The impacts of climate change are felt acutely by Indigenous communities across Canada, with significant consequences for physical, mental, and spiritual health. As temperatures rise, ecosystems shift, and traditional ways of life are disrupted, Indigenous Peoples and communities face unique health challenges. However, these communities are also at the forefront of developing holistic approaches to addressing these impacts.
The Interconnected Nature of Indigenous Health
Indigenous perspectives on health embody a profound understanding of interconnectedness, where well-being emerges from harmonious relationships between people, land, water, and spirit. This holistic worldview recognizes that human health is inseparable from the health of the ecosystems that sustain us, creating a web of reciprocal relationships that nourish physical, mental, and spiritual wellness.
Sacred relationships form the foundation of Indigenous health understanding. These connections extend beyond individual well-being to encompass deep bonds with traditional territories, water systems, and food sources. Ceremonial healing practices and land-based wellness approaches honour these relationships, while traditional medicine protocols and ancestral healing knowledge guide health practices through seasonal ceremonial cycles. This sacred framework recognizes that human health cannot be separated from environmental health.
Environmental connections play a crucial role in maintaining wellness. Clean water relationships and healthy land connections provide the foundation for traditional food access and medicinal plant stewardship. The protection of sacred sites and maintenance of ecosystem balance demonstrate how environmental responsibility directly impacts human health. This understanding recognizes that the preservation of biodiversity is essential for maintaining community wellness.
Community wellness emerges through intergenerational relationships and cultural knowledge transmission. Strong support networks facilitate collective healing practices, while traditional teaching methods ensure the continuation of shared wellness responsibilities. These social bonds maintain cultural continuity, recognizing that individual health is inextricably linked to community well-being. The strength of these connections provides resilience in facing contemporary health challenges.
Mental and emotional well-being flows from strong connections to territory and cultural identity. Participation in traditional ceremonies and community activities creates a sense of belonging that supports psychological health. Land-based healing practices and spiritual ceremonies provide powerful tools for maintaining mental wellness, while intergenerational support ensures cultural expression continues to nurture emotional health.
Physical health practices reflect this interconnected understanding through traditional food systems and active land-based activities. Natural medicine knowledge guides seasonal activities and traditional sports, while harvesting and food preparation methods maintain important connections to the land. These traditional movement practices recognize that physical health emerges from active participation in cultural activities.
Spiritual wellness, maintained through ceremonial participation and sacred site connections, forms a crucial component of overall health. Traditional teachings and cultural protocols guide spiritual practices, while Elder and Knowledge Keeper guidance ensures proper understanding of creation stories and ancestral relationships. This spiritual foundation supports all aspects of health and well-being.
Contemporary applications of these traditional approaches demonstrate their continued relevance. The integration of traditional healing with modern health services creates more effective community-led health programs. Land-based wellness initiatives and cultural health programs provide crucial support for mental health and youth wellness, while Elder-guided healing ensures these approaches maintain their cultural integrity.
This comprehensive understanding of health demonstrates how physical, mental, and spiritual well-being emerge from proper relationships with land, water, and community. By maintaining these connections, Indigenous approaches to health provide powerful models for addressing contemporary wellness challenges while preserving cultural knowledge and practices.
Indigenous-Led Health Initiatives Addressing Climate Impacts
Indigenous communities demonstrate remarkable leadership in developing comprehensive approaches to address the intersecting challenges of climate change and community health. Their innovative responses combine traditional knowledge with contemporary practices, creating effective models for health adaptation and resilience that honour cultural values while meeting modern challenges.
Land as Medicine: Indigenous Healing Programs Bridge Traditional and Contemporary Wellness
Land-based healing programs emerge as cornerstone initiatives in Indigenous health responses to climate change. These programs create powerful spaces where traditional healing practices merge seamlessly with contemporary mental health support. Through guided activities on the land, community members strengthen their cultural connections while addressing climate-related anxiety and stress. These programs prove particularly effective in supporting Youth and Elders, creating opportunities for intergenerational knowledge transfer while building community resilience. As environmental conditions change, these programs adapt traditional therapeutic practices while maintaining their cultural integrity and healing power.
Preserving the Sacred: Indigenous Communities Revitalize Traditional Medicine in a Changing Climate
Traditional medicine revitalization efforts demonstrate Indigenous communities’ commitment to preserving and adapting crucial health knowledge. Knowledge Holders work diligently to document traditional plant knowledge while developing strategies to address changing plant distributions and access. Medicine gardens serve as living laboratories where communities cultivate essential plants while training new practitioners in traditional healing arts. These initiatives carefully integrate climate change considerations into medicine protocols, ensuring these vital practices remain viable despite environmental changes. The protection of sacred medicine sites and preservation of ceremonial practices remain central to these efforts.
