Reggie Joule says the plan to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions that emerged from the Paris climate talks last week didn’t include some very important provisions.
“We were definitely trying to get in the binding part of the agreement the recognition of the rights of indigenous people,” said Joule, mayor of Alaska’s Northwest Arctic Borough. He said it was disappointing that it didn’t make it in.
Joule sat in on the climate talks as an observer with the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, or ICC, which represents Native peoples of northern Alaska, Canada, Greenland and northeast Russia.
The ICC and Saami Council, which represents indigenous peoples of northern Scandinavia and Russia, were among many indigenous rights groups and thousands of other delegates whose main objective was a broad agreement to slow global climate change.
“The rights of indigenous peoples wasn’t one of the major issues of a lot of the countries,” he said.
That’s unfair because the Arctic is suffering rising temperatures and other climate change impacts much faster than the rest of the planet, says Jim Gamble, executive director of the Aleut International Association. The organization represents Natives in the Aleutian Islands and far eastern Russia.
“Any agreement that doesn’t take into account that people live in the Arctic and indigenous people are really on the front lines of this change — that’s a missed opportunity,” Gamble said.
Indigenous people didn’t cause climate change, says Evon Peter, a Gwich’in Athabaskan and University of Alaska-Fairbanks vice chancellor.
“Other observers say it’s ironic that the climate agreement gives indigenous peoples such a small voice,” Peter said, “and yet it assigns a huge role to the mainly wilderness areas in which they live, which would serve as ‘carbon sinks’ to absorb and offset emissions from developed and developing countries.”
Joule says he hopes indigenous peoples will be given greater accord in the next global climate change conference to be held three years from now.
