MICHOACÁN, Mexico , Dec 18 2025 (IPS) - My niece Roxana Valentín Cárdenas was 21 years old when she was killed. She was a Purépecha Indigenous woman from San Andrés Tziróndaro, a community on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro in the Mexican state of Michoacán.

Roxana was killed during a peaceful march organised by another Indigenous community commemorating the recovery of their lands. Forty-six years earlier, three people had been murdered during that same land struggle. This time, the commemoration was once again met with gunfire.

Roxana was not armed and was not participating in the march. She encountered the demonstration and was struck by gunfire. Her death was deeply personal, but it took place within a broader context of long-standing violence linked to land and territory.

That violence has intensified in Michoacán recently, where the assassination of a mayor in November this year underscored how deeply insecurity has penetrated public life and how little protection exists for civilians, community leaders and local authorities alike.

Across Mexico, Indigenous people are being killed for defending land, water and forests. What governments and corporations often describe as “development” is experienced by our communities as dispossession enforced by violence – through land grabbing, water theft and the silencing of those who resist.

A way of life under threat
I come from San Andrés Tziróndaro, a farming, fishing and musical community. For generations, we have cared for the lake and the surrounding forests as collective responsibilities essential to life. That way of life is now under threat.

In Michoacán, extractive pressure takes different forms. In some Indigenous territories, it is mining. In our region, it is agro-industrial production, particularly avocados and berries grown for export. Communal land intended for subsistence is leased for commercial agriculture. Water is extracted from Lake Pátzcuaro through irregularly installed pipes to irrigate agricultural fields, depriving local farmers of access.

Agrochemicals contaminate soil and water, forests are deliberately burned to enable land-use change, and ecosystems are transformed into monocultures that consume vast amounts of water. This is not development. It is extraction.

Violence as a method of enforcement
When Indigenous communities resist these processes, violence follows.

Two cases illustrate this reality and remain unresolved.

José Gabriel Pelayo, a human rights defender and member of our organisation, has been forcibly disappeared for more than a year. Despite an urgent action issued by the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances, progress has been blocked. Authorities have delayed access to the investigation file, and meaningful search efforts have yet to begin. His family continues to wait for answers.

Eustacio Alcalá Díaz, a defender from the Nahua community of San Juan Huitzontla, was murdered after opposing mining operations imposed on his territory without consultation. After his killing, the community was paralysed by fear, and it was no longer possible to continue human rights work safely.

Together, these cases show how violence and impunity are used to suppress community resistance.

Militarisation is not protection
It is against this backdrop of escalating violence and impunity that the Mexican state has once again turned to militarisation. Thousands of soldiers are being deployed to Michoacán, and authorities point to arrests and security operations as indicators of stability.

In practice, militarisation often coincides with areas of high extractive interest. Security forces are deployed in regions targeted for mining, agro-industrial expansion or large infrastructure projects, creating conditions that allow these activities to proceed while community resistance is contained.

Indigenous people experience this not as protection, but as surveillance, intimidation and criminalisation. While companies may claim neutrality, they benefit from these security arrangements and rarely challenge the violence or displacement that accompanies them, raising serious questions about corporate complicity.

A global governance failure
Indigenous territories are opened to extractive industries operating across borders, while accountability remains fragmented. Corporations divide their operations across jurisdictions, making responsibility for environmental harm and human rights abuses difficult to establish.

Voluntary corporate commitments have not prevented violence or environmental degradation. National regulations remain uneven and weakly enforced, particularly in regions affected by corruption and organised crime. This is not only a national failure. It is a failure of global governance.

International responsibility, now
In this context, I have recently spent ten days in the United Kingdom with the support of Peace Brigades International (PBI), meeting with parliamentarians, officials from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and civil society organisations.

These discussions are part of a broader international effort to ensure that governments whose companies, financial systems or diplomatic relationships are linked to extractive activities take responsibility for preventing harm and protecting those at risk.

While the UK is only one actor, its policies on corporate accountability and support for human rights defenders have consequences far beyond its borders.

Why binding international rules are necessary
For years, Indigenous peoples and civil society organisations have called for a binding United Nations treaty on business and human rights. The urgency of this demand is reflected in the lives lost defending land and water and in the defenders who remain disappeared.

A binding treaty could require mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence across global supply chains, guarantee access to justice beyond national borders, and recognise the protection of human rights defenders as a legal obligation. It could make Free, Prior and Informed Consent enforceable rather than optional.

Such a treaty would not prevent development. It would ensure that development does not depend on violence, dispossession and impunity.

Defending life for everyone
Indigenous peoples are not obstacles to progress. We are defending ecosystems that sustain life far beyond our territories. Indigenous women are often at the forefront of this defence, even as we face extraordinary risks.

