As a child, climate activist Hilda Flavia Nekabuye’s family owned one of the biggest plantations in their village near Uganda’s Lake Victoria. But rising temperatures, rains and strong winds devastated the property and Nekabuye’s grandmother had to sell some of their land to feed her family.  

“I remember I had to miss school for months because my parents couldn’t afford to pay my tuition fees,” she told an audience during a youth activism panel at the Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit on Dec. 4. “I was kicked out of school because of the effects of climate change, but I’m not the only one: Every year, 4 million girls are kicked out of school because of the effects of climate change. 

“They bear the biggest burden and they have to play a very big role in creating a future for their children, and the children after them and the other generations to come.” 

Nekabuye — who started the Uganda branch of Fridays for Future, a youth-led global climate strike movement originally founded by Greta Thunberg — shared the same sentiment that the three other panelists, all young women, expressed: Women and youth are most burdened by climate change, but they are also key to solutions needed now.

"If you are aware of climate change and if you know what is happening, then you have the responsibility to do more. Use your voice to represent millions of voices that do not have a platform."

—Hilda Flavia Nekabuye

“Do not work alone. Never ever.” 

For Julieta Martinez, a climate justice and gender equity youth activist from Santiago, Chile, education is a main driver for climate solutions. 

“If you don't go to school, you don't get to college. If you don't go to college, you don't get a job, and if you don't get a job, you don't get money and you become dependent,” Martinez said, pointing to young South American girls who spend four to five hours a day walking for clean water. 

As the founder of Tremandas, a global action dedicated to amplifying youth voices, the 19-year-old spoke on what helps her make big strides in her work: “Do not work alone. Never ever. We need each other.” 

“The best thing we can do right now is find a common ground.”

—Julieta Martinez

CU Âé¶čÓ°Ôș students are working toward the same goals. 

Graduate student Sarah Jensen is co-founder of the Âé¶čÓ°Ôș chapter of the American Conservation Coalition. She hopes to bring more climate discussion into college classrooms. 

“When it comes to a debate, people always say, ‘We’re not picking sides.’ But I know I have classmates who want to debate,” Jensen said. “If faculty members knew we wanted to have those conversations and made time for that, that would really help.” 

PhD student Emily Nocito wants to see more small-group discussions in classrooms to allay some of the pressure and fear that can arise in difficult climate conversations. Lively and useful debates can take place instead.

“Climate touches all of us,” Nocito said. “It’s one of the most tangible ways to make an impact on your world.” 

“We need to act now” 

Ewi Stephanie Lamma of Cameroon, Africa, works to empower children, youth and women in natural resource management. When she was four, her mother would work on farms for days at a time to provide for her and her baby sister.

“My mom had to focus on the earth to make sure we could survive,” Lamma said. 

When communities like hers are affected by climate change, children and youth have to move elsewhere, and may become involved in dangerous situations like human trafficking, Lamma explained. She’s worked with young volunteers to plant thousands of trees in Cameroon, and also created the documentary , which received recognition during the COP27 climate conference in November. 

“If I have 100 sincere climate leaders brought up from the ages of 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10, I believe that in the nearest future, Cameroon will have a balanced climate system,” Lamma said. “And I can’t wait to be part of that future.” 

“When we take care of our environment, we actually are taking care of ourselves.” 

Among all of the youth activists featured during the four-day conference, consensus was found in creating unity first to come up with solutions — then act quickly. 

“Climate is an opportunity for us to come together. As young people, we share this urgency because it’s what we’re going to have to live in. Hopefully, this could be where we bridge that divide.” 

—Sarah Jensen

Said environment educator and activist Monica Neupane via a Zoom call in Nepal: “The crisis is in front of us and we need to act now.” 

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We are at a moment in history when all of us must now take on a mantle of leadership. And we must do it in a way that energizes and motivates rather than saying ‘It’s too late.

—Kumi Naidoo

South Africa-born human rights activist Kumi Naidoo kicked off a fiery Sunday-morning talk at CU Âé¶čÓ°Ôș’s Glenn Miller Ballroom with a pointed request for his audience.

“Please stand if you believe that: A) Everything is fine climate wise; B) We have a massive challenge ahead, and the window of opportunity is closing; or C) It’s too late,” he instructed.

Seven people stood for C. The rest stood for B. Notably, no one stood for A.

