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 metal 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 the Caribbean Regional Climate Week beginning on May 11, social movements are highlighting this contradiction and calling for change.

This event will bring together community organizers and advocates from Haiti and the Dominican Republic to discuss their efforts to resist extractive development projects that would exacerbate climate vulnerability and to uphold communities’ rights to natural resources essential to a climate resilient future.

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