Climate Change & Environment

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 19:24:48 +0000

Robin Wall Kimmerer Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/18/2022 - 12:24

United States

Expertise:
Climate Change & Environment

Day 3: Solutions

Panel:
Traditional Knowledge and Climate Solutions

Sunday, December 4, 2022

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals. In 2022, Braiding Sweetgrass was adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith. This new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the Earth’s oldest teachers: the plants around us.

Wall Kimmerer tours widely and has been featured on NPR’s On Being with Krista Tippett and in 2015 addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations on the topic of “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.” Kimmerer is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of environmental biology and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs that draw on both Indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. She was named a MacArthur fellow this year.

As a writer and a scientist, Kimmerer’s interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She holds a BS in botany from SUNY ESF, an MS and PhD in botany from the University of Wisconsin, and is the author of numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

Off

Zebra Striped

White

Kishore Rao

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 16:26:50 +0000

Kishore Rao Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/11/2022 - 09:26

United States

Expertise:
Business & Industry
Climate Change & Environment

Global Consulting Sustainability and Climate Leader
Deloitte

Day 3: Solutions

Panel:
Economics, Pricing, Policy: How do governments and various stakeholders pay and otherwise take action to develop climate policy solutions in a manner that is equitable?

Sunday, December 4, 2022

Kishore Rao is Deloitte’s global consulting sustainability and climate leader, focused on government and public sector clients. He works with leaders and professionals across the globe, helping governments and public services agencies develop and translate policy into practical action on such issues as climate action, sustainability, social inclusion and good governance. Rao also leads Deloitte’s business relationship with global international affairs and development organizations.

For over 25 years, Rao has been helping global governments to devise and implement strategies that enhance sustainability, drive climate action, promote digitalization, build competitiveness, promote trade and investment, and build infrastructure. He also supports global companies ranging from real estate and energy to technology to build business models to enter and expand in global markets. More recently, his work has focused on environmental, societal and governance issues.

Over his career, Rao has held leadership positions with major consulting companies engaged in global expansion, economic development and social impact. He has lived and worked in over 70 countries and serves on the boards of globally focused nonprofits that advocate for international engagement and social impact.

Kishore Rao is Deloitte’s global consulting sustainability and climate leader, focused on government and public sector clients.

Off

Zebra Striped

White

Astrid Puentes Riaño

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 19:47:40 +0000

Astrid Puentes Riaño Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/12/2022 - 13:47

Colombia

Expertise:
Law & Policy
Human Rights
Climate Change & Environment

Lawyer, Consultant and Board Member
International Rivers

Day 1: Impacts

Panel:
Understanding Climate Change as a Matter of Human Rights

Friday, December 2, 2022

Astrid Puentes Riaño is a lawyer with more than two decades of experience in environmental law, human rights and climate change, and the intersection of these, with a perspective of climate justice, diversity, equity and inclusion. She has worked for and with communities and Indigenous peoples in Latin America, contributing to the protection of their rights and territory, including in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. She received her law degree from the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, holds a master's degree in comparative law from the University of Florida and has an environmental law degree from the University of the Basque Country. She served as co-executive director of the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense, AIDA, from 2003 to August 2021. She is an independent consultant and has advised the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights in Mexico on catalyzing actions to better protect the environment, human rights and climate.

Riaño has extensive experience in public interest environmental, human rights and climate justice litigation. She has published several articles and lectured at the Human Rights Academy of the American University, and at the Diploma on Strategic Litigation and Tools for the Defense of Economic, Social, Cultural and Environmental Rights at UNAM in Mexico, among others. She has been part of the board of directors of International Rivers since September 2021.

Off

Zebra Striped

White

Climate change hits disabled and Indigenous communities hard. Kera Sherwood-O’Regan wants their voices heard.

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 18:11:45 +0000

Climate change hits disabled and Indigenous communities hard. Kera Sherwood-O’Regan wants their voices heard. Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/17/2022 - 12:11 Lisa Marshall

Kera Sherwood-O’Regan poses at Lake Takapō, New Zealand, during a June celebration of the Māori New Year. Image credit: Jason Boberg

“Children have a lot of their future ahead of them. They have to know about climate change so they can stand up, speak up and fight for their future.”

—Kera Sherwood-O’Regan

The referenced media source is missing and needs to be re-embedded.

