Across these lands, First Nations are not simply responding to climate change; they are expressing a profound act of self-determination. Investing in resilience is not just about reducing risk or protecting infrastructure; it is about renewing relationships with land, water, plants, animals, and elements as the primary teachers of how to live, adapt, and thrive in a rapidly changing world.
For Indigenous communities, resilience is inseparable from identity, language, law, and governance. It is a way of saying: We will define our own adaptation, guided by the natural laws that have sustained life here for millennia.
Learning from Nature’s Long History of Change
Climate change is often described as novel or purely human-made. While industrial activity has unquestionably accelerated, the Earth’s climate has always been in motion. Over millennia, warming, cooling, flooding, and fire have continuously reshaped life. In these cycles, nature teaches a hard truth: some species perish, others adapt. Those that survive don’t just endure; they reorganize, forge new relationships, and sometimes emerge more resilient and diverse than before.
Indigenous Peoples have observed and lived within these adaptive processes for thousands of years. By watching how plants root deeper, how animals shift migration patterns, and how waters carve new paths, communities learn what authentic adaptation means. Adaptation is not an optional add-on; it is a law of life.
More-than-Human Teachers of Autonomy
Indigenous law and lifeways are rooted in the more-than-human world. Languages carry the verbs and metaphors of specific territories, while hunting, fishing, harvesting, and ceremony express ecological kinship.
From this perspective:
- Plants teach patience, rootedness, and collective defence.
- Animals show mobility, alertness, and cooperation.
- Waters’ model persistence and the quiet strength of flow.
- Fire and wind remind us of transformation and the limits of control.
These beings are not “resources.” They are teachers. They show that autonomy is not isolation but the capacity to respond to change while remaining in right relationship with the web of life. For many First Nations, this is where self-determination begins in the school of the land, long before it is written into policy.
Climate Change as a Crucible for Renewal
When communities design resilient housing, energy systems, food networks, or water infrastructure, they do more than install technology; they realign human systems with the teachings of their territories. This can mean:
- Designing community layouts that follow local contours, winds, and wildlife corridors.
- Adjusting hunting and fishing practices to track shifting species while maintaining reciprocity.
- Reclaiming fire stewardship to protect habitats and renew ecosystems.
- Localizing food and energy to reduce reliance on fossil-fuel-heavy supply chains.
Each of these is a form of climate self-determination. The more space, resources, and authority First Nations must shape such models, the more deeply adaptation can take root in long-term relationships with land and water. These shifts are not only technical but also cultural, linguistic, and spiritual. They create the conditions for communities to renew their institutions, habits, and values at the pace the Earth now demands.
Knowledge That Evolves with the Climate
As First Nations engage closely with their territories, monitoring ice, tracking plant cycles, observing wildlife, and watching shorelines, a living record of change emerges. Each project produces two transformations:
- Infrastructure evolves through new buildings, systems, and practices.
- Knowledge evolves, deepening understanding of place, risk, and interdependence.
This co-evolution is crucial. Static plans soon fail in a world of accelerating climate disruptions. True resilience relies on the capacity to read the land, interpret signals, and adjust course. When governance is grounded in the agency of the land itself, Indigenous Nations are uniquely positioned to lead this kind of adaptive practice.
From Self-Determination to Shared Sovereignty
When First Nations lead adaptation, they are not only strengthening their own communities, but they are also modelling shared sovereignty rooted in place. Shared sovereignty does not erase difference; it anchors relationships in mutual responsibility.
It rests on three recognitions:
- Natural laws, those governing water, soil, species, and climate, are the highest laws.
- Human governance must fit within them, not above them.
- Nation-to-nation relationships are strongest when grounded in shared duties to land and water.
As First Nations are supported to listen to and act from the authority of land, new possibilities for collaboration and climate justice open. Non-Indigenous societies have much to learn from these approaches, not just techniques, but humility: accepting that humans must adapt to the Earth, not the other way around.