Watching with Purpose: Indigenous Communities Lead Climate-Health Monitoring
Community-based monitoring programs provide essential information for health adaptation strategies. Through systematic tracking of environmental changes and their health impacts, communities develop sophisticated understanding of climate-health relationships. These Indigenous-led initiatives combine traditional knowledge with contemporary research methods, creating powerful tools for early warning and response. Local capacity building ensures communities maintain control over health monitoring while building valuable knowledge sharing networks that benefit multiple communities.
Guardians of Land and Life: Indigenous Stewards Connect Environmental and Community Health
The Indigenous Guardians program exemplifies how traditional stewardship practices support community health. Guardians serve as front-line observers of environmental change, monitoring conditions that affect community well-being. Their work protecting traditional medicine areas and tracking ecosystem changes provides crucial data for health planning. Through their efforts gathering traditional foods and preserving sacred spaces, Guardians maintain vital connections between environmental and community health.
Weaving Resilience: Indigenous Communities Create Adaptive Health Solutions for Climate Change
Adaptive health strategies emerge from these integrated efforts, demonstrating Indigenous communities’ sophisticated approach to climate-health challenges. Climate-responsive health planning incorporates traditional food system adaptation while strengthening mental health support networks. Cultural strengthening programs build community resilience, while enhanced emergency response capacity helps communities address acute climate impacts. Youth engagement initiatives ensure these adaptive strategies continue evolving, while Elder support systems maintain connections to traditional knowledge.
Braiding Knowledge: Indigenous Communities Unite Traditional Wisdom with Modern Innovation
The integration of knowledge systems within these initiatives demonstrates Indigenous communities’ ability to blend traditional wisdom with contemporary approaches. This synthesis creates innovative health solutions while preserving crucial cultural knowledge. Through community-led research and adaptive management practices, Indigenous communities develop sustainable approaches to health that respond to current challenges while maintaining traditional values and practices.
Holistic Approaches for Climate Resilience
As climate change continues to impact the health and well-being of Indigenous communities across Canada, the responses emerging from these communities offer powerful models of resilience and adaptation. By approaching health holistically – considering physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions – and grounding solutions in cultural knowledge and practices, Indigenous Peoples are developing strategies that not only address immediate health impacts but also build long-term community resilience.
These Indigenous-led approaches to addressing the health impacts of climate change offer important lessons for all of Canada and indeed the world. They demonstrate the power of integrating traditional knowledge with modern health practices, the importance of community-led initiatives, and the need for holistic approaches to health and well-being in the face of environmental change.
As Canada grapples with the broader health implications of climate change, the wisdom and resilience demonstrated by Indigenous communities provide a valuable roadmap for creating health systems and policies that are not only responsive to climate impacts but also rooted in a deep, respectful relationship with the land and all living beings.
Blog by Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
(Image Credit: Ahmed, Licensed by Unsplash+)
The post Climate Change and Indigenous Health: Addressing the Impacts on Well-being appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Climate Change and Indigenous Health: Addressing the Impacts on Well-being
Governments at the COP17 nature summit in Armenia agreed on Saturday to scale up their policies to protect the planet’s shrinking biodiversity, and for the first time invited large emerging economies like China and Gulf states to take on donor responsibilities to help fund those efforts.
For the past two weeks, countries held talks in Yerevan under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to outline a plan to ramp up currently “insufficient” policies to conserve land and marine ecosystems. A recent UN progress report found the world is off track to meet 22 out of 23 global targets aimed at reversing species loss and protecting 30% of land and seas by 2030.
While a response plan, called the “Global Review of Collective Progress”, was expected to be the main outcome of COP17, negotiations struggled to advance amid a deadlock over the controversial subject of how to finance the boost in conservation measures needed.
After an all-night session on Friday, delegates agreed to invite developing countries to voluntarily signal their interest in assuming donor funding obligations alongside developed nations. Negotiators repeatedly warned that any stronger provisions on expanding the donor base would collapse the deal.
COP president: Results beat expectations
An exhausted COP17 president Hambardzum Matevosyan, Armenia’s environment minister, told journalists in the early hours of Saturday that “we’ve achieved more than we could’ve expected” given the “importance” of the decisions being taken.
