Published

1 month ago

June 20, 2026

Alice Rush

Rethinking clean water in First Nations through the sovereignty and rights of water itself.

This month, Canada tabled a new version of its First Nations clean-water legislation, and the shift in its language is quietly telling.

The previous bill, C-61, the First Nations Clean Water Act, contained something notable for a Canadian statute: it “recognized and affirmed” that it is a human right of every individual on First Nations land to have access to clean and safe drinking water, albeit only “in accordance with” that Act. That bill lapsed when Parliament was prorogued in early 2025. Its replacement, Bill C-37, introduced this June, frames the same idea more cautiously. Rather than recognizing a right outright, it commits to “further the progressive realization, for individuals on First Nation lands, of the human right to safe drinking water, as protected by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.” It is a subtle change in wording, but those close to the file noticed it at once.

It is worth sitting with that for a moment—not as a matter of politics, but of permanence. A right to water that one law can affirm and the next can soften is, by its nature, a provisional thing. The water itself, meanwhile, does not wait on language. Communities like Neskantaga First Nation in northern Ontario have lived under a drinking-water advisory since 1995—long enough that children born into the advisory are now raising children of their own under it. Dozens of advisories remain in place across the country, including long-term ones that governments pledged to end years ago. The wording on the page changes; the water on and under the ground does not.

So we are left with a quieter, harder question. If the right to water can be written and unwritten, strengthened and softened, then was it ever truly secure—and on what foundation did it rest? Perhaps the difficulty lies in the frame itself: the idea that water is something granted to people, rather than something with a life, a continuity, and a standing of its own.

Let’s flip the script entirely. Not water as a human right, but the rights of water—and the sovereignty of water itself.

The trap inside a good word

“Water is a human right” is a sentence written in defence of people, and people do need defending. But notice what it assumes. It makes water an object of human entitlement—a thing we are owed, a benefit we are due, a resource to be delivered to the human end of a pipe. The framing puts humanity at the centre and water at the service end.

That framing is not neutral. It is the same logic that lets a corporation bottle billions of litres from an aquifer and call it commerce, and the same logic that lets a data centre evaporate a river to keep its servers cool. Once water is framed primarily as a resource to which humans hold rights, every argument becomes an argument about which humans, and how much, and at what price. The water itself never gets a seat at the decision-making table. It is only ever the prize.

Indigenous law begins somewhere else. Water is not a resource. Water is a relative.

Water governs

Consider what water actually does before any human claims it.

At the smallest scale, water is the medium of life itself—the solvent inside every living cell, the substance through which a body becomes a body. We are mostly water, carrying memory and breath. At the largest scale, water is the author of the landscape: it carves valleys, lays down floodplains, and decides where forests stand, where deserts begin, where fish spawn, and where birds rest on their migrations. Rivers do not flow through the land as guests. They govern it. The shape of a watershed is water’s own decision, written over millennia.

And water does not act alone. It moves in relationship with the sky and the land, in a rhythm older than any law a government could pass. The land holds the water; the water nourishes the land; the sky lifts the water and returns it as rain and snow. Earth needs all three—water, sky, and land—to keep its rhythm, and nowhere in that rhythm are humans required. The cycle ran for billions of years without us, and it would still run on without us. This is the part we are slowest to accept: water’s agency and autonomy do not depend on human recognition. We do not animate the water. We arrived in a world that the water had already made.

To say, “I have a right to water,” then, is to get the order of things backwards. Water does not owe its existence to our rights. We owe our existence to it.

Stewards, not owners

If water holds its own sovereignty, where does that leave Indigenous Peoples—who have asserted, rightly and urgently, a relationship to water since time immemorial?

The answer is not ownership. It is stewardship. And the difference is everything.

For generations, Indigenous nations did not merely survive within their waters; they thrived within them, because thriving required something colonial water management has never had: an awareness of water governance as a living obligation. To be a steward is to hold something in trust—to carry responsibility for it—not to hold title over it. Around the sharing circle, the supreme decision-maker is not the Chief, the council, or the loudest voice. It is the water itself, the life force on which every being in the circle depends. The people speak with the water. They do not speak over it or for it.