Each and every one of them, he asserted, has a responsibility to rise up against climate change.

“We are at a moment in history when all of us must now take on a mantle of leadership,” said Naidoo. “And we must do it in a way that energizes and motivates rather than saying ‘It’s too late. What’s the point of resistance?’”

During a presentation that conjured reflections from Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., Matt Damon, Cree elders, and the late South African rapper Riky Rick, Naidoo called for a new kind of collective action to push back on what he calls “climate apartheid” –– one that includes more voices, communicates more clearly and even incorporates a little joy.

“Pessimism and cognitive dissonance are not luxuries we can afford anymore,” he said.

As a lifelong human rights activist who first began protesting South Africa’s system of institutionalized racial oppression at age 15, Naidoo knows something about resistance.

After multiple arrests, he was forced to flee his country in the 1980s and lived in exile in the United Kingdom. He risked his life placing protest banners on oil rigs in Greenland, served in leadership roles with Greenpeace International and Amnesty International, and was instrumental in getting the African National Congress –– banned for decades under Apartheid –– formally registered as a political party again in the mid-1990s.

From this vantage point of experience, Naidoo shared a list of dos and don’ts for today’s climate activists, starting with a request to look inward.

“All of us, academia and NGOs included, have adjusted to injustices that we never should have adjusted to,” he said, suggesting that endemic “civil obedience” has stalled progress.

In addition to direct actions such as sit-ins, strikes and other protests, he said today’s activists have changed the way they communicate the climate crisis, moving away from the sterile language of science to the language of lives, land, health and jobs.

“We have tried to win this with facts and figures: ‘1.5 degrees. 350 parts per million. Blah blah blah. All of this goes completely over the heads of 99% of people,” he said.

He added that one mistake his generation has made as activists was to put too much power into the hands of a few, and he suggested it’s time for a more decentralized, participatory and collectively shared climate justice movement.

In the past, climate activists –– many of them white and wealthy –– have also failed to recognize the harm that their protests have on working people. This, too, must change.

“If you have a persistent pattern of civil disobedience being done by wealthy white people and it adversely impacts people of color, that is an arrogance that must be addressed,” he said.

Today’s climate warriors, he said, must also stop preaching to the crowd.

“Activism cannot continue to be the art of developing a position and mobilizing the people who agree with you and dissing the ones who don’t agree. It has to be about having the humility to build bridges with those we disagree with. That means learning to love the people who voted for Donald Trump.”

He praised a new generation of youth activists who have embraced the climate crisis with unprecedented urgency, but also with new tools. In addition to bringing economic and legal weapons to the fight, they are also bringing art, song and poetry.

In that vein, he ended his talk not with jarring statistics or talk of catastrophe, but rather with a song.

On a screen behind him played a music video created by his stepson, rapper Riky Rick, who tragically died this year. It was initially created as a love song –– one lover trying to woo back another who he’d harmed. But Naidoo and his family adapted it into a love song from humans to our planet.

On the screen, images of waterfalls and sunrises intermixed with those of trash heaps and sewage as the lyrics declared:

“I was focused on paying bills when I should have focused on showing you how I feel.”

Naidoo asked the audience to stand again, this time to dance.

And they did.

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“We’ve heard from the activists. We know they’re being threatened. They’re being jailed for their work. They’re being deprived of their livelihoods. Now we need to move to action.”

—Therese Arnesen, UN Human Rights Officer

Closing Reception

Beth Osnes, associate professor of theater and dance and environmental science at CU Âé¶čÓ°Ôș, leads a performance of young people from fifth grade through college age. The performance included musical pieces focused on the impacts of climate change and what we must do to address it. Osnes injected comedy into the performances and included a piece on reducing food waste. 

Day three of the Right Here Right Now Global Climate summit at CU Âé¶čÓ°Ôș was filled with discussions of concrete solutions and urgent calls for collective action to reduce the human toll of the climate crisis today and to fend off a catastrophic future.

To get there, panelists and speakers said the world must update its infrastructure, rethink its economy and consider Indigenous knowledge alongside Western science. And a new generation of climate defenders must better communicate the realities of the crisis in ways that strengthen the movement and foster political will.

“We’ve heard from the activists. We know they’re being threatened. They’re being jailed for their work. They’re being deprived of their livelihoods,” said U.N. Human Rights Officer Therese Arnesen after the close of the summit. “Now we need to move to action.”