“It was 100% possible that those items did not made it through. 100% possible,” he said, adding that the conference had made progress on “all the most important items”.
Speaking at the closing plenary, the group of Pacific Islands said that, while the summit had achieved “great outcomes”, delegates are also departing Yerevan “with realities not reflected in the official text”, such as the low replenishment of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a key funder of nature projects.
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Some observers also said the deal did not go far enough. Steven Guilbeault, a former Canadian environment minister who helped broker the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), said the Yerevan package of action is “an important step forward”, but still “falls short of what is needed to meet our 2030 commitments”.
An Lambrechts, biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International, said COP17 had kept things moving forward and set well-intentioned promises, but added that these “won’t remove major roadblocks to implementation” such as insufficient finance and debt constraints in developing countries.
WWF chief conservation officer Daudi Sumba noted that financial issues were not fully resolved. Despite the deal in Yerevan, “I fear finance will remain the key issue that continues to haunt the UN biodiversity summits,” he said in a statement.
‘Yerevan Pathway’ tackles nature plans and subsidies
In the lead-up to the summit, the UN assessment report showed countries are falling short on virtually all targets in the GBF, the 2022 global deal often referred to as the ‘Paris Agreement for nature’.
They include a landmark target to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and sea by 2030. If countries all stick to their current national goals, about 26% of land would be protected and only about 12% of marine ecosystems would be under conservation measures.
The main COP17 decision – named the Yerevan Pathway by the presidency – calls for countries to revise their biodiversity plans, subject to available funding, with a particular focus on addressing the gap in coverage of “marine, coastal and inland water ecosystems”.
It also urges the over 60 countries who have not submitted a biodiversity plan yet to finalise them “as soon as possible” and taking into account the gaps identified by the UN progress report.
Countries also agreed to tackle the drivers of biodiversity loss by “accelerating” the reduction of subsidies for activities that damage nature. Subsidy reform, covered by Target 18 of the GBF, is where countries have made the least progress so far, according to the assessment report.
Jill Hepp, director of nature and marine policy and incentives at green group Conservation International, said singling out subsidies in the Yerevan Pathway “gives a strong signal” that closing the gap for biodiversity action requires “more urgent efforts to reform harmful incentives and scale up positive incentives”.
“Timid” steps to expand base of donors
Having failed to meet a target to channel $20 billion for biodiversity conservation by 2025 and faced with shrinking aid budgets, the EU pushed a proposal to expand the list of which countries count as donors, so that wealthy emerging economies like China and Saudi Arabia could also voluntarily contribute. The group of Arab nations strongly opposed this.
During the talks, Irish minister of state for nature, Christopher O’Sullivan, whose country holds the EU presidency, said the bloc wanted the world’s “new realities” to be reflected in the donor list.
Negotiations remained gridlocked for most of the two-week talks, until a last-day compromise was struck to invite developing countries that may want donor status “to indicate to the [Convention on Biological Diversity] secretariat their interest in being included in the corresponding list”.
Countries also asked the secretariat to send an invitation to emerging economies wanting donor status at each subsequent COP, and requested a technical report on “the implications of inclusion in the list” for emerging economies.
Swiss lead negotiator Gabriela Blatter said during one of the sessions that her country had expected greater steps towards expanding the base of contributing countries, but added that “if we’re mutually unhappy, it’s probably the closest we can get on these very delicate political compromises”. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, also noted their dissatisfaction but said it had expected “a lot less”.
The fragile deal was approved in a package of decisions together with the Global Review, after some delegations including Brazil and China appealed to the plenary not to make further changes to the text at the risk of collapsing the whole agreement.
In a statement delivered to the closing plenary, the EU said the finance outcome had delivered “timid” progress towards fully broadening the base of donors.
Cali Fund still not operational
Adopted two years ago at COP16, the Cali Fund was seen by some observers as a way to channel private-sector finance into biodiversity conservation, as governments struggle to find public funds. But it is still struggling to get up on its feet.
The fund allows big corporations to access certificates for the use of genetic material found in biodiversity in return for a financial contribution, which experts estimate has the potential to raise up to $6.9bn for biodiversity. While voluntary, companies are encouraged to pay 1% of their profits or 0.1% of revenue into the fund.
But since its creation, the fund has received little more than $10,000, which Guilbeault argued is because the rules for disbursements to local communities and the operation of the fund had yet to be fleshed out. This was due to happen at COP17.