This is the distinction that even good-hearted advocacy can blur. When a First Nation insists on its right to clean drinking water, the demand is just and overdue. But it should never be misread to mean that the people have become the final owners of the water—its de facto decision-makers, its masters. They are something more dignified than owners. They are part of water’s reality, participants in its self-determination—relatives who carry the duty to keep a sacred balance, not proprietors who treat it as something to be extracted for their own gain.

Claiming water as a possession, even with the best intentions, quietly diminishes the natural law and order that set the conditions for life in the first place. Stewardship enlarges human beings. Ownership shrinks both humanity and the water.

A deplorable inheritance

None of this excuses Canada. If anything, it indicts it more deeply.

The boil-water advisories that have shadowed First Nations for decades are not a plumbing failure. They are a colonial inheritance. The Crown displaced Indigenous Peoples from the waters they had stewarded for millennia and confined them within a reserve system designed to control and assimilate. That system broke the relationships between people, land, and water that made a nation a nation. When you sever people from their waters and then deny them safe water in the cramped territory you have confined them to, you are not just failing to deliver a service. You are continuing a project of dehumanization—one that delegitimizes even the most basic human rights affirmed by the United Nations.

Those rights are now recognized internationally. The UN General Assembly has affirmed the human right to water and sanitation, along with the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) sets out the collective rights of Indigenous Peoples, including the requirement of free, prior, and informed consent for decisions that affect their lands, territories, and resources. Canada has endorsed these instruments. And Canada keeps failing—failing the people who are sorely in need of clean water, and, more profoundly, failing to protect the most precious source of all life: the water itself.

Here is the part that should unsettle every Canadian, not only First Nations. If First Nations communities are treated as the acceptable outliers of poor water quality—the places where unsafe water is tolerated because the people are out of sight—then what becomes of everyone else when the water runs short? It is not hypothetical. We already buy water by the litre. We already accept that water is something sold to us in plastic. The First Nations water crisis is no exception to Canada’s treatment of water. It is a preview of it.

The thirst of empire

Look at how thoroughly water has already been turned into a commodity. National and international conglomerates draw countless billions of litres from springs and aquifers, truck them into grocery stores and urban centres, and sell them back to us for billions in profit—not because the water needs bottling, but because thirst is reliable revenue. And now a new and enormous mouth has opened: Artificial intelligence runs hot, and the data centres that power it drink to stay cool.

Recent research and policy analysis estimate that global data centre operations consume hundreds of billions of litres of water each year, with use projected to roughly double by 2030 as AI workloads expand. A single large facility can require millions of litres of water per day for cooling in some regions. Some studies estimate that running a sequence of AI prompts can consume enough cooling water to fill a small bottle—a figure magnified across billions of queries daily, often in already water-stressed basins. The industry now promises closed-loop cooling and “water-positive” pledges, and some of that innovation is real. But the demand curve is climbing far faster than the solutions curve.

This is precisely the danger hidden inside “water as a human right.” If water is a right held by humanity, for humanity’s benefit, then there is nothing in that framing, by itself, to stop humanity from drinking the planet dry to feed its conveniences and its machines. The right to water, untethered from any duty to water, becomes a licence for its destruction. If these conglomerates can find ways to extract water at a planetary scale, they can find ways to use it responsibly—protecting the sources, the watersheds, the living bodies of water, and the governance of those bodies. The question is whether we will compel them to do so, and on whose terms.

Water self-determination

So how do we shift the ideology from water as a human right to water as a living relation to which we are responsible?

Across Canada, we can start by naming what we are actually defending: water self-determination—the water’s own right to flow, to be whole, to keep its rhythm with the land and the sky. And together, we can recognize Indigenous Peoples not as the new owners of that sovereignty but as its treaty partners and shared stewards—the rights holders charged with maintaining a sacred sovereignty that was never theirs, or anyone’s, to control.

