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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
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Countries have completed the first “global review” of their progress towards reversing nature loss by 2030 at the COP17 biodiversity talks in Yerevan, Armenia.
The review “notes with deep concern” that, unless action is “rapidly accelerated”, the goal to reverse nature loss and meet a set of 23 targets by 2030 “will not be achieved”.
It “urges” countries to accelerate action, including by “increased ambition in addressing the gaps”.
Much of the discussions in Yerevan focused on how to raise the necessary funds to help developing countries protect nature.
Some major economies pushed to expand the range of nations that are expected to provide finance, with countries agreeing at the end of the two weeks of talks that non-donors that want to contribute can “signal interest” before COP18.
This came after developed countries failed to meet a target to significantly ramp up nature finance over the last few years.
It also came as a landmark fund agreed at COP16 in Colombia to pay communities for the genetic resources derived from nature stands nearly empty two years on.
The Yerevan talks marked the halfway point of the “Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework” (GBF), the “Paris Agreement for nature” first made in 2022 and due to be achieved by 2030.
During the nearly 12-hour-long final plenary, countries voted for Quito, Ecuador, to host the COP18 nature talks, which will be held in 2028.
Countries managed to sign off on all the major negotiation texts, marking a stark contrast to COP16, which ran so far over time that the Colombian presidency lost “quorum”, forcing talks to resume in Rome months later.
Below, Carbon Brief has detailed analysis of all of the key outcomes from COP17.
Formal negotiations
Finance
Finance, predictably, was at the heart of the discord and deadlock at the Yerevan talks.
At COP17, discussions on finance had to achieve several outcomes.
The first part – to take stock of biodiversity finance mobilised so far to meet the nature deal’s goals – fell under the global review.
As the global report noted, developed countries failed to meet their commitments to raise “at least $20bn a year by 2025” for nature. Delegates pointed to falling aid levels and a sharp 27% decline in environmental funding for the 2026-30 period.
The second part was to agree on how to mobilise resources for the next four years, to meet the GBF’s goals and targets.
Calls to “broaden the contributor base” of who pays to protect nature – and whether that should include emerging economies – became the most fraught element of the talks.
Eventually, countries agreed on what Switzerland described as a “super, mega-delicate” text. It hinged on major “political compromises”, with “no major winner or loser”, according to Kenya.
Per the decision, countries that want to be included on a list of developed country donors can “signal interest” through bilateral, confidential consultations before COP18 and every alternate COP after.
Finally, countries also agreed on criteria to shape and resource a new, permanent financial mechanism to protect nature after 2030.
However, this did not immediately take the form of a new fund under the COP that biodiverse countries have demanded since 2022, deferring the mechanism’s institutional structure to COP18.
Resource mobilisation discussions at the GBF’s halfway mark were supposed to agree on how to close the “biodiversity finance gap” and to “increase resources from all sources” to “at least” $200bn per year by 2030, as set out in target 19 of the GBF.
The talks were largely dominated by a push, led by the JUSCANZ bloc of developed countries, to “broaden the contributor base”. This could see emerging economies, such as Qatar, China, Saudi Arabia and India, being added to the list of countries that pay to protect nature.
Article 20 of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) states that developed countries “shall provide new and additional financial resources” to developing countries to meet the costs of implementing measures to protect nature.
The text states that other countries – including emerging economies – may “voluntarily assume” these obligations to pay. However, it adds that this list of developed countries “shall” be reviewed periodically and amended “if necessary”.
The list was last amended in 2006.
(See this “jargon buster” which explains the specific meaning and legal weight of various terms and verbs used in UN formal documents.)
Discussions around this fraught subject had reached a dead end at intersessional talks this year, but resurfaced in Yerevan.
The first “non-paper” had four different options for expanding the contributor base. These ranged from using the World Bank’s country income groups “as a proxy” to identify high-income countries, to commissioning a study on the impacts of being included on the list.
By 21 October, the number of options swelled to eight, including two from Saudi Arabia and one from Peru.
