World Indigenous Leaders Meet to Address Climate Change

The Foundation for the Promotion and Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous Peoples’ Biocultural Climate Change Assessment Initiative have organized the first international forum for world indigenous leaders to discuss the impacts of climate change on their communities.

The Epistemologies and Indigenous Methodologies to Respond to Climate Change meeting runs from April 2 to 7 in the Ustupu community of the Kuna Yala comarca in Panama.  Indigenous leaders from biodiversity hotspots in Thailand, India, the United States, Ecuador, Kenya, Peru and Panama are attending.

Indigenous peoples living in the most biodiverse and fragile ecosystems of the planet are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to their direct reliance on the local natural systems for their well-being and their disadvantaged socioeconomic standing caused by historical, and often ongoing, political and social processes of discrimination, the Indigenous Peoples’ Biocultural Climate Change Assessment Initiative website says.

The ninth session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous issues will meet from April 19 to 30 at the UN Headquarters in New York to discuss development with culture and identity of the indigenous peoples.