When defenders disappear, when others are murdered, and when young women like my niece lose their lives, it is not only our communities that suffer. The world loses those protecting land, water and biodiversity during a deep ecological crisis.

Defending life and land should not come at the cost of human lives.

Claudia Ignacio Álvarez is an Indigenous Purépecha feminist, lesbian, and environmental human rights defender from San Andrés Tziróndaro, Michoacán. Through the Red Solidaria de Derechos Humanos, she supports Indigenous and rural communities defending their territories from extractive industries and organised crime. Her work has been supported by Peace Brigades International (PBI) since 2023.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Dec 17 2025 (IPS) - Efforts to combat climate change too often sideline the very communities hit hardest by the crisis and who have contributed the least to it. This injustice was the core idea of the Voices for Just Climate Action (VCA) program. Now that VCA has concluded after five years, Job Muriithi and Winny Nyanwira from Hivos reflect on its achievements and share recommendations for governments and donors to ensure fair and equitable climate action.

In the coastal villages of eastern Indonesia, where turquoise waters lap against volcanic shores, we set out on a trip, reminding us of why this work matters. Traveling from Jakarta to Nusa Tenggara Timur, we saw firsthand that real progress begins with listening to communities, amplifying their voices and supporting locally led initiatives.

One thing that immediately stands out is the Next Level Grant Facility (NLGF), a climate finance mechanism under VCA. It shows what happens when local groups are entrusted to take the lead in climate funding. In Indonesia alone, 62 projects supported diverse initiatives in 11 provinces, reaching thousands across the archipelago in both coastal and highland communities. Over half of the grantees (57%) were first-time recipients of formal funding, working at the intersection of environmental justice, disability inclusion, and gender-responsive community action.

But statistics only scratch the surface. We saw firsthand how marginalized voices stepped into the spotlight. The NLGF fund manager, Samdhana Institute, Humanis and local partners, supported members of the NLGF grantees on climate literacy, financial literacy, reporting, and adaptive planning. Women fishers, long overlooked in policy discussions, are now consulting with government officials. Indigenous communities blended ancestral wisdom with modern adaptations to protect ecosystems. These groups emerged as first responders in crises, innovators in sustainability, and stewards of resources vital for survival.

In Kupang, our local partner PIKUL supported fisherfolks. These communities have spent lifetimes interpreting the rhythm of the sea, preserving their catch using traditional methods, and nurturing coastal habitats. They did not need expertise; they brought it. VCA provided a platform, networks, credibility, and access to decision-makers.

Once invisible at decision-making tables, coastal communities are now key advisors to governments, advocating for environmental protection, climate-resilient infrastructure like breakwaters, and fair finance. Their transformation illustrates VCA’s core approach: recognizing that for coastal and island communities, oceans are not resources to be exploited but are fundamental to their food security, livelihoods, cultural identity, and survival. VCA brought this community-centered ocean perspective into Indonesia’s climate discussions, which had long focused primarily on land-based agriculture, often overlooking the realities of maritime populations.

In Indonesia, a nation of over 17,000 islands, communities in East Nusa Tenggara needed their government to understand that the sea connects rather than divides their lives and livelihoods. VCA provided the platform and capacity-strengthening support that enabled these communities to articulate their needs and traditional knowledge effectively. Through facilitated dialogues and inclusive forums that intentionally included women, youth, Indigenous peoples, and persons with disabilities, community members gained the skills and confidence to engage directly with policymakers. This process enabled them to influence critical policies and to establish enduring relationships with government agencies. This exemplifies something more profound: the fundamental redistribution of decision-making power to those whose lives depend on the decisions.

Yet challenges persist in the form of tightening civic spaces, scarce funding, skills shortages, and deep-rooted exclusion. As VCA wraps up, these issues are not fading – they are growing sharper amid global setbacks in climate commitments.

During our visit, one hard truth stood out: the landscape that shaped VCA in 2021 had become much tougher by 2025. Indonesia exemplifies this shift – civic freedoms have narrowed, traditional advocacy paths have grown thornier, and grassroots climate funds have dried up. A 2025 study from Hivos, examining climate vulnerability in Brazil and Zambia, reveals that women-headed households spend between 10-30% of their annual income recovering from climate shocks – costs that remain largely invisible in national budgets and climate finance mechanisms.

The study’s call to recognize care work as climate action echoes what VCA demonstrated in practice –when coastal communities in East Nusa Tenggara received direct funding and decision-making power, they did not just survive climate impacts; they innovated sustainable responses rooted in local knowledge. VCA’s success in channeling resources to first-time grantees and elevating marginalized voices offers a proven model for the kind of equitable, community-centered climate finance that research shows is desperately needed but rarely delivered.

