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16 December 2021 - NPWJ News Digest on Environmental Justice & Human Rights
Articles
Colombia's Indigenous nomads displaced by violence
France 24, 16 Dec 2021
Violence and illnesses inflicted first by settlers and later by armed groups forced the Nukak from their homes and into voluntary isolation decades ago, turning them into displaced people living in poverty in small towns in the southeastern Guaviare department. Now, the last nomads of the Colombian Amazon still occasionally venture out from their slums to pick fruit and hunt animals, dreaming of a return one day to their ancestral way of life.
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38℃ record Arctic temperature confirmed, others likely to follow: WMO
UN News, 14 Dec 2021
A new and disturbing high temperature record for the Arctic of 38 degrees Celsius, or just over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, was confirmed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on Tuesday. Worryingly, the temperature reading taken last June in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk – which is located 115 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle - is “just one of a series” of potentially record-breaking observations from around the planet in 2020, that the agency is seeking to verify.
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Who will pay for the damage caused by climate change?
BBC, 14 Dec 2021
Talking about who is responsible for climate change is a fraught debate – even more so when it comes to who ought to pay for the damage it causes. At the United Nations' global climate talks in Glasgow in November, developing countries fought hard for a dedicated loss and damage funding facility, a formal body set up under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to provide new financial support to affected nations. But the final Glasgow climate pact made no reference to climate finance to address the rising costs of losses and damages in developing countries. Instead, rich nations said they would establish "a dialogue" to discuss "arrangements for the funding of activities to avert, minimise and address loss and damage".
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Climate change fuels violence and mass displacement in Cameroon
UN News, 10 Dec 2021
A flare-up in intercommunal fighting in northern Cameroon has forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes and brought a halt to aid operations there, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on Friday. The development is just the latest episode in the difficult relationship between the region’s herders, fishermen and farmers, who have seen the waters and tributaries of Lake Chad shrink dramatically, because of climate change-induced drought.
Indigenous communities in South Africa sue, protest off-shore oil and gas exploration
Mongabay, 10 Dec 2021
In one of the largest and most spontaneous protests in post-apartheid South Africa, thousands of people gathered on the country’s eastern coastal beaches last Sunday to voice their dissent against an off-shore 3D seismic survey planned by the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell. Many protesters were Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs), for whom the ocean not only provides a source of livelihood, but also carries significant cultural meaning.
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A Plea to Make Widespread Environmental Damage an International Crime Takes Center Stage at The Hague
Inside Climate News, 07 Dec 2021
During the International Criminal Court’s annual meeting, three nations threatened by climate change promoted a fifth international crime, called ecocide. The campaign to make ecocide an international crime took center stage in The Hague on Tuesday as Bangladesh, Samoa and Vanuatu advocated criminalizing environmental destruction during a virtual forum at the annual meeting of the International Criminal Court's 123 member nations. The forum, attended by more than 1,300 individual participants, represented a collective cry for justice from three of the world's most climate vulnerable countries.
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