Rukka Sombolinggi, a Torajan Indigenous woman from Sulawesi, Indonesia, is the first female Secretary General of AMAN, the world’s largest Indigenous peoples organization.
Gathered in NYC in mid-April, 87 Indigenous leaders from 35 countries met to hammer out a set of demands to address a common scourge: the green energy transition that has our peoples under siege.
Worldwide, we are experiencing land-grabs and a rising tide of criminalization and attacks for speaking out against mining and renewable energy projects that violate our rights with impacts that are being documented by UN and other experts. Their research confirms what we know firsthand.
And yet political and economic actors continue to ignore the evidence, pushing us aside in their rush to build a system to replace fossil fuels, while guided by the same values that are destroying the natural world.
Ironically, we released this declaration amid the UN’s sustainability week – renewable energy was on the agenda. We were not.
Q&A: What you need to know about clean energy and critical minerals supply chains
Indigenous peoples are not opposed to pivoting away from oil and gas, nor are we opposed to investing in renewable energy systems as an alternative.
But we must have a say. More than half the mines that are expected to produce metals and minerals to serve renewable technologies are on or near the territories of Indigenous peoples and peasant communities.
Resource extraction causing triple crisis
In the words of the UN’s Global Resource Outlook 2024, released in March with little fanfare by the UN Environment Programme: “the current model of natural resource extraction…is driving an unprecedented triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution”.
Mining companies have been offered a path to sustainability. Few have started down that path.
And they won’t unless global and national decision-makers take advantage of this key moment in history to demand change. Indigenous leaders need to be at the table too.
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We are not willing to have our territories become the deserts that mining companies create, leaking toxins into our rivers and soils and poisoning our sources of water and food, and by extension our children.
The playing field for Indigenous peoples is massively unjust. The authors of the Global Resources Outlook cite evidence of national governments that favor companies’ interests “by removing the judicial protection of Indigenous communities, expropriating land…or even using armed forces to protect mining facilities”.
Why should this matter to people on the other side of the planet?
Proven to outperform the public and private sectors, Indigenous peoples conserve some of the world’s most biodiverse regions. Negotiators at global climate events do cite our outsize conservation role, but treaty language allows our governments to decide when and whether to recognize or enforce our rights.
Companies are advised to “engage” with our communities – not so they can avoid harming us, but to prevent costly conflicts that arise in response to outdated and destructive practices.
These “externalities” that chase us from our ancestral homes and damage our health and the ecosystems we treasure are revealed only when they become “material”, of concern to investors and relevant to risk analysts.
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Our resistance is costly and material. Failure to properly obtain our consent before sending in the bulldozers can bring a project to a halt, with a price tag as high as $20 million a week. And communities are learning to use the tools of the commercial legal system to defend themselves.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School report that, over time, shareholders benefit most when companies heed the demands of their most influential stakeholders. Indigenous peoples are the stakeholders to please.
Our communities disrupt supply chains, but when our rights are respected, we can also be the best indicators of a company’s intention to avoid harm to people and planet.
Call for ban on mining in ‘no-go’ zones
In the declaration we released in New York earlier this month, we called for laws to reduce the consumption of energy worldwide, and we laid out a path for ensuring that the green transition is a just one.
We urged our governments to recognize and protect our rights as a priority; to end the killings, the violence and the criminalization of our peoples; and to require corporations to secure our free, prior and informed consent, and avoid harming our lands and resources.
A growing body of evidence suggests that Indigenous peoples rooted to their ancestral lands can draw on traditional knowledge, stretching back over generations, to help nature evolve and adapt to the changing climate. We understand the sustainable use of wild species and hold in our gardens genetic resources that can protect crops of immeasurable economic and nutritional value.
Current practices for extracting metals and minerals put our peoples at risk and endanger climate, biodiversity, water, global health and food security. Researchers warned earlier this year that the unprecedented scale of demand for “green” minerals will lay waste to more and more land and drive greater numbers of Indigenous and other local peoples from our homes.
So our declaration also calls on governments to impose a ban on the expansion of mining in “no-go” zones – those sites that our peoples identify as sacred and vital as sources of food and clean water. Indigenous communities, rooted in place by time and tradition, can help stop the green transition from destroying biomes that serve all humanity.
The UN Secretary-General launches a panel on critical minerals today that seems to recognize the importance of avoiding harm to affected communities and the environment.
This is a step in the right direction, but Indigenous peoples and our leaders – and recognition and enforcement of our rights – must be at the centre of every proposal for mining and renewable energy that affect us and our territories. This is the only way to keep climate “response measures”, made possible by the Paris Agreement, from harming solutions that exist already.
