on the mountains where the reindeer used to graze. The last migration routes may end up underneath a mine. The ice covering the hydropower reservoirs is weak and unpredictable. The ground is so faint that sometimes it feels like its heart is pounding as weakly as that of the sick reindeer. Yet Sweden still looks to the north and believes that there is more to harvest. Sápmi is the terra nullius of the Nordic countries; it is considered empty enough for both green and grey industries. In countries where you have not yet come to terms with your history, you become blind to how it is repeated, how old colonialism just changes shape, finds fresh arguments, new forms. Nowhere in the world can those who are already most affected by climate change control their own story. Past losses of land, language, family and faith sadly prepare Indigenous peoples for this. History and the present walk side by side.
In the classic Sámi poem about the children of the sun, the sun’s daughter is troubled. What will happen to the humans? In the poem, the sun is setting, the wolves are coming, sneaking around in the darkness of the night. The sun is sinking, the flock is decreasing. But she is also hopeful, being the daughter of the sun; she has to be. We cannot guard the land if we do not believe in our power to protect it, and the sun’s daughter asks herself hopefully, ‘Morning is coming, isn’t it?’
I think the daughter of the sun was referring to the young, who are now rising up for the morning to come. Here in the north, there are no longer any doubts. The last decade has taught us to wrap down jackets over Arctic animals and to mix sugar dissolved into water with the lichen. Even young children learn how to heal. But, above all, they learn to fight for the forest and the mountains as if they were the last ones, because that’s what life tells them when they squat next to the dying calf. Fight for everything as if it were the last, because that’s what it actually is. As children of the sun, people must guard the land, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. /
In countries where you have not yet come to terms with your history, you become blind to how it is repeated, how old colonialism just changes shape, finds fresh arguments, new forms.
3.15
Fighting for the Forest
Sônia Guajajara
The fight against the climate apocalypse is a global struggle that depends on all of us to defend our territories. In every corner of the world, it is fundamental that we fight for the preservation of our ecosystems and allow them to recover from the damage caused by the excessive greed of those who, instead of forest, can see only profit.
I am an Indigenous woman, born in the Amazon. From an early age I understood the fundamental importance of keeping our territories protected, because our people’s lives, bodies and spirits are deeply connected to the relationships we have with our land.
Our path has always been the defence of life. Since the first invaders set foot on these lands, which were not then called Brazil, we have lived in a state of vigilance in the face of repeated and constant attacks. The colonizing project usurped our territories, bringing diseases and death to our bodies, and fire and destruction to our biomes. If we have survived to this day, it is because we are tireless fighters, and because we rely on the strength of our ancestors to defend our Mother Earth.
In Brasilia in September 2021, during the Second Indigenous Women’s March, we launched the Reflorestarmentes platform, which was created to connect innovative community-based projects on environmental protection and to share Indigenous women’s knowledge and wisdom with the world. This is a time when several global crises are devastating humanity and our Mother Earth. The climate and environmental crises, the crisis of an exclusionary and unequal economic system, the crisis of hunger and unemployment, the crisis of hate and hopelessness. These overlapping crises most acutely affect the original peoples of the world, who depend intimately on their relationship with their biomes.
That is to say, those who care most for our planet, our forests, our sources of fresh water, are those who are most impacted by their destruction. And this is an undeniable fact, reinforced by numerous scientific institutions: the true guardians of the forests, and of the planet, are the Indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples represent approximately 5 per cent of the global population and occupy no more than 28 per cent of world territories. However, they are responsible for guarding and preserving 80 per cent of the biodiversity that, alongside us, lives upon Mother Earth.
These statistics reinforce what we have been repeating for centuries: there is no possible future for humanity that does not pass through us, the Indigenous peoples. Now I will take this a step further and claim the place of Indigenous women at the heart of the struggle to guarantee a future for humankind. For in many original communities it falls to us, Indigenous women, to manage and preserve our ecosystems and to preserve our knowledge through memory and custom. We have lived in harmony with the forests for thousands of years, and we have shaped them to ensure better living conditions for us, as well as for the forests themselves – they are therefore not wild, as the outsider usually perceives them to be, but cultivated.
We will organize and share our thousand-year-old ancestral knowledge in order to offer humanity a broad project for the future – one that will allow life to continue in a more balanced and equitable way. We are not the owners of the truth, but in the time we have occupied this planet, we – our ancestors – have developed knowledge and technologies that are needed today more than ever.
We need to foster a way of living that harmonizes human existence with the full and powerful continuity of our biomes. And Indigenous women know how to do this, for we are ancestral scientists of life on this planet. And we are willing to share our knowledge so that all of us have a chance of life today and in the future. /
There is no possible future for humanity that does not pass through us, the Indigenous peoples.
Indigenous woman, geographer and environmental activist Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim leads a group of pastoralists in Chad, advocating for ancestral agroecological practices.
3.16
Enormous challenges are waiting
Greta Thunberg
‘With current warming trends, 1.2 billion people could be forced to migrate by 2050,’ writes Taikan Oki in his chapter. This is another one of those figures that you come across while reading about the emerging climate and ecological crisis. It is almost impossible to fathom and translate all these numbers – all these enormous challenges that are waiting for us further down this road we are still choosing to travel on. Most of those 1.2 billion people will probably be displaced within their own countries, but, given how the world has treated refugees in recent decades, there is reason to believe that it will cause unspoken suffering, widespread human disasters and jeopardize our entire civilization as we know it.