Our Indonesian partners found a strategic workaround. Rather than pushing back through confrontation in a restricted advocacy space, they pivoted to building tangible community assets: fish-processing hubs, local food-processing facilities, mangrove cooperatives, and coral-restoration sites. These visible wins – better livelihoods that communities can see and feel – in turn open doors to advocacy and attract support from other funders. In other words, community investments serve as a bridge to advocacy when direct advocacy routes are blocked.

The results prove the strategy. Partners secured subnational policy wins and leveraged almost 400,000 USD in additional funding from both government and non-governmental sources, showing that strategic local investments can multiply impact even in unfavorable environments.

Credit: Hivos

Managing 62 partners across 45 districts and 18 provinces strained coordination – vast distances meant virtual check-ins often fell short, and not all received support on time. From our visit we drew concrete lessons from real hurdles, like adapting the reporting for Indigenous groups with limited technological skills.

Other concrete lessons from VCA Indonesia:

On our final evening in Waingapu, sharing stories with fishers as the sun set, one woman said, “We had answers but no audience. VCA gave us both. We have shown it works – now others must commit.” She’s right. Locally led action produces resilient, equitable results. Communities are not victims; they are experts.

But they need more: fair climate finance, protected spaces, and partners who value their expertise. That’s why we ask donors to scale up VCA’s proven models – including trust-based grants for grassroots initiatives. We ask governments to partner with these voices to meet climate goals; this means safeguarding civic spaces above all. Climate justice demands partnership with ecosystem guardians. Indonesia’s coastal communities prove local solutions can scale globally. VCA offers a roadmap – let’s follow it closely now. The planet’s future hinges on it. Ayo – let’s advance together.

This piece reflects on Hivos’ November 2025 monitoring visit to Indonesia, conducted in partnership with the Humanis Foundation and local coalition partners, including SIPIL, ADAPTASI, KOPI, and Pangan Baik. As VCA concludes, it’s a tribute to their achievements and a plea to extend them.

Author Bios

Job Muriithi is a development practitioner with over 10 years of experience in monitoring, evaluation, accountability, research, and learning across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. He serves as Global Planning, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Officer at Hivos for the Voices for Just Climate Action Program.

Winny Nyawira is a Certified Public Accountant and Global Finance Manager at Hivos for the Voices for Just Climate Action Program. She specializes in grants management and financial administration for international development programs.

BELÉM, Brazil, Dec 17 2025 (IPS) - On the Pacific Islands, where the ocean horizon is both a lifeline and a warning, communities have long interpreted environmental change through traditional knowledge, lived experiences, stories, and practice. Their observations echo those across the Pacific region, where traditional knowledge remains central to understanding shifting environments and responsible stewardship.

This grounding shaped the early work of Coral Pasisi, Director of Climate Change and Sustainability at the Pacific Community (SPC)—the region’s scientific and technical organization—and it is these experiences, including those from her home country of Niue, that anchor her lived realities and values to her work across the Pacific.

She remembers the early years of her scientific career, going from village to village with a laminated satellite image stitched with the cadastral base of roads and buildings, a few colored pens in hand, asking communities to add what they remembered.

“In times of drought, where were your main water source and caves? What areas remain important to protect as traditional medicines gathering or food security? Where are the traditional sites of ‘tapu’ and graves? And please mark where you remember waves reaching in the big cyclones experienced as far back as you can remember,” says Pasisi, explaining that they used the information to add important information into the Geographic Information System (GIS) to help understand environmental change and inform development resource use management plans.

“So, in one database, you have traditional knowledge, lived experience, and modern science together as a tool for governments and communities to make decisions.  It also provided certainty for development and investments the villages were seeking to advance their sustainable development aspirations.”

Women gleaning for octopus as part of an SPC study aimed at building knowledge on ecology, biology and identification of the marine species. Credit: Stuart Campbell/SPC

In a region where most countries and territories are Indigenous-run, the knowledge held by those with generations of traditional wisdom is science—it’s just verified in a different way than modern science. It enhances formal scientific data, giving countries twice as much information to track change and calibrate understanding.

“SPC probably has the world’s most advanced fish monitoring systems in the Pacific region. But we can’t take that data alone because there are always going to be some gaps, so it’s important that community knowledge and experience are also factored in to informing the state of fisheries in the region,” Pasisi adds.

“Pacific People are great storytellers, especially fishing folks, as I am one! But when you document those stories, including old photos, you can stitch together a timeline of the sizes of fish that were caught at different periods, the species of fish, and what they ate, and all of a sudden, you have this incredible documented knowledge from traditional practitioners that you can combine with the modern science and information.”

“So traditional knowledge and practice is basically applied science that has been refined over the years. It is just verified in different ways,” she says.