This is not abstract. It already exists in Canadian law and governance experiments. In 2021, the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and the Regional County Municipality of Minganie declared the Magpie River (Muteshekau shipu) a legal entity, the first river in Canada to hold rights of its own. The river was granted rights to flow, to maintain its biodiversity, to be safe from pollution, and to have legal standing in court. Guardians appointed by the Innu and the municipality can speak (with, not for) on the river’s behalf. It is a guardianship model: the water holds the rights, and the people hold the responsibility to defend them. This is the rights of water and water self-determination actualized—Indigenous law and the global rights-of-nature movement meeting in a single river.

That is one pathway. Real solutions to the First Nations water crisis cannot stop at finally laying the pipe and lifting the advisory—though that must happen, urgently, and is owed. They must go further than anything the Crown currently holds in place:

Protect water at its source, not just at the tap—through Indigenous-led source-water protection, Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas, and guardianship that treats a watershed as a living body with standing.
Recognize the sovereignty and rights of water bodies, following Muteshekau shipu, so that a river can be defended in court before it is harmed, not mourned after.
Honour free, prior, and informed consent as a floor, not a courtesy, so that no decision over source water, drinking water, or wastewater is made without the consent of the Nations whose relatives those waters are.
Hold the commodifiers accountable—bottlers, extractive industries, and the AI infrastructure now drinking deeply—to the protection of the sources they profit from.
Centre Indigenous governance not as consultation after the fact but as authority, because the knowledge of how to keep the water’s balance was never lost; it was only ignored.

A balance kept for seven generations

The point of all this is not to take away the right to clean water from the people who are dying for lack of it. It is to anchor that water in something stronger than a clause that a future Parliament can delete. A human right to water can be granted and weakened. The rights of water, held in trust by the people who have always known themselves to be its relatives, are grounded in a law older than Canada—natural law, the law of the sharing circle, where the water decides because every life in the circle depends on it.

We are not the source of water’s sovereignty. We are part of its reality, and we have the chance to be its stewards instead of its undoing. That is the work: to remedy the atrocity Canada engineered in First Nations communities, and at the same time to build pathways of protection that honour the water itself—so that the rhythm of water, land, and sky is kept whole, not for our convenience, but for seven generations and the seven beyond them.

Water gave us life. The least we owe it is a right to its own.

By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock

Photo by Yunus Tuğ on Unsplash

The post Water Is a Relative, Not a Resource appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.

Water Is a Relative, Not a Resource

Climate Change

UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire

Published

2 days ago

July 31, 2026

Alice Rush

The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.

A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.

“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.

El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.

Fossil fuellling the fires

Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.

A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.

UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.

Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.

The head of the United Nations Antonio Guterres (right) with the head of the UN’s climate arm Simon Stiell (left) at COP30 (Photo: Kiara Worth/UNFCCC)

Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.

Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.

After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.

They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.

The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.

Defending science

Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.

Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.

The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.

Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks

The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”

The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”

Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.

Ed Miliband meets José Manuel Albares Bueno in Madrid on 29 July 2026. (Picture by Ed Morris / FCDO)

The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.

The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.

More adaptation needed

Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.

As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.

The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.

The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.

UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire

Climate Change

‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review

Published

3 days ago

July 30, 2026

Alice Rush

In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:

“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.

“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”

“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.

“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”

—ENDS—

‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review

Climate Change

Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires

Published

3 days ago

July 30, 2026

Alice Rush

In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.

These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.

However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.

These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.

In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.

The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.

The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.

‘Quietest year’

On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.

Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.

Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:

“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”

Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.

Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.

Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.

The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.

As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.

Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.

Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:

“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.

“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”

In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.

Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.

By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.

Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.

The area burned by wildfires in the EU in 2026 by end of July is second only to 2022. Weekly cumulative burned area (hectares). Line graph shows 2026 burned area reaching over 400,000 hectares by late July, far exceeding the 2006-2025 average. Source: EFFIS - (alt text generated by Google Gemini)

Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.

French fires

Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.

The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.

For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.

The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.

France's wildfires in 2026 are the most widespread in modern records. Weekly cumulative burned area (hectares). A line chart shows 2026 burned area sharply rising by August to over 90,000 hectares, well above the 2006-2025 range maximum of around 65,000 and average of 15,000. Source: EFFIS - (alt text generated by Google Gemini)

The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.

On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.

More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.

In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:

“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”

Central Spain scorched

While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.

The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.