When Kera Sherwood-O’Regan was young, her parents gathered the pito (umbilical cord) that had nurtured her in the womb, and, per tradition, buried it on sacred coastal grounds in Te Waipounamu, the South Island of New Zealand, alongside the remains of her ancestors.

Growing up in the Kāi Tahu tribe, she learned early on to treat Aoraki, the chiefly mountain of her people, and Waitaki, their river, with reverence. When she went fishing with her dad, he would always throw the first catch back to Takaroa, the god of the ocean, to ensure the sustainability of the fish stocks for future generations.

“From the time we are born, we see ourselves in a deep relationship with the environment, and with that relationship comes responsibility,” said Sherwood-O’Regan, who will serve as a panelist at the upcoming Right Here, Right Now Climate Summit on the CU �鶹ӰԺ campus.

As climate change increasingly threatens that environment and the people who depend upon it, Sherwood-O’Regan has taken that responsibility seriously, serving as a vocal advocate not only for her fellow Māori—the Indigenous people of New Zealand—but also for people with disabilities. Having been diagnosed with fibromyalgia in her 20s, she seeks to assure that Indigenous people, people with disabilities and people like her at the difficult intersection of the two have a voice at the table.

That’s critical, she said, because they are at once uniquely affected and uniquely well suited to provide solutions.

“Indigenous and disabled people have been organizing and innovating and creating novel solutions to problems for generations, because there has been no other option for us,” said Sherwood-O’Regan, co-founder of Activate, an Indigenous- and disabled-led social impact agency. “But only very recently have our views and experiences been [accepted as] part of the mainstream climate conversation.”

Citing her mentor, Rhys Jones, she described climate change as an “inequity magnifier.” Hold it, like a magnifying glass, over existing inequities/social issues and those challenges grow more intense. She noted that in New Zealand, only about 2% of homes are accessible to people with disabilities. With waters rising because of climate change, rendering some coastal homes unsafe, that housing stock is shrinking further.

Climate change-related heat waves can also exacerbate symptoms. For instance, people with spinal cord injuries may have trouble regulating their body temperature and are more likely to suffer heat-related illnesses. Higher pollen counts and extended allergy seasons can worsen respiratory issues among those with asthma, allergies and other chronic illnesses. Her own symptoms, including migraines and fatigue, flare when the temperature rises. When climate change-related disaster strikes, deaf people and people who are hard of hearing may not hear the sirens, and people with disabilities may have trouble being evacuated.

“Everyone has the right to be rescued, but in many areas around the world, civil defense planning doesn’t account for disabled people,” she said.

More than 1 billion people, or 15% of the population, have a disability, according to the United Nations, and disabilities are disproportionately high among Indigenous populations.

“There is a massive intersection between Indigenous rights and disability rights,” she said.

For her, and other Indigenous people around the world, climate change brings another more visceral threat: the loss of their cultural sites.

Already, the burial ground Sherwood-O’Regan’s parents visited after her birth has begun to erode as rising seas lap at the coast. She has visited occasionally, reinforcing her connection to her ancestors and the land of her people.

She hopes that if she has children someday, she can do the same for them.

“It makes me so emotional to think about it. I don’t ever want to have to say, ‘I’m sorry. But we lost that land.’”

Off

Traditional

White

To prevent future death and destruction, Yeb Saño is confronting the human rights violations that fuel climate change

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 16:16:01 +0000

To prevent future death and destruction, Yeb Saño is confronting the human rights violations that fuel climate change Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/16/2022 - 10:16 Patricia Kaowthumrong

“How then do we fight this battle? We stand up against every kind of injustice.”

—Yeb Saño

Super Typhoon Haiyan surges across the Philippines. NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response.

For Yeb Saño, the effects of climate change became tragically clearer on Nov. 8, 2013, when Super Typhoon Haiyan made landfall in Southeast Asia. The tropical cyclone—one of the strongest in recorded history—left a massive trail of destruction, particularly in the Philippines, where it claimed thousands of lives.

At the time of the disaster, Saño’s brother, AG, an environmental and peace activist, was in the family’s hometown of Tacloban and helped gather bodies of the deceased in the aftermath.

“He counted at least 73 dead bodies carried by his own hands. We lost friends, loved ones,” Saño said.

Just a few days later, the tragedy led Saño—then chief climate negotiator for the Philippines in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—to speak on behalf of the lives lost at the hands of Super Typhoon Haiyan at the UN Climate Change Summit in Warsaw, Poland. His heart-wrenching address called for action and was met with a standing ovation. He also fasted for 14 days in solidarity with the victims and all people confronting the impacts of climate change.

