Communities in the Caribbean have long engaged in efforts to protect their land, ecosystems and water, even as climate change increasingly threatens all three. Caribbean governments, meanwhile, increasingly point to protecting natural resources as essential to climate resilience, while globally, securing local communities and indigenous peoples’ water and land rights is recognized as critical to both climate mitigation and rights-based adaptation.

Yet across the Caribbean, governments also continue to rely heavily on development pathways built on extractivism, including mining, that cause severe environmental degradation and social harms, disproportionately impacting already marginalized communities. As the Dominican Republic prepares to host regional Latin American and Caribbean Regional Climate Week beginning on May 11, social movements and advocates are highlighting this contradiction and calling for change.

This event will bring together community organizers and advocates from the Caribbean to discuss their efforts to resist extractive development projects that would exacerbate climate vulnerability, their priorities for climate justice and the inextricable links between anti-extractivism and a climate resilient future.

Panelists

  • Samuel Nesner, Program Manager, SOKIJA (Young Haitian Cultural Society) and Community Organizer (Haiti)
  • Heriberta Fernández Liriano, Local Development Coordinator, Centro Montalvo (Dominican Republic)
  • Malene Alleyne, Founder, Freedom Imaginaries (Jamaica)
  • Nikki Reisch, Director, Climate & Energy Program, Center for International Environmental Law (United States)

Moderator:

  • Sienna Merope-Synge, Co-Director, Caribbean Climate Justice Initiative, NYU Global Justice Clinic

 

Event features English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole speaking panelists. Translation in all three languages will be available.

 

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