People from around the world have gathered in Anchorage, Alaska this week for the Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change. WWF Arctic Programme’s Head of Communications, Clive Tesar is there, and is filing reports all this week.
“There is no way that the people who created the problem of climate change should be allowed to sidestep their responsibility … we should never leave them one minute or one hour to feel comfortable in their neglect.”
Cletus Springer, a spokesman for the Caribbean region said clearly what many at this gathering felt. As the Inuit leader Patricia Cochran put it, Indigenous peoples have seemed to be invisible in the debate on global warming, yet the the testimony of Indigenous peoples from around the world shows that they are disproportionately feeling the impacts.
Speakers from the South Pacific spoke of crops are withering in the heat, delegates from the Caribbean spoke of living in fear of increasingly violent and frequent storms, and people from the Arctic spoke of the sudden, sometimes deadly unpredictability of time worn travel routes.
WWF’s Arctic Programme contributed money to this conference, because we believe that the Indigenous peoples need to be heard. Personally, I was raised in the north, and have lived among people who still rely heavily on the land. I know that the changes on the land are hitting people hard.
It is not just the economy of Indigenous settlements. It goes deeper than that, down to a very real fear that people have of changes on the land so profound that they become strangers to their own lands.
The encouraging thing is that the people here, and many of the people they represent, are not passively waiting for the changes to come. They refuse to be victims of a problem they did little to create. As the week goes on, people here are working collectively on a declaration that will outline how they plan to take their concerns onto the world stage, and to ensure that nobody can “feel comfortable in their neglect”.