“What is heartbreaking is that the people who suffer the most are the ones who contribute the least to the root of the problem: The poor, marginalized and vulnerable groups bearing the brunt of the impacts from the climate emergency contribute the least to the world’s carbon emissions,” he said. “Climate change is one of the biggest injustices in human history.”

Saño’s advocacy for climate justice as chief negotiator for the Philippines captured global attention. In 2016, he was appointed executive director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia, where he continues to strive for social and environmental justice.

To prevent future devastation, Saño said the world must hold those responsible for climate change truly accountable and make them stop the harms they’re inflicting. But action requires immense economic and political transformation—including a transition of energy, transport, and food systems. That means abandoning fossil fuels, such as oil, coal and gas; developing renewable energy systems that support sustainable economic development; and shifting narratives promoted by the fossil fuel industry and colluding government agencies.

“[Fossil fuel industries] have robbed humanity of decades to act on climate change by creating a smokescreen around the truth and reality of the crisis,” he said. “They have also cunningly shaped the wrong notion that the responsibility for the climate crisis rests on the shoulders of individuals rather than on their own questionable business practices.”

To unravel what Saño called the root causes of the climate crisis—greed, arrogance and apathy—Saño said we must implement the same solutions that make the world a better place, from empowering the marginalized to combating consumerism.

“How then do we fight this battle?” he said. “We stand up against every kind of injustice.”

Destruction and damage by Typhoon Haiyan November 23, 2013 in Tacloban, Philippines.

For Yeb Saño, the effects of climate change became tragically clearer on Nov. 8, 2013, when Super Typhoon Haiyan made landfall in Southeast Asia.

Off

Traditional

White

Her family lost their farm in Uganda to climate change. Now she’s standing up for the future.

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 16:30:59 +0000

Her family lost their farm in Uganda to climate change. Now she’s standing up for the future. Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 08/12/2022 - 10:30 Daniel Strain

Hilda Flavia Nakabuye poses with newly planted trees in Kampala, Uganda on Earth Day, 2021

“Children have a lot of their future ahead of them. They have to know about climate change so they can stand up, speak up and fight for their future.”

—Hilda Flavia Nakabuye

Climate activist Hilda Flavia Nakabuye first experienced the impacts of climate change before she even knew what the term meant.

When she was growing up in Uganda, Nakabuye’s family owned a small plantation in a village called Masaka not far from the wide expanse of Lake Victoria. They grew bananas, cassava, Irish potatoes and other crops. Then, in the 2000s, long periods of drought interrupted by fierce storms destroyed most of her family’s chief source of food and income.

“Crops were withered, and heavy rains stripped away most of the plants,” Nakabuye said.

Her parents moved the family to the capital city of Kampala to find work. It wasn’t until 2017 when Nakabuye enrolled as a student at Kampala University that she learned what had caused the devastation to her family farm: rapidly rising temperatures driven by humanity’s out-of-control greenhouse gas emissions.

Now 25, Nakabuye has dedicated the years since to mobilizing young people across Uganda and beyond to combat what she calls “the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced.”

By 2050, more than 200 million people may be forced to move within their own nation’s borders because of climate change, according to a 2021 report from the World Bank. In parts of East Africa, that mass migration has already begun. In the Horn of Africa, huge numbers of people are moving to escape a record-setting drought. The United Nations estimates that 1.7 million children in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya are in urgent need of treatment for malnutrition because of the drought.

“The countries of the Global South are the least prepared to cope with the effects of climate change,” Nabakuye said. “They are also the countries that have contributed the least to causing climate change.”

Yet Nakabuye believes that young people, and especially young women, in nations like Uganda are in the best position to help the world solve its climate crisis.

She founded Fridays for Future Uganda, which organizes regular “climate strikes” to raise awareness of climate change in the nation. More recently, she participated in a campaign to protest the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, a planned project that would carry oil across Uganda and through Tanzania to the Indian Ocean.

Nakabuye has also led efforts to clean up the shores of Lake Victoria. Once a point of pride for Uganda and neighboring countries, the lake has become overrun with pollution and invasive plants and fish.

One of the most important solutions to climate change is education, she said. Nakabuye hopes that children in Uganda will have opportunities she did not have to learn about climate change and the forces shaping the environments around them from a young age.

“Children have a lot of their future ahead of them,” Nakabuye said. “They have to know about climate change so they can stand up, speak up and fight for their future.”