Here’s a look at what that action might look like, according to participants who attended the third day of the summit:

Adapt to reality now to save lives

While the mitigation of future warming must remain a priority, the world is progressing slowly on this front, and countries must adapt to global climate realities now to save lives, said economist Elizabeth Robinson, director of the Grantham Research Institute, during a panel on Adaptation, Mitigation and Disaster Response.

Robinson noted that after a 2003 heat wave led to 15,000 deaths in France, the French government established an early warning system that now alerts elderly people and other vulnerable communities of oncoming heat waves and directs them to cooling stations. When another heat wave hit in 2019, 1,500 died, a fraction of the number who might have died had the warning system not been implemented.

Similarly in Nigeria, the government has invested in programs to assure that construction and agricultural workers, whose health is increasingly threatened due to climate change, have access to water and toilets on hot days.

“We must continue to focus on mitigation, but adaptation can work. It can save lives, and it’s not that complicated,” she said.

Expedite a global green energy infrastructure

Martin Keller, director of the National Renewable Energy Lab based in Golden, Colorado, joined Robinson on the panel.

Keller added that scientists and energy companies from the developed world could make a big difference in mitigating future warming if they would do more to help developing countries transition to a cleaner energy infrastructure, powered by solar and wind.

He noted that many countries, particularly in Africa, have no electricity at all yet, so providing funding and expertise now can enable them to skip powering their country with fossil fuels entirely, much like they skipped landline telephones and went directly to cell phones.

“We need to act now to prevent them from making the same mistakes that we have,” Keller said.

He stressed that the transition to green energy must be a just one, considering and financially supporting those at risk of losing their livelihood.

Rethink what rich means

Solutions for adaptation to and mitigation of climate change abound, and many are within reach, “But a crucial question we have to confront is: Who will pay?” noted economist Kelly Sims Gallagher, director of the Climate Policy Lab, during a panel on economics, pricing and policy.

Some panelists throughout the day suggested that in carbon offset systems, the price of carbon is already too low and should be raised.

Others pointed to the recent Loss and Damage fund established at the United Nations’ COP27 climate conference as a ray of hope, if implemented properly.

And many suggested that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank should be overhauled to make them more amenable to investing in green economies.

“If you think about these two institutions, they have become conservative and risk averse and in reality they should be the opposite,” said Robinson.

On a more fundamental level, it could be time for many to reimagine what it means to be rich.

“What if we saw it as having clean air and clean water,” said Canadian youth activist Tia Kennedy, during the summit’s closing panel on traditional knowledge.

Consider Indigenous knowledge alongside Western science

During that panel, Indigenous participants from Belize, Arizona, Canada, the United States and Panama highlighted a worldview in which values of reciprocity prevail, not only with one another but also between humans and the planet. The earth and animals are viewed not as a “natural resource” to be extracted from but as part of an interconnected web.

In thinking this way, simple solutions arise that can often trump sophisticated technical fixes, explained botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

She shared how her ancestors stayed warm in winter because they built a small fire and sat close to it.

Meanwhile, “they observed that the settlers built a really big fire in a big house and sat far away from the fire.” That story still resonates with her today.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a member of the Hopi Tribe in Arizona, and “250th generation” farmer shared this story, a fitting way to bring the summit to a close:

“We only receive 6 to 10 inches of annual rainfall every year at Hopi. That’s it, but we’re able to raise things like melon, squash, beans (and) corn. When I was at Cornell University, they told me I needed 33 inches of annual rainfall to raise corn, and I said, ‘Man, you guys have got some weak corn here.’ Do you know what makes it come up? It’s our faith, and it’s our belief system that makes that corn come up. It’s not a commodity, folks. It’s life.”

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On the second day of the Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit, keynote speaker and former Irish President Mary Robinson posed a question about a pretty, yellow plant we all know but might not love: the dandelion.

She used the metaphor of the common weed to illustrate—and name—the latest climate justice movement taking root: Project Dandelion, the next phase of climate justice work, led by women. Dandelion seeds spread gently on the wind, and they grow on all continents around the world. To call them resilient is an understatement. 

"Have you ever tried to get rid of the damn thing?” she said to applause in the full Glenn Miller Ballroom at the Âé¶čÓ°Ôș.

Robinson was the second keynote in the inaugural Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit.

