How climate change is disproportionately affecting Indigenous communities

C/O Marcus Spiske

Imagine contributing the least to climate change, but being affected by it the most

By: Hadeeqa Aziz, Contributor

The climate crisis: you’ve heard about it, you see it everywhere in the news and maybe sometimes you just can’t escape its widespread acknowledgment – that’s a good thing. Yet, despite the media’s best efforts to spread information about it, the climate crisis continues to get buried under other, seemingly larger and more “urgent” issues such as the pandemic.

What most individuals fail to understand is that global climate change is perhaps the most time-sensitive issue that we’re facing. At the moment, you and I may not be directly experiencing the effects of climate change, but I promise you that others are. In particular, marginalized groups such as Indigenous communities are often the first to face consequences of climate change due to their close relationship with the environment.

Indigenous communities are generally the most affected by events such as extreme weather conditions, depletion of natural resources and water contamination. Direct consequences have resulted in restricted access to traditional areas for resources like medicine and food and forced relocation or displacement. 

If that wasn’t enough, climate change effectively exacerbates the pre-existing issues Indigenous peoples face, such as economic and political marginalization, discrimination, unemployment and human rights violations. 

This is ironic, to say the least. Although Indigenous communities face the greatest threats from climate change, they contribute the least to greenhouse gas emissions. 

The larger issue is that, although we know climate change does not affect everyone to the same degree, many proposed solutions seem to assume exactly that. We’re advised to ditch the cheeseburgers, receive passive death glares upon requesting a straw at Starbucks and penalized if we don’t use compostable coffee cups. Though changing small habits like these can definitely have an impact when done on a larger scale, it’s rather unfair to single out individuals, especially Indigenous peoples, for not complying. 

Veganism is not feasible when it may be a struggle to put food on the table, conserving water would be difficult when there’s limited access to it and contemplating the purchase of a metal straw seems silly when there’s no cup to stick it into. See the pattern? Developing eurocentric solutions for an intersectional problem is simply classist, racist and will not get the job done. 

What’s more is that most of these short-sighted solutions may not be applicable to Indigenous groups to begin with. Asking a community that has relied on animal husbandry for thousands of years without depleting wildlife populations or inflicting permanent harm to the earth to suddenly go vegan is a questionable approach. Meanwhile, industrial agriculture and capitalism’s insistence on competitive factory farming is slowly but surely demolishing our planet. 

All this being said, some Indigenous communities may very well be capable of and have the means to apply these changes to their lives. Better yet, let’s pretend for a second that these changes are feasible for everyone and executed on a sizable scale. According to the International Energy Agency, in one of the biggest pandemics, carbon emissions have only dropped by eight per cent. What does this tell us? When the world supposedly shut down and individual impacts significantly decreased, the effects of climate change didn’t follow very far. We continue to promote individual contributions without looking at the bigger picture. 

So what exactly does this bigger picture look like? 

Let’s take a young start-up located on the Mississaugas of New Credit First Nation reserve just south of Hamilton, for example. They work in proximity with local Indigenous partners to develop projects such as wind farms, sustainable fishing for companies and sustainable forest management programs through which they’ve created carbon offsets. These offsets can then be used to help large businesses reduce their environmental impacts. 

It’s funny how, despite facing the harsh consequences of issues created by multinational corporations, Indigenous community leaders are at the forefront in designing innovative solutions to combat climate change. Indigenous communities protect and nurture 80 per cent of the earth’s biodiversity but instead of giving them a seat at the table, we'd rather focus on metal straws.