A Path Forward for Climate Justice
Climate change is revealing the brittleness of systems built on extraction and the denial of limits. In contrast, Indigenous climate leadership offers another path, one grounded in relationship with morethanhuman relatives and exercised through responsibility rather than domination.
For readers of the Indigenous Climate Hub, this is an invitation to see resilience not as a technical challenge but as a renewal of connection:
- Supporting First Nations’ leadership strengthens teachers’ adaptation to lands, waters, and living beings.
- Investing in Indigenous self-determination invests in knowledge systems that can guide all communities through uncertainty.
- Embracing shared sovereignty honours natural law and the hope that, by learning from the Earth, humanity can move beyond survival into a state of balance.
In this light, climate change becomes more than a threat; it becomes the crucible through which deeper self-determination, wiser stewardship, and more just relationships among nations are forged.
Blog by Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Image Credit : Kenzie Broad, Unsplash
The post Climate Resilience as an Act of Self-Determination appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
The ongoing “super El Niño” is likely to peak at the end of 2026 and push average global temperatures to record levels next year.
That is according to Carbon Brief’s latest “state of the climate” update, which analyses El Niño forecasts from more than a dozen climate models, as well as six global temperature datasets.
Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor, described this year’s El Niño as “simply staggering” when answering questions from CB+ members during a CB Connect “ask me anything” session.
El Niño is a naturally occurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere and temporarily boosts global temperatures.
This year’s El Niño event – which has been underway since June – has already broken a number of records and reshaped the world’s weather, fuelling fires in Indonesia and “super typhoons” in the west Pacific.
The strength of an El Niño is tracked using the “Niño3.4 anomaly”, which is a measure of how much warmer sea surface temperatures are than average in a section of the central Pacific.
Analysis of more than 600 forecasts from 14 different climate models by Hausfather for Carbon Brief’s “state of the climate” update shows how models project this year’s El Niño will peak with an anomaly of around 4C. This would be more than a degree above the previous record in 2015-16.
Writing on CB Connect on 5 November, Hausfather wrote:
“This El Niño event is developing so quickly and is reaching sea surface temperatures so warm that it’s simply staggering. We haven’t seen anything like this in the historical record and it may end up being the strongest El Niño event in the past millennium.”
This year’s El Niño has already chalked up a number of milestones.
On 18 September, the daily anomaly in the Niño3.4 region broke the satellite-era record set in 2015 when it reached 3.11C.
Meanwhile, September as a whole recorded the highest monthly Niño3.4 region temperature anomaly – 2.84C – since sea surface temperature records began in the mid-1800s.
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Hausfather wrote on CB Connect that this year’s El Niño had been “running well above any prior El Niño event since June, at times by a full degree [Celsius]”.
Carbon Brief’s “state of the climate” analysis indicates that El Niño is set to continue to intensify into December, with 10 out of 14 models expecting temperatures in the Niño3.4 region to peak in the final month of this year. The remainder anticipate a November peak.
While human emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible for almost all of long-term global warming, temperatures in specific years are strongly influenced by El Niño events.
The “state of the climate” analysis explains that this year’s El Niño event will have its largest effect on global temperatures in 2027. This is because global temperatures typically lag warming in the tropical Pacific by around three months.
Carbon Brief projects that the 2027 average global temperature will reach around 1.74C above pre-industrial levels. It calculates a 96% chance that next year will be the warmest on record.
This projection is based on the historical relationship between year-on-year temperature changes and El Niño conditions the preceding autumn. It also factors in uncertainty around how global temperatures will develop across the remainder of 2026.
The post ‘Simply staggering’: Rapidly developing ‘super El Niño’ on track to peak in December appeared first on Carbon Brief.
‘Simply staggering’: Rapidly developing ‘super El Niño’ on track to peak in December
Some things are too precious to risk. And Scott Reef is one of them.
Today, we’re launching a bold new campaign starring iconic Australian actor Michael Caton and a green sea turtle named Sandy to rally Australians behind one simple message: Flip off Woodside to save Scott Reef.