While she announced Project Dandelion at COP27, her speech focused on the importance of building trust and including all perspectives and voices, and holding governments and corporations accountable for the financial and policy reforms urgently needed now to address climate change. 

One of the world’s most respected advocates for human rights and climate justice, Robinson said she hoped that, like the fast-growing dandelion, this movement would act as a feminist “moonshot” to achieve a more just and carbon-free world as quickly as possible.

“We have decided that what is needed is a women-led global climate justice movement, not women-only, but women-led,” said Robinson.

We have decided that what is needed is a women-led global climate justice movement, not women-only, but women-led.

—Mary Robinson

Climate injustices to address

Robinson cited five climate injustices that Project Dandelion aims to address:

First, that the climate crisis has disproportionately affected the poorest countries and communities, small island states, and Indigenous peoples. Second, the gender injustice within the climate crisis, noting that women and their children must travel further and suffer more in the face of climate change and disasters.

Third, the intergenerational injustices committed by her own generation, which have left younger generations with the possibility of an unlivable world. “We haven’t done what we should do,” said Robinson.

Fourth: the injustice of different development pathways. Developing countries around the world are told they now cannot use gas or oil to better their nations when it is the delay and lack of action on the part of developed countries that has led to this predicament.

Robinson said all nations and all people have to make not only a rapid, but a just transition, or we will not have a livable world.

Finally, the injustice to nature, which is especially important to Indigenous peoples around the world. In her time as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Robinson was coordinator of the Decade of the World’s Indigenous People, which taught her to listen first to Indigenous perspectives on climate issues.

“Yet they're very often not delegates at the table and they find it very difficult to bring that wisdom to decision-making,” she said.

Leadership on climate justice

There are two words Robinson doesn’t use anymore: climate change. Instead, she uses either “climate crisis” or “climate justice.” It’s a purposeful choice to highlight the “deep connection” between the climate crisis and all human rights in her international advocacy and leadership.

During her tenure as president of Ireland (1990-97), Robinsonnever talked about climate change. It wasn’t until after five years as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997–2002) that Robinson realized this critical connection when she saw firsthand how climate change was affecting several African countries and small island nations.

She went on to found the Mary Robinson Foundation (2010–2019), serve as the U.N. Special Envoy on Climate Change from 2014–2015, author the book Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future, and be a founding member and current chair of , an esteemed group of former world leaders with a focus on creating a world where “people live in peace, conscious of their common humanity and their shared responsibilities for each other, for the planet and for future generations.” 

Getting fired up

Robinson was disappointed after COP27 concluded two weeks ago in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. It was touted as a COP of “implementation” but it did not deliver in important ways, she said.

While an agreement was reached to establish a fund for loss and damage and a link was made with reform of the international monetary system, “there was no move to increase ambition at COP27 by governments.”

“I came away from COP27 with a sense of what I can only describe as a terrible paradox,” said Robinson.

While we are on the cusp of a clean energy world, she said, we’re still heading for a catastrophic 2-degrees warming world.

“So what does this mean for the human rights community? I think it means one word, which we know and are familiar with but we have to really rise to: the word ‘accountability.’”

Robinson said she also aims to hold herself accountable, noting in her opening remarks that she traveled all the way from Dublin to be at the summit, and needed to justify her resulting carbon footprint.

She was going to do that, she said, “by making all of you as fired up as I was when I was leaving COP27 in Egypt a short time ago. I was fired up by anger and frustration and frankly, the fierce urgency of now.”  

In closing, Robinson asked the audience: “I want to know, are you fired up?” A sudden, loud round of applause and a standing ovation gave her an answer.

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“The actions we need to take may not be profitable in the short run but if we don't take those actions, human civilization itself is threatened."

—Gillian Marcelle, CEO and founder of Resilience Capital Ventures, LLC

To hold governments and industry accountable for protecting human rights threatened by climate change, youth, women and front-line communities must mobilize. Economists and investors must rethink what success looks like. 

And, as a last resort, litigation must be used, according to speakers at the Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit at CU Âé¶čÓ°Ôș Saturday.

After an at-times emotional first day of the summit Friday, in which panelists from around the globe made the undeniable case that climate change is a humanitarian crisis, speakers on Day 2 focused on accountability, called for action and suggested that a human rights framing is precisely what’s needed to spark action.