Hilda Flavia Nakabuye, center, joins a protest.

Climate activist Hilda Flavia Nakabuye first experienced the impacts of climate change before she even knew what the term meant.

Off

Traditional

White

Walter Vergara

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 18:56:08 +0000

Walter Vergara Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/11/2022 - 12:56

Colombia

Expertise:
Climate Change & Environment
Business & Industry

Senior Fellow
World Resources Institute

Day 3: Solutions

Panel:
Economics, Pricing, Policy: How do governments and various stakeholders pay and otherwise take action to develop climate policy solutions in a manner that is equitable?

Sunday, December 4, 2022

Walter Vergara is a climate specialist with longstanding interests in a variety of climate adaptation and mitigation topics. At the World Resources Institute (WRI), Vergara directs the 20x20 initiative—an ambitious, country-led land restoration effort aimed at reducing the carbon footprint of land use and land use change activities in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Before joining WRI, Vergara retired from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), where he was the division chief for climate change and sustainability. Before that, Vergara was at the World Bank for 25 years, where his last post was as leader of the global expert team on climate change.

Vergara has written or co-written 14 books and numerous technical articles. His last publication, “Agriculture and Climate: Systemic Impacts and Possible Responses,” was published as a discussion paper by the IDB. He also was a review editor in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.

Vergara is a chemical engineer by training with degrees from Universidad Nacional de Colombia and Cornell University.

Walter Vergara is a climate specialist with longstanding interests in a variety of climate adaptation and mitigation topics.

Off

Zebra Striped

White

How a human rights approach to climate change can spark real change

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 19:45:45 +0000

How a human rights approach to climate change can spark real change Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 08/05/2022 - 13:45

Lisa Marshall

Sheila Watt-Cloutier

James Anaya

Mary Robinson

On Dec. 7, 2005, Canadian-born mother and grandmother Sheila Watt-Cloutier filed a 163-page petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights arguing that the impacts of climate change violated the “fundamental human rights” of Indigenous Inuit people like her across the Arctic.

“It is the responsibility of the United States, as the largest source of greenhouse gases, to take immediate and effective action to protect the human rights of the Inuit,” the petition read. The commission ultimately declined to hear the case.

But Watt-Cloutier’s bold move helped kick-start what many describe as a sea change in how the international community thinks about climate change. Rather than center conversations around the science behind it or the economics and politics of addressing it, as had been the norm for decades, Watt-Cloutier and a new brand of climate justice advocates took a different approach. They framed climate change not as a distant, abstract concern but as a current human rights crisis that disproportionately impacts marginalized communities. Thus, they made the case that government and industry are duty-bound to respect and protect those rights in the face of climate change.

“Before that time, at nearly every meeting I attended, they were talking about polar bears and ice,” said Cloutier, who will present a keynote speech at the upcoming Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit on the CU �鶹ӰԺ campus. “To put a human face to the issue was really important.”

Two years later, a small group of island states led by the Maldives joined forces to adopt the Malé Declaration, the first intergovernmental statement that “climate change has clear and immediate implications for the full enjoyment of human rights.” The next year, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted the first of what became a series of resolutions linking climate change to human rights.

In February 2020, UN Secretary General António Guterres proclaimed unequivocally: “The climate crisis is the biggest threat to our survival as a species and is already threatening human rights around the world.”

In framing it this way, climate justice advocates say they gain more leverage in both the court of public opinion and the court of law, and better assure that as policymakers set out to craft solutions, those most affected by climate change (but often least responsible for it) have a seat at the table.

“Viewing climate change through a human rights lens brings to the fore the urgency of the problem and helps us to focus on what it is really about—human beings and our survival,” said James Anaya, a university Distinguished Professor and professor of international law at CU �鶹ӰԺ, and the lead of three co-chairs for the climate summit.

The toll on human rights

In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees that all human beings are entitled to a social and international order in which their rights and freedoms can be fully realized.

Those rights include the right to health, food, housing, life and culture.

Climate change threatens all of them, and the Indigenous people of the Arctic, which has warmed much faster than any other region of the globe, were among the first to feel it, Watt-Cloutier explained.

In the village of Shishmaref, Alaska, where people have been living, hunting and fishing for 2,000 years, melting sea ice is swallowing homes. Roads built on once-sturdy permafrost are sinking as it thaws. Hunters who have traveled across the ice for centuries now face the danger of breaking through it. Seals and polar bears that depend on the ice are moving farther out, threatening food supplies. Thinning ozone and increased ultraviolet exposure have boosted reports of skin cancer and cataracts.