Yet, while the final decision on the fund laid out some of the rules – including how companies can earn “Cali Fund certificates” – some key technical details were left to the next COP in 2028 in Ecuador. This includes the issue of whether companies can pay a lower rate if they use genetic data for only a small portion of their products.
“By punting essential decisions to two years from now, parties have all but ensured the fund remains empty until then,” said Pakhi Das, a public policy advisor at NGO Plant-for-the-Planet.
The post COP17 delivers fragile deal to boost conservation and funding for nature appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP17 delivers fragile deal to boost conservation and funding for nature
SYDNEY, Thursday 30 October 2026 — In response to reports that the Albanese government is set to introduce draft legislation this year that would seek to ban data centres in Australia’s suburbs, Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“These reports are a testament to the growing community opposition to these completely inappropriate AI factories that have sprung up across our suburbs, and Big Tech corporations should take heed — the data centre build-out must not happen without the endorsement of the Australian people.
“But the government can’t simply ship this problem out to regional Australia without addressing the fundamental issues with this extractive new industry.
“We’re already seeing a trend of AI data centre proposals moving to the regions, in areas that are more water-scarce, more environmentally sensitive, and next to sources of fracked and coal seam gas to support their massive BYO gas-fired power plans — a pattern we’ve seen play out in the United States.
“From the Beetaloo Basin in the NT to the Western Downs in Qld, we’re seeing a wave of AI data centre proposals that would see new gas fast-tracked to support their massive energy demand, and threaten to completely derail Australia’s energy transition.
“Just as suburban Australians are asking, “what for?”, regional communities like Berry Springs and Dalby do not want dirty data centres setting up shop with absolutely no benefit to their communities. Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on AI data centre developments until strict and enforceable safeguards are in place to protect our climate and our communities.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
AI data centre ban in suburbs would not address fundamental issues: Greenpeace
In the thick of the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, the UN climate talks were rattled by what can only be described as a major PR disaster. The BBC, Reuters and The Guardian all carried headlines, attributed to leading climate policy experts, that the COPs were “no longer fit for purpose”.
The articles outlined a series of reforms called for in an open letter signed by 22 eminent scientists and politicians, including a former UN secretary-general and previous UN climate chief, with a further 150 lending their support. The headlines shook confidence in the COP process, just as governments were wrestling over a new climate finance goal.
The Club of Rome – which handled the media relations for the letter – hurried to say that its “constructive, supportive ideas” had been “misinterpreted”. Negotiators kept calm(ish) and carried on, in the end landing the finance goal after some high-stakes drama on the final day.
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To my surprise, when I went back this week to read the letter again, I could not find the offending line about the COPs not being fit for purpose. The Club of Rome has yet to respond to my query about its disappearance.
Whatever happened to the wording, that sentiment has been widely shared. COPs have ballooned in size while the importance of their outcomes seems to have diminished since the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the exception of the 2023 COP in Dubai where countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems).
The same on the surface
Two years on from those painful headlines in Baku, has anything changed for the better? You might be forgiven for thinking not. Official decisions are still made by consensus rather than the majority voting some have called for to stop blockers.
Tens of thousands of officials, activists and business execs still scurry around the halls to an ever-growing list of side events, roundtables and dialogues, while deals still come down to rows, all-nighters and jargon-filled texts adopted to rounds of applause.
But it would not be true to say that COPs have completely failed to respond to the very real need to translate the words of the Paris Agreement into action in the outside world.
Global warming is projected to be around 1.3C lower this century than it would have been if the world had not committed to tackle the climate crisis under that accord. Developing countries have a valued space at COPs in which their voices have equal weight in decision-making, unlike in many other international fora. And most importantly, perhaps, there has been a subtle shift, tipping the balance away from negotiating towards doing.
Brazil branded last year’s summit in Belém as the “COP of Implementation”, corralling the sprawling Action Agenda into six axes. This was a bid to impose some structure on the mushrooming efforts between governments, UN agencies, cities, businesses and civil society to set targets and spur faster results on their pet issues, from methane emissions to health and adaptation in conflict zones. COP30 alone saw the launch of 120 “plans to accelerate solutions”.
COP30 roadmaps off the cuff
Meanwhile, as the formal negotiations drew to a close, it was clear that consensus decision-making was evolving into something a little more improvised.
With only around half of all countries on board with the idea of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced his team would put one together over the coming year, along with another on how to meet a global goal to halt deforestation by 2030. Those roadmaps will be launched next week, presented and discussed at COP31, though it’s still unclear whether or how they’ll be incorporated into the formal negotiating agenda.