Off the coast of Western Australia, Scott Reef is one of Australia’s most extraordinary marine environments. It is home to vulnerable green sea turtles, endangered pygmy blue whales and thousands of other marine species.
Each year, one thousand endangered green sea turtles return to Scott Reef to nest. It’s where they lay their eggs. It’s where baby turtles hatch. It’s where they make their first brave dash from the sand to the ocean. It’s their home.
But this remarkable ecosystem is under threat from Woodside’s plans to drill for gas, with up to 57 toxic wells proposed around the reef.
Turtles can’t speak up for their home, so we’re asking Australians to make their voices heard instead.
From one Aussie icon to another
At the heart of our new campaign is an iconic Australian voice, Michael Caton. Caton is using his voice to speak out for, what will soon be, another Australian icon – Scott Reef.
In a cinematic courtroom showdown, Caton lends his unmistakable voice to one of Scott Reef’s most vulnerable inhabitants: a green sea turtle fighting to protect her home from corporate destruction.
As Sandy the turtle defiantly flips her flippers at Woodside, Caton delivers a message that every Australian can get behind.
“Some things are too precious to risk.”
Because when it comes to protecting our natural environment, sometimes being polite just isn’t enough.
Turning a gesture into a movement
We’ve launching a campaign designed to do more than grab attention. We want to turn public concern into meaningful action.
The idea is simple: flip off Woodside and make sure our political leaders know exactly where Australians stand.
We’re calling on people across the country to share the campaign, get involved on social media and, most importantly, tag their local MPs.
We need Environment Minister Murray Watt and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to hear loud and clear that Australians want Scott Reef protected, not sacrificed for another gas project.
China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 3.1% in the third quarter of 2026, as the Hormuz crisis continued to hit oil demand and coal use also dropped.
This guest post is by:
Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air
This was the largest quarterly reduction since the 2022 Covid lockdowns and means that China’s CO2 emissions have now fallen by an estimated 0.5% in the year to date.
The new analysis for Carbon Brief, based on official figures and commercial data, shows that coal use fell by 3% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2026, while oil was down 4%.
The main drivers were a fall in power-sector coal consumption, a continued sharp reduction in transport oil consumption and slowing growth in the coal-to-chemical industry.
The sharp decline in China’s CO2 emissions extends a “flat or falling” trend that began in March 2024 and has now lasted more than two years, as shown in the figure below.
The outlook for China’s CO2 emissions depends on the balance between rising energy demand, clean-energy growth and the government response to a GDP slowdown.
Decline drivers
Key drivers of the fall in CO2 in the third quarter of 2026 included a 3.3% drop in coal-power generation, after demand growth slowed and the amount of “wasted” wind and solar fell.
Power generation from solar, wind and nuclear increased by 110 terawatt hours (TWh) year-on-year, more than twice as much as the growth in total electricity demand. This added clean-power generation equal to Germany’s total power output in the same time period.
The fall in coal-power output and CO2 emissions came despite the fact that China continues to build new coal-power capacity at near-record rates. This means that average running hours for coal plants are falling even faster than total generation, eroding their profits.
Meanwhile, transport oil consumption continued to fall sharply, down 9% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2026. Electric vehicles (EVs) continued to gain market share, hitting a record 67% of passenger car sales and 50% of heavy trucks in September.
The amount of electricity used by EVs grew by 53%, much faster than the number of EVs on the road, showing increased usage of the existing fleet in preference to fuelled vehicles.
Elsewhere, growth in the coal-to-chemical industry continued to slow down in the third quarter of 2026. The sector has been a key source of emissions growth, but high coal prices have weakened profitability and higher output prices hurt downstream demand.
Finally, CO2 emissions from cement and steel production continued to fall in the third quarter, as the contraction in construction volumes accelerated.
Outlook for emissions
Energy consumption growth has been falling after a period of exceptionally high growth during Covid, while clean-power growth has been robust.