Very, very few people abandon their home because they want to. Escape and flight are natural human instincts, and it is fair to assume that the vast majority of us would do the same thing if we were in their position. But I don’t think many people whom we would define as climate refugees would call themselves that. It might have been a flood, a drought, conflicts or a climate-related famine which finally pushed them away, but there would also have been a combination of other factors such as poverty, disease, violence, terror or oppression. It is all interlinked, as Amitav Ghosh explains in The Nutmeg’s Curse.
No wall or barbed-wire fence will keep anyone safe in the long run. Shutting down our ports and leaving people to drown in the Mediterranean Sea or the English Channel will not make these problems go away. They will keep coming back to haunt humanity until we start making efforts to heal our divisions and share our resources in a reasonable and sustainable way.
Democracy is the most valuable tool we have and, make no mistake, without it we will not stand a chance of solving the problems we face. Just imagine communicating disturbing scientific results or speaking truth to power in a dictatorship. There is no question that a destabilizing climate will lead to a destabilizing world, and that will eventually put everything in our societies at risk, including democracy. The climate crisis will amplify conflicts and societal problems. As Marshall Burke writes in his chapter on climate conflicts, ‘The total number of organized armed conflicts around the world is also trending up and is now at the highest level seen in nearly a century, leading to record numbers of internally displaced people and alarming levels of global hunger.’ If we fail to address all the deeper issues that ultimately make up this sustainability crisis which is emerging all around us, it will without a doubt lead to further erosion of democracy. In many ways throughout modern history, our dependency on fossil fuels has also played a key role in military conflicts. And still, instead of taking steps to overcome our fossil fuel dependency, we are deepening it. In doing so, we are funding geopolitical powers that clearly work against human rights. We are making ourselves even more dependent on oil, coal and fossil gas from authoritarian regimes, from Putin’s Russia to the nations around the Persian Gulf.
As things get worse – and they will – we are likely to see more and more authoritarian politicians stepping up to offer easy solutions and scapegoats in response to more and more complex issues. This is usually where fascism appears and escalates. We are already seeing the signs of it across the globe. This is the sum of all the inequalities we have allowed to spiral out of control for so many centuries. And unless we start to address the root causes of these problems and begin building strong, democratic, grassroots movements all across our societies – movements like those we have just encountered, movements that leave no one behind – then everything of beauty and meaning that humanity has ever achieved might be lost – quite literally – forever.
Some of those movements already exist today. Others will form as we go along. They all have huge responsibilities to stay clear of all forms of violence and to avoid creating social unrest which might result in vandalism and destruction that risks doing far more harm than good. We need billions of climate activists. Non-violent, peaceful demonstrations and civil disobedience that doesn’t risk the safety of others; strikes, boycotts, marches, and so on. Humanity has succeeded in changing our societies many times before, and we most definitely can do it again.
Just as the climate crisis requires everyone to work together, so does this. The sustainability crisis, the inequality crisis, the democracy crisis – they can’t be solved by individual people or individual nations. We must all work together and we must do it in solidarity. When we humans come together for a common cause we can create just, sustainable and equal societies. Just as we can establish selfish, unsustainable and unequal ones. /
3.17
Warming and Inequality
Solomon Hsiang
Our world is profoundly unequal. There are wealthy communities today that enjoy opportunities and standards of living that would have been unimaginable a few centuries ago, while at the same time there are other, poorer communities whose access to resources, health care and technology has barely changed since that time.
In the future, as our emission of greenhouse gases alters the climate, these changes will likely reshape global inequality. As environmental conditions shift, the opportunities and resources available to different societies will change too – improving for some, and worsening for others. For example, the livelihood of a community that depends on agriculture for its income will be impacted if the climate is transformed, but whether this impact is positive or negative will depend on what kind of farming they practise, and how the climate changes in their specific location. In a hot and dry region, rainfall might increase, helping farmers. Alternatively, temperatures may rise even higher, which could make agriculture more difficult. Global warming’s overall impact on any given community will depend on many factors, including how that community lives, what their climate is today and how we expect it to change in the future.
Given all this complexity, it isn’t always obvious how climate change will affect inequality. If richer societies were made poorer by warming, and poor societies were made richer, then climate change could reduce global inequality. But if rich societies tend to benefit from warming and poor societies tend to be harmed, then we would expect climate change to increase inequality. To try to understand which outcome is more likely, many researchers, including myself, have turned to data analysis to understand how different societies are impacted by different climatic conditions.
What we see in the data strongly indicates that climate change will increase global inequality. Depending on which measures of well-being one studies (for example, health, education or income), we see that rich populations are sometimes helped by warming and sometimes harmed. But almost every way we look at the data, we see that poor populations suffer, and usually more than rich populations.
Harm and temperature
Figure 1: The non-linear effect of warming can be helpful or harmful, depending on where you live.
Research suggests that there are two main reasons why poor populations around the world tend to be harmed more by climate change than rich populations. First, poorer communities have fewer resources at their disposal to protect themselves from the effects of climate change. Air-conditioning, sea walls and irrigation systems alleviate the impact of rising temperatures and extreme weather events, but they require a significant investment of money and resources.
The second reason is less widely known but is potentially even more significant: the effect of temperature on many critical human outcomes is non-linear. Fig. 1 illustrates this: the effect of warming depends on the current temperature of the location. In general, we see that if a community lives in a cold location (for example, Norway), warming is helpful – heating costs and wintertime respiratory illnesses decline, while labour productivity rises. If a community lives in a temperate location (for example, Iowa, in the US), warming has very little effect on well-being. Many studies find that the ‘ideal’ average temperature tends to be 13–20°C. If a community lives in a hot location (for example, India), additional warming is very harmful – destroying crop yields, exacerbating vector-borne diseases and slowing economic growth. One additional degree of warming does not have the same effect everywhere, and this has profound implications for global inequality.