“We are living in an exciting time,” said panelist David Boyd, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, in the session “The Obligations of Governments Arising from the Human Rights Impacts of Climate Change.” “By harnessing the power of human rights and the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, we can see a path forward where governments will begin to actually take action.”

Mobilizing from the ground up

In multiple sessions, panelists pointed out that it has been women, Indigenous people and activists from developing countries or the Global South who have pushed forth some of the most critical advancements in fighting climate change. That includes the Paris Agreement goal to limit global warming to, preferably 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels and the recent establishment at COP 27 of a “loss and damage” fund for nations most vulnerable to the climate crisis.

In a rousing speech before a packed house, many of them CU Âé¶čÓ°Ôș students donning orange caps reading “Divest,” former President of Ireland Mary Robinson called for a new women-led global climate justice movement, a feminine version of the male-led “moonshot” of the 1960s, to hold the duty-bearers, including government and industry, to task for protecting the planet.

“They said putting a man on the moon was impossible but it was achieved in eight years,” she said.

During the morning panel with Boyd, moderator Nick Clark, of Al Jazeera, called on governments to protect defenders of human rights and the environment, noting that four environmental activists are murdered every week and their killers often go unpunished.

He pointed to the Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean, better known as the EscazĂș Agreement, as the first human rights treaty in the world to include a provision to protect activists.

Meanwhile, panelist Janine Coye-Felson, of Belize, challenged those with financial resources to support such defenders around the globe.

“That is the big challenge: How exactly can we mobilize when what we have to mobilize is so limited in terms of resources?” Coye-Felson asked.

In a panel on the role of education, representatives from youth-focused organizations stressed the need for teachers to include the human impacts along with the science in their lessons on climate change, in order to inspire a new generation of climate activists.

“People can’t see the human face from these graphs,” said Ili Nadiah Dzulfakar, panelist and chair and program director of the climate justice and feminist organization Klima Action Malaysia (KAMY), led by young people to mobilize a climate emergency declaration in Malaysia. “You can’t see the death.”

Panelist Jono Anzalone, executive director of The Climate Initiative (TCI), a nonpartisan organization that aims to inspire, educate and empower 10 million youth around climate action by 2025, stressed that just getting climate change education into the curriculum is a challenge. While 84% of educators want to teach climate science, only 43% do.

“How do we close that gap?” Anzalone asked.

Think beyond profit

In an afternoon session, “The Responsibility of Business and Industry to Respect Human Rights in the Context of Climate Change,” several panelists suggested that in order for industry to be able to fully respond to the climate change crisis, the global economy, including investors, must rethink the “Milton Friedman mindset” that success is inextricably tied to short-term profit.

“The actions we need to take may not be profitable in the short run but if we don’t take those actions, human civilization itself is threatened,” said Gillian Marcelle, CEO and founder of Resilience Capital Ventures, LLC.

Investors and corporations should also look to benefits outside of profit, including social good and consider the unseen costs, such as environmental degradation.

Other panelists added that profits from transitioning to a renewable economy will come but it will take time so society must shift its timeline for gauging economic success.

And, as economies transition to renewables, they must ensure that the transition is just, enabling countries in the Global South to continue to develop and workers in the Global North to feel they won’t lose their financial security.

“Working people around the world have to feel like they're not going to be left behind,” said Monte Tarbox, executive director of the National Electrical Benefit Fund, which provides pension benefits to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. “So that they have buy-in and back the political initiatives that are needed for this and we don't end up in the situation we’ve been in politically in the United States in the last five, six years.”

Litigate as a last resort

Should citizens sue their governments to force them to do something about climate change?

Many panelists viewed this as a last resort but noted that it has been done, and it can be done again.

For instance, in 2015, in the case of the Urgenda Foundation vs. the State of the Netherlands, the plaintiffs prevailed in their effort to require their government to do more. 

The court in the Hague ordered the Dutch state to limit Greenhouse Gas emissions to 25% below 1990 levels by the end of 2020. The success inspired several other countries to use legal conventions on human rights and climate change to bring cases to demand reduction in fossil fuel emissions.

“It’s a case that’s had a really transformative effect on the way that people litigate climate change against governments,” said panelist Tessa Kahn, in the session “Climate Justice Activism: Litigation and Other Strategies to Hold Governments Accountable in the Context of Climate Change.” “I still don’t think we’ve hit the limit of what can be learned from the decisions that were issued in that case, and how they can inform legal strategies in other countries.”