Erosion next to houses in Shishmaref, Alaska

Aerial view of Shishmaref, Alaska

“We are the most adaptable people in the world. We invented the kayak. We can build a home made of snow that is warm enough for a mother to birth in. We are teachers, not victims. I believe Indigenous wisdom is the medicine the world seeks.”

—Sheila Watt-Cloutier

Inuit culture is also under threat, said Watt-Cloutier, as hunting traditions in the Arctic come with key lessons about resiliency, coping, patience and boldness.

“Our culture is based on the ice, the snow and the cold. That's who we are,” said Watt -Cloutier, author of The Right to Be Cold: One Woman’s Fight to Protect the Arctic and Save the Planet from Climate Change.

Elsewhere around the globe, the human toll of climate change became apparent to Mary Robinson, then the UN high commissioner for human rights in the early 2000s. “No matter where I went, I kept hearing variations on the same phrase: ‘But things are so much worse now,’” she wrote in her 2019 bestseller, Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience and the Fight for a Sustainable Future.

Robinson, the former president of Ireland, who will deliver a keynote speech at the climate summit in �鶹ӰԺ, recalls farmers in Africa whose harvests failed to arrive or whose crops and villages were washed away by floods.

“In the past, I had seen images of stranded polar bears and the disappearance of ancient glaciers, but these stories from the frontlines of climate change suddenly began to match the scientific findings I was reading about,” Robinson wrote.

Anaya is quick to note that while the ravages of climate change are now being felt globally—including in �鶹ӰԺ, which has been hit by devastating floods and fires in recent years—women, people with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, children and other marginalized groups tend to feel the brunt.

“A human rights approach pays attention to those groups that are particularly in vulnerable situations and makes sure to include their voices in the discussions about solutions,” Anaya said.

Obligations and solutions

Under international human rights law, governments have the primary obligation to protect human rights, Anaya said.

Increasingly, climate justice advocates are seizing upon this legal obligation and taking governments to court for failure to protect human rights.

For instance, in 2013, the Urgenda Foundation filed a lawsuit against the Dutch government demanding that it take steps to address the toll climate change was taking on human rights. In a groundbreaking 2019 decision, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands ordered the government to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25% from 1990 levels.

Since then, hundreds of plaintiffs have filed suit against governments and businesses for failing to protect human rights from the impacts of climate change.

Meanwhile, a human rights approach has given a new voice to vulnerable communities, aiming to ensure that when solutions are discussed, their interests are top of mind.

“These solutions have to be equitable, and certain groups should not bear the cost more than others,” Anaya said.

For instance, if wind power is a solution, how will the construction of those wind farms affect the lives, livelihoods and traditions of people in local communities? When it comes to costly mitigation and adaptation strategies, who will pay?

“The human rights framing emphasizes equity and fairness. Those who are most responsible for climate change have the greatest responsibility to address it,” Anaya said.

Watt-Cloutier is quick to note that those who are most vulnerable to climate change—while often portrayed as victims and left unheard—tend to have unique and valuable perspectives on solutions.

“We are the most adaptable people in the world. We invented the kayak. We can build a home made of snow that is warm enough for a mother to birth in. We are teachers, not victims,” she said of the Inuit. “I believe Indigenous wisdom is the medicine the world seeks.”

As the world increasingly seeks an answer to what is now broadly viewed as an existential threat to human rights and the future of humanity, she said she has renewed hope.

“I believe the campaigns that link climate change to human rights protection efforts, that acknowledge our shared humanity and our shared future, are the most effective way to bring about lasting change.”

Off

Zebra Striped

White

Julieta Martinez

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 19:54:21 +0000

Julieta Martinez Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/28/2022 - 13:54

Chile

Expertise:
Youth Activist
Education
Climate Change & Environment

Founder
Tremendas

Day 3: Solutions

Panel:
Developing Climate Solutions With the Human Rights of Future Generations in Mind: What do youth have to say about that?

Sunday, December 4, 2022

Julieta Martinez is a climate justice and gender equity youth activist. Her work focuses on girls’ education as a climate solution, since the climate crisis is not gender neutral. She founded Tremendas, a global action that connects, empowers, educates and amplifies the voices of young women and adolescents who seek to become changemakers in local and global processes and decision-making. Tremendas is present in 18 countries around the world. Martinez has also co-founded Latinas For Climate and the education academy Climáticas. She knows first-hand that an educated girl can change the world.

