Indigenous Women as Frontline Defenders in the Fight Against Climate Change

Oct 11, 2022 | Marisa O. Ensor

Although Indigenous communities comprise less than 5 percent of the world’s population, Indigenous peoples safeguard 80 percent of the planet's biodiversity. Indigenous lands are also crucial to protecting forest ecosystems and immense carbon stores. More than 20 percent of the carbon stored above ground in the world’s forests is found in land managed by Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon Basin, Mesoamerica, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Indonesia. Indigenous traditional knowledge of natural resource management and sustainable land use offer important lessons to cope with the negative impacts of climate change, promote conservation, and contribute to disaster risk reduction. Yet, as the climate crisis intensifies with record floods, fires, and heatwaves across the world, so does the violence against Indigenous environmental defenders, many of whom are women.

A Legacy of Colonialism and Violence

Across the world, Indigenous people’s life expectancy is up to 20 years lower than the average for their non-Indigenous counterparts. Indigenous women also have higher rates of maternal mortality and teenage pregnancy. They are less likely to use health care facilities when pregnant because of discrimination, mistreatment and well-founded fears of forced sterilization.  For some, restrictions on movement have infringed on their right to adequate food by barring them from accessing the land, forests, and natural resources they need to sustain their livelihoods.

A recent report from Global Witness (2022) estimates that more than 1,700 people have died in the last decade while trying to protect their lands, forests, and water bodies, with  200 environmental defenders killed in 2021 alone. This study finds that 68 percent of the murders took place across the American continent, with Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Honduras recording the highest totals. One in three of those killed were Indigenous people, often involved in struggles to prevent the exploitation of their ancestral territories by mining, oil, logging or hydropower developers.

Among Indigenous women, participation in peace and environmental activism is often perceived as breaking both class and gender social norms. Indigenous women often see their struggle as both environmental and spiritual as they fight against the destruction of sacred sites in their territory. They have at times paid for their efforts with their lives, with the lethal attacks against them taking place in the context of wider threats including criminalization, intimidation, unlawful surveillance, and sexual violence.

International Law and Indigenous Land Rights

Established in 2000, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), is the central body within the UN system which deals with Indigenous issues. These include economic and social development, culture, education, health, the environment, and human rights. Indigenous Peoples’ rights are more specifically laid out in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007.

Land rights are a particularly contentious issue. The lack of legal security of tenure remains a critical concern for Indigenous peoples almost everywhere. While Indigenous peoples’ land ownership rights are established under international law, only a few countries recognize Indigenous peoples' land rights. Even in those countries, land titling and demarcation procedures have often not been completed, suffer delays, or are shelved because of changes in political leadership and policies. Indigenous lands are routinely appropriated, sold, and leased out by the state as mining or logging concessions without consulting Indigenous peoples, much less obtaining their free, prior and informed consent.

Forced evictions and the dispossession of lands have particularly severe impacts on Indigenous women and girls, who, as a result, often have an increased workload as they must walk long distances to find alternative sources of water or fuel wood. Others are driven out of income-earning productive activities and into a situation of economic dependence on men that exacerbates their vulnerability to sexual and gender based violence.  Criminal gangs, paramilitary groups, and private security forces from industries like mining, logging, dam construction, and agribusiness often target these Indigenous environmental and human rights activists. 

An emblematic case involves Berta Cáceres, an Indigenous Lenca woman who was murdered in Honduras in 2016. As a student-activist, Berta co-founded the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) in 1993.  Berta fought to stop the construction of a hydroelectric dam on the Gualcarque River, which is part of the sacred ancestral territory of the Lenca Indigenous community. Water governance is a primary concern in Honduras, one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change in Central America.

Hope on the Horizon

Despite the grim statistics and the rise in the number of deaths in recent years, Indigenous environmental rights advocates and activists are hopeful that progress is being made.  In 2018, partly in response to the death of Berta Cáceres, 24 Latin American and Caribbean countries signed a legally binding pact to protect the rights of environmental defenders. On December 2, 2019, seven men found guilty of killing Berta Cáceres were sentenced to between 30 and 50 years.

Another noteworthy development is the Escazú Agreement, which entered into force in 2021. This agreement is the first treaty for Latin America and the Caribbean focusing on the linkages between environment and human rights. It commits countries to prevent and investigate attacks on environmental defenders. Yet, more work is required to ensure that Indigenous people not only are not assaulted for defending their rights but are not forced to fight for them in the first place. 

Indigenous women and human rights defenders across the globe are at the vanguard of land rights advocacy and environmental protection. We must support their efforts to preserve their traditional knowledge as a vital tool to protect the environment and tackle climate change, without tokenizing or romanticizing Indigenous contributions.

These priorities are reflected in a statement penned by Jade Begay and Dallas Goldtooth, two Indigenous authors and activists with the Indigenous Environmental Network, to mark Indigenous Peoples Day (October 10^th). Rejecting narratives that often frame Indigenous peoples as victims, they instead exhort us to acknowledge “the tireless work of Indigenous organizers, activists, knowledge keepers, and artists” so that Indigenous strengths, resilience, and creativity are seen and honored.  

 In Begay’s and Goldtooth’s own words:

 “As Indigenous peoples, we are powerful agents of change in a time that needs us the most—and our ability to harness an intersectional, feminist, and transformative movement is what will lead us in the right direction for the benefit of all life on this planet. Let’s cherish that. Let’s honor that. Let’s build on that”.

 Dr. Marisa O. Ensor is an applied environmental and legal anthropologist currently based at Georgetown University’s Justice and Peace Studies Program. She is also the current Chair of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association’s Gender Interest Group (EnPAx-GIG).