In a separate panel, Naderev ‘Yeb’ Sano, executive director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia, stressed that economics and law aside, human empathy will be key to achieving real progress: “Litigation can only go so far. The battle will be won or lost in the chambers of people’s hearts.”

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Sheila Watt-Cloutier has a simple prescription for staying warm in the icy fringes of the Arctic where average annual temperatures can plummet down to near zero degrees Fahrenheit: Don’t eat brand-name soup.

“It’s not going to be Lipton Cup-a-Soup that’s going to keep you warm,” said Watt-Cloutier, who was born in the Eastern Arctic of Canada. “It’s going to be our ‘country food,’ our seal meat that warms you up from the inside out.”

Watt-Cloutier has spent more than 25 years advocating for the rights of the Arctic’s Inuit peoples and other Indigenous groups around the world. On Friday, she addressed an audience of hundreds in the Glenn Miller Ballroom on the CU Âé¶čÓ°Ôș campus as the first keynote speaker of the Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit.

Speaking to the packed room on her birthday, Watt-Cloutier quipped that when many people living in the United States think about the Arctic, their minds go to a hallmark of capitalism: soda commercials—the ones where polar bears frolic with seals on the ice.

“The world knows more about our wildlife and the ice of the Arctic than its people,” she said.

Watt-Cloutier has spent her career trying to put a human face on this cold part of the planet and on the changes in climate that have devastated the region—causing temperatures to soar and melting the Arctic’s all-important sea ice. She also noted that Indigenous peoples aren’t merely the victims of climate change. They are also in the best position to solve this global crisis, which has begun to affect communities around the world, even in the balmier south.

“Indigenous wisdom is the medicine the world seeks to attain sustainability, and we’ve got to start to tap into that wisdom,” Watt-Cloutier said. “We can show the world about sustainability because we still rely on our environment, our lands, our water to sustain our way of life.”

“The world knows more about our wildlife and the ice of the Arctic than its people.”

—Sheila Watt-Cloutier

Shared trauma

One of the key themes of Watt-Cloutier’s moving keynote address was that the problems facing the planet and its people today aren’t separate. As she put it, “Human trauma, planet trauma are one in the same.”

Today, roughly 165,000 Inuit people live in the Arctic, spread across parts of the United States, Canada and Russia. Watt-Cloutier explained that the legacy of colonialism has taken a toll on the culture and livelihood of these communities. In the 1950s, for example, the Canadian government began a campaign of taking Indigenous youth from their homes and sending them to schools far from home. 

The impacts of climate change, she added, are just the latest manifestations of that traumatic history. At the same time, communities across the globe are also beginning to notice the consequences of the Arctic’s collapse—through wildfires, floods and other disasters.

“[The Arctic] is the air conditioner for the planet,” Watt-Cloutier said. “It’s breaking down and it’s hurting not just us in the Arctic and our way of life, but it is creating the havoc we see today.”

Warm bellies

She also believes that the ingenuity of Indigenous peoples can help to solve these problems.

Watt-Cloutier spoke proudly about how Inuit peoples invented, among other things, the kayaks that are popular across the globe.

“We can build a home of snow warm enough for your mothers to birth in,” she said. “We can still do that today. That’s architecture and engineering at its best.”

Time and time again, Watt-Cloutier returned to food as a solution to many of the issues in modern Inuit communities. She spoke about her young grandson who is autistic and feels more “grounded” when he eats a traditional Inuit diet, including seal meat.

“Food is medicine for him, especially protein, especially country food.”

Indigenous contributions to solving the globe’s climate crisis may also go beyond nutrition and inventions. Watt-Cloutier said that many Indigenous communities, including Inuit peoples, recognize that humanity can only solve its climate crisis by working across cultures and nations.

“We can’t think our way out of this,” she said. “We have to feel our way out of this.”

At the end of Watt-Cloutier’s talk, she and the audience highlighted what might have been a small example of that shared humanity. The Glenn Miller Ballroom serenaded the advocate with a standing ovation and rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

“I hope somebody captured that because my people aren’t going to believe this,” Watt-Cloutier said.

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“This is the time in history where humanity has to understand that we own the power that will change the world. For so long we have been looking to political will to make change and where has that gotten us? We have to stand up and hold each other’s hands and create the difference we so badly need.”