Martinez is a member of the Youth Task Force for the Beijing+25 for Generation Equality of UN Women. In July 2021, she participated in the Generation Equality Forum held in Paris. At the meeting, the young activist shared the stage with figures such as Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, businesswoman Melinda Gates, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, with whom she shared an intergenerational dialogue on the role of girls and adolescents for gender equality and intersectionality.

In November 2021, Martinez participated in COP26 as a panelist and speaker, sharing the stage with Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Together they discussed the role of intersectionality in developing ambitious and effective solutions to the climate crisis.

Martinez is also a Girl Rising Fellow and advocates for girls' access to education. With Girl Rising, Martinez is directing her first documentary focusing on girls as part of developing climate solutions, as well as calls to action from the Global South.

Julieta Martinez is a climate justice and gender equity youth activist. Her work focuses on girls’ education as a climate solution, since the climate crisis is not gender neutral.

Off

Zebra Striped

White

Stephanie Lamma Ewi

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 17:05:06 +0000

Stephanie Lamma Ewi Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/28/2022 - 11:05

Cameroon

Expertise:
Environmental Governance
Climate Change & Environment
Youth Activist

Director of Programming
Pan African Center for Climate Policy

Day 3: Solutions

Panel:
Developing Climate Solutions With the Human Rights of Future Generations in Mind: What do youth have to say about that?

Sunday, December 4, 2022

Stephanie Lamma Ewi obtained a master’s degree in natural resource and environmental management from the University of Buea, spearheading research and development for nine years as an environmental and climate justice advocate in rural communities of Cameroon. After much research in these communities, she noticed the exclusion of women and girls in climate change projects and decision-making platforms. She was determined to see responsible decisions made regarding sustainable natural resource management in Cameroon and Africa, and she proposed structures that facilitate the channeling of rural voices in the process, particularly women and young people for representation in national and international platforms.

Lamma Ewi leads teams of volunteers to develop entrepreneurial support and climate leadership capacity-building programs for women and young people in rural forests and communities of Cameroon. She has been able to reach over 5,460 women and 500 young people in 162 communities in the country. She empowers women with livelihood skills like bush mango processing, beekeeping, mushroom farming, snail cultivation and micro enterprise development. Her work with rural community councils has prompted the formulation of over 20 local forest management policies in villages within Nguti and Takamanda that have stirred the construction of several nurseries with 110,000 indigenous tree species for revamping degraded sites and farmlands. Her works have recorded a 65% increase in women’s income sources and a 20% involvement of women in local councils in the communities where she works.

Lamma Ewi works directly with young people through her weekly radio program Eco-voice, an environmental awareness program on Eternity Gospel Radio and Eden Radio Limbe, Cameroon, reaching 4,000 listeners. Recently, she coordinated the establishment of a 5,000-tree nursery to combat natural disasters in Limbe. She organized the Miss Environment FOREP 2020 pageant, bringing together government institutions, 10 nongovernmental organizations, two TV stations, several media houses and 150+ people to plant more than 4,500 trees along the streets, farms and neighborhoods of Limbe. She is working with four disaster-prone communities to play football for trees, with an objective to plant 7,000 trees across her municipality.

Lamma Ewi heads a team that developed a climate change curriculum. She led her team to establish an eco club in primary schools around Limbe where they are building children’s capacities as climate ambassadors using arts. Lamma Ewi is a volunteer country mentor for the Africa Climate Reality Project, coaching 24 mentees from Bogota, Colombia, three mentees from USG/Leap Girl Africa Cameroon and 21 students from PACC Policy. She gained recognition from the United Nations Foundation as one of the six new youth voices on climate change and from the Climate Reality Project as one of 8 Women Leading on Climate. Lamma Ewi is an environmental impact consultant at the Delegation of Environment and Nature Protection in Limbe. She is a Mandela Washington fellow, YALI Regional Leadership Center alumna, a UN peace ambassador, a Joke Waller-Hunter Initiative awardee and board member of the Youth Against Slavery Movement.

Lamma Ewi says she believes that “natural resources should be for the benefits of all people and not monopolized for the benefits of few."

Stephanie Lamma Ewi obtained a master’s degree in natural resource and environmental management from the University of Buea, spearheading research and development for 9 years as an environmental and climate justice advocate in rural communities of Cameroon.

Off

Zebra Striped

White