Some countries “expressed concern” that certain options were based on a CBD secretariat study on “what constitutes a developed country”, Earth Negotiations Bulletin reported.
By the end of the first week, it was clear that the finance deadlock would have to go into informal ministerial consultations for any consensus to emerge.
At a press conference on 28 October, Christopher O’Sullivan, Ireland’s nature minister and representing the EU delegation, told Carbon Brief:
“Our position isn’t that we want to pull back in terms of contributing…but it’s been 20 years since that list was added to, times have changed and there are new realities. We just simply want those new realities reflected. I don’t fully understand why there’s so much opposition to that.”
The EU chose not to comment on which countries it would like to see on that list.
Lim Li Ching from the Third World Network, meanwhile, called the push for others to “assume the obligations” of developed countries “sheer hypocrisy”, adding that any country could make a voluntary contribution. She told Carbon Brief:
“At a forum like the CBD, this linking of income status with finance does not take into account where historical and current responsibilities lie. If you want to generate more funding for biodiversity, let’s look at sovereign debt burdens and rules, which are inequitable for developing countries. But if you can fund wars, and provide resources for your defence industry, then you know where the priorities are.”
On 29 October – at a plenary meant to adopt final texts for the most contentious subjects – Norway’s Gaute Hanssen announced that resource-mobilisation discussions would go into a smaller “friends of the chair” meeting.
Facilitated by Carolina Caceres from Canada and Imèn Meliane from Tunisia, the meeting would discuss the most contentious elements of a draft decision that had swelled to 112 brackets, denoting areas of disagreement on specific details in the text.
While the meeting was open to all, countries that were called to be present included Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, the EU, Fiji, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the UK.
At the same time, a “non-paper” text by finance and environment ministers laid out countries’ red lines and compromises.
At the end of COP17, countries welcomed a final compromise text, with Kenya thanking the “strong women” co-chairs who strove to strike a “delicate” balance.
China, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland and Fiji cautioned against any further interventions, with Brazil warning: “If we open this text, we will never close it again.”
While the final decision “recognises” that “contributions from more parties would improve the mobilisation” of biodiversity finance, it steered away from issuing criteria to expand the list of donor countries.
The text makes it clear that no additions to the list would be made without inviting and confidentially consulting with interested countries, to secure their explicit consent.
Instead, the CBD secretariat “invites” countries keen to be on the list and “assume the obligations” of developed countries to “signal interest” before COP18 and at every alternate COP thereafter.
At the same time, developing countries can contribute to meeting the GBF and biodiversity convention’s goals on a “voluntary basis”, with contributions not implying inclusion on the list.
A negotiator for China told Carbon Brief at the closing plenary:
“We welcome this balanced document. It was a very long discussion that has gone [on] since [2022 nature talks in] Nairobi. But actually this time, there were a lot of sensitive issues, [there were] a lot of critical things we didn’t open in the contact groups; it mainly went to the high-level discussion.”
The decision also establishes a financial mechanism for nature funding after 2030 under the governance of the COP, a key ask from developing countries.
However, it defers decisions on what form this mechanism would take – whether this would be a new fund or based on existing arrangements – until COP18.
Oscar Soria at the Common Initiative told Carbon Brief that the decision on the financial mechanism leaves things “very open”, with “no movement” towards a new fund or money and no upgrades to existing funding arrangements.
The text acknowledges the links between debt and biodiversity eight times, mentioning how debt-related instruments can be included in biodiversity plans, but does not go further.
“It is almost as if the debt studies they called for at COP16 didn’t happen,” said Soria, who had earlier flagged serious methodological issues with the first-ever COP-commissioned report on debt and biodiversity.
Global review
In Yerevan, countries agreed on the first stocktake of progress towards the 2030 nature targets – known as the “global review”.
The review was one of the keenly anticipated outcomes from COP17 and was seen as less controversial than some of the other major negotiation strands.
It was swiftly signed off by countries at the start of the final COP17 plena