—Hilda Flavia Nakabuye, youth activist, Uganda

  10% of population are responsible for 50% of world’s fossil fuel emissions, while the poorest 50% contribute only 10%

  216 million people will migrate within their own country by 2050 – World Bank

Nearly 4,000 people from 90 countries convened at CU Âé¶čÓ°Ôș, either virtually or in-person Friday, for a day-long, candid exploration of something speakers contend isn’t talked about enough: how climate change impacts people’s lives right now.

“A lot of times, we talk about climate change as an issue that will affect future generations, but the reality is, for many communities climate change is already here 
and has been for a long time,” said New Zealand-based Indigenous and disability rights activist Kera Sherwood O’Regan during the panel “”

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis kicked off the three-day Right Here, Right Now Global Climate Summit with a stark reminder that no corner of the globe is immune to the impacts of a rapidly warming planet.

Less than one year ago, he noted, just miles from his podium, Âé¶čÓ°Ôș County suffered the most destructive fire in the history of the state, a rare wintertime blaze that burned more than 1,000 homes, including those of many CU faculty and staff.

“There’s no denying that climate change is also a humanitarian crisis,” Polis said.

Marshall Islands to Uganda

Throughout the day, speakers from distant corners of the globe shared what that humanitarian crisis has looked like for their communities.

For the young women of South and Central America, crushing drought has forced northward migration, which often comes with danger, including sexual assault, explained Astrid Puentes RiaƄo, a lawyer and human rights advocate from Colombia who joined the first panel.

She noted that in 2018, a staggering 82% of crops were lost in Honduras, prompting caravans of people, many of them women, to head north.

“It is not the same to be a wealthy man or woman here in Âé¶čÓ°Ôș impacted by climate change as it is for a 14-year-old Indigenous girl migrating all the way from Central America,” RiaƄo said. “If she is lucky, she will get to the U.S. alive.”

During an emotional keynote speech, with images of her great grandfather and other elders displayed behind her, Indigenous rights activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier described how youth suicide rates among the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic are soaring, in part due to the rapid vanishing of ice (long used for hunting, transportation and housing) and a cultural cornerstone for the Inuit people.

“The ice is our life force,” she said.

During an afternoon session titled “,” youth activist and poet Selina Leem, from the Marshall Islands, spoke of a growing up in a place, just 2 meters above sea level, where global warming could literally mean the submergence of her homeland.

“We are not accepting of the idea of permanently relocating from our country. It is where it is and that is where we deserve it to be,” Leem said.

Beside her on stage, youth activist Hilda Flavia Nakabuye described how droughts and floods, and the resulting lack of harvest, forced her family of farmers to sell portions of their land and pull her out of school when they couldn’t pay the fees.

“Meals reduced from five a day to two to one until we just had to wait for water from the stream and then the stream started drying up. We asked why the gods were punishing us,” Flavia Nakabuye said.

Even well-intentioned “solutions” to climate change can also inflict harm, said panelist Mattias ÃhrĂ©n, who comes from an Indigenous reindeer-herding community in northern Sweden, where sprawling wind farms have begun to gobble up vital pastureland. 

“Yes, climate change is terrible, but sometimes the fight against it is even worse,”  ÃhrĂ©n said.

With candid stories about the devastating impact of climate change came stories of progress.

Panelists noted that at last month’s United Nations Climate Conference, COP27, in Egypt, participating countries reached a historic decision to establish a “loss and damage fund” to support nations most vulnerable to the climate crisis.

This summer, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution recognizing the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment as a human right. And a record 300 representatives from Indigenous communities attended COP27, noted Sherwood O’Regan. (Notably, 600 representatives from the fossil fuel industry were also there).

“Loss and damage getting across the line at COP27 is absolutely massive,” Sherwood O’Regan said, stressing that the initiative was brought forth by Indigenous and other front-line communities impacted by climate change. “It is critical that we give credit where it is due. They have not been given space by developed nations, it has happened because people have banged down the doors of those negotiation rooms.”

When asked by NPR journalist and panel moderator Lakshmi Singh to name their No. 1 ask in the battle to save the planet from climate change, the answer from afternoon panelists was universal: representation.

“The power to make decisions has to be shifted from those who might have the means to those who are actually affected,” said ÃhrĂ©n.

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