The post Indigenous lands feel cruel bite of green energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate Change
Threads of Earth’s Underground Fungal Networks Are Long Enough to Reach Beyond the Solar System
For the first time ever, researchers have quantified the length and mass of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks globally and mapped the ecosystems where they are densest.
Hidden underground around the world lie 110 quadrillion kilometers of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks—webs of ultra-thin threads that, if connected in a single line, would stretch almost a billion times thge distance between the Earth and the sun, according to new research published in Science on Thursday.
Threads of Earth’s Underground Fungal Networks Are Long Enough to Reach Beyond the Solar System
The number of journalists registered to attend the annual climate negotiations in Bonn has declined this year, as climate reporters have been let go and media coverage of climate issues falls around the world.
Data from UN Climate Change, which runs the two weeks of talks, shows that just 135 media representatives have signed up to attend. Climate Home News analysis of previous data shows this is the lowest figure since 2021, when COVID-19 restrictions limited travel and the Bonn talks were held in a hybrid format to enable online participation.
The number of journalists that actually attend the talks will not be known until later this month but is typically significantly less than are registered. Press conferences, held back-to-back each day by campaign groups, have been sparsely attended in the first few days and often filled mainly with climate campaigners and researchers rather than journalists.
Alexandra Endres, a reporter for German-language website Table Briefings, told Climate Home News in Bonn there are fewer German journalists covering the conference in-person. “I think it is important to have more journalists covering the negotiations because when the climate coverage increases, the interest of the public grows,” she said.
Media outlets that have registered fewer journalists than previous years, or no journalists, include global heavyweights like Reuters, Bloomberg and the BBC, as well as German outlets like Deutsche Welle and ZDF television, and specialist publications like business information service Argus and climate broadcaster We Don’t Have Time.
Activist Harjeet Singh, who is in Bonn advising the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative, said that “the empty press seats here in Bonn are a warning signal. While the world’s gaze is often fixed on the annual COP summits, the real-world consequences of the climate crisis—from financing the fossil fuel transition to protecting vulnerable populations—are being shaped, or ignored, in these mid-year negotiations right now.”
“Journalists are the essential eyes and ears of the public,” he said. “We need them to shine a light on these rooms: hold negotiators accountable, defend the principles of equity and historical responsibility, and ensure that ‘technical’ negotiations do not become an excuse for delay.”
UN Climate Change said they could not comment on the situation at this point in the Bonn talks.
Climate coverage is falling
Outside of Bonn and the official UN climate negotiations, coverage of climate change is falling to lows not seen since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to analysis of newspapers and television reporting conducted by the Media and Climate Change Observatory (MECCO).
MECCO’s head Max Boykoff told Climate Home News that climate coverage in the first five months of 2025 was 35% down on the same period of 2025 and 41% less than in 2021. New analysis by the Yale Programme on Climate Change Communication found a similar fall in climate coverage in 2026.
Boykoff said media attention has been drawn away from climate change to issues like the Iran war and now the World Cup getting underway in North America.
While both stories have climate implications, he said, the media have “failed to connect the dots” on the conflict in the Middle East, with coverage focusing on the politics, air strikes and violence of the war. “Reporters have been pulling up short,” he said.
He added that since 2025 there have been cuts to climate teams at US outlets like the Washington Post, CBS, National Public Radio and the Los Angeles Times. On top of this, the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Context website has been shut down and Politico recently folded specialist environmental outlet E&E News into its broader energy coverage.
Mark Hertsgaard, head of global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now, also said that fewer reporters at Bonn is “part of a larger pattern”. He said no US television network sent reporters to the recent Santa Marta conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels “and as a result they missed covering what turned out to be a landmark development in the climate story”.
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“No one can know if the Bonn talks will yield something similar until the [they] actually take place and conclude. But the fewer journalists that are on the scene, the less the world’s people and policymakers will know about that. And that’s a problem,” he said.
Media may also have been put off from attending by a new registration system which is more complicated, especially for freelance journalists. In addition, the rise in jet fuel prices has made travelling by plane to Bonn much more expensive than last year and reporters from many developing countries continue to face hurdles getting visas to enter the Schengen area, of which Germany is part.
Diego Arguedas Ortiz, who led the Oxford Climate Journalism Network from 2022 until it was shut down by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in 2025, said journalists can’t cover the talks so well remotely.
While press conferences, plenaries and open negotiating sessions are broadcast for the public to watch on the UNFCCC’s website, Ortiz said relying solely on this means “you miss the interviews in the hall”.
“You can´t catch scientists and ministers as they leave the rooms. And the audience is back home suffering. Because audiences are relying on reporters and editors to explain how these seemingly abstract negotiations have daily implications for them,” he explained.
The post Fewer journalists register for Bonn talks, as cuts to climate reporting bite appeared first on Climate Home News.
Fewer journalists register for Bonn talks, as cuts to climate reporting bite
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