But climate change is making it harder for Indigenous people to apply this knowledge and anticipate change and response, because much of that knowledge was “tied to predictable seasons and patterns of occurrence, but those are going a little crazy now with climate change. In the Pacific, this loss of predictability affects food systems, freshwater access and coastal safety across all 22 Pacific Island Countries and Territories.  It even affects our five metropolitan members, but they have built modern systems of early warning, remote sensing and disaster management that are calibrated to cope better with the rapidly changing environment we are now in.”

The destabilization of once-reliable environmental signals has strengthened the region’s insistence that global action must align with the scientific findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which show that surpassing 1.5°C dramatically increases risks to reefs, fisheries, health and entire island ecosystems and territories.

This science underpins why Pacific countries place such emphasis on strong climate agreements and multilateral cooperation and accountability. A hard-won Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) reinforced this, affirming that keeping warming below 1.5°C is not just a political aspiration but a legal obligation rooted in international law.

A fisherman in Tuvalu. Traditional wisdom helps inform the knowledge systems in the Pacific region. Credit: SPC

“I think the ICJ Advisory Opinion is going to continue to play a very significant role in influencing the outcomes of the COP that was held in Brazil and all COPs to come.  There is nothing like the clarification of existing law and responsibility to help stakeholders stay on the right side of the law.  Frankly, the consequences of not doing so present much greater risks than litigation.  The highest price is existentiality and our region is on the front lines of that.”

“It’s highly beneficial, and it just gives, I think, a level of authority to the positions that our countries have held for a long time but which are often shot down by the ambiguity of interpreting agreements and responsibilities to deliver on those.  The capacity constraints of Pacific SIDS mean they are often up against huge delegations from larger countries that come with lots of fancy people who bring fancy language in and make all these very fancy arguments about what is legal and what isn’t,” Pasisi adds.  “The ICJ AO levels the playing field somewhat in that we don’t all need to be lawyers to understand what our responsibilities are and what the consequences of inaction could be; the highest court in the world has now done that for us.”

Mary Nipisina working her peanut garden in Tanna, Vanuatu. Credit: SPC

“There are many developed and developing countries that believe that this is an important tool in the international toolkit of global responsibility to help steer the world in the right direction.”

Pacific youth have echoed this call. The entire United Nations family supported the call for the ICJ AO process, and, at COP30, Pacific leaders, officials, partners and youth highlighted its value in upholding critical planetary tipping points like the 1.5°C limit in global warming underpinned by the best available science of the IPCC, reminding the world that decisions today will shape the survival, culture and sovereignty of future generations.

Organic farmers in Vanuatu. Climate change. In the Pacific, this loss of climate predictability affects food systems, freshwater access and coastal safety. Credit: SPC

Climate finance was a major focus at COP30 as countries negotiated how to advance the implementation of the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance. The approval of the Belém “Mutirão” decision was a significant step, establishing a two-year work programme and recognizing the need to dramatically scale up climate finance.

For Pacific Small Island Developing States, however, the question is not only whether climate finance increases but also whether countries can actually access it. Many do not have the staffing, systems or financial structures required by major international funds. Without simplified and equitable access, Pasisi notes, increased pledges will not reach the places where they are most urgently needed.

These concerns were strongly voiced during the final plenary in Belém. Vanuatu’s Minister for Climate Change, Hon. Ralph Regenvanu, acknowledged the difficulties of the negotiations.

“We recognize that we did not get everything we wanted at this COP, but we also know that this is the nature of our processes, and we continue to move forward together in solidarity towards what science requires, what justice demands, and what our people deserve,” he said.

He reminded the world that current pledges do not keep warming below 1.5°C “as science and equity demand,” and that future negotiations and actions must address this gap honestly.

Looking ahead, COP31—co-hosted under the joint leadership of Australia—will include significant participation from Blue Pacific countries. A major pre-COP event is expected to take place within the region, focusing on the ocean, energy transition, and climate finance, amongst other things. The importance of capitalizing the Pacific Resilience Facility within the solutions of addressing the complex climate finance landscape of access for the region was spotlighted.

“In relation to the ocean, we really need people to understand the holistic value of that natural blue capital and infrastructure.  Whilst our  countries are on the front line of climate change, they are also holding the front line by protecting large swaths of intact marine ecosystems that play a huge role in planetary stability—from biodiversity to climate change,” Pasisi says.

“It seems very unjust that Pacific countries and territories on the front line cannot access the resources needed to respond to climate change and sustainably protect their large ocean real estate. So, informing that narrative from a Pacific lens is critical, showcasing not just the extreme manifestations of the impacts of climate change, but also the positivity and innovation that comes from there, this is what our region is very keen to showcase.”

And she says it is not just about this generation, but the “rights of future generations—it’s our children’s earth that we are  mortgaging right now.”

Her message echoes the wider Pacific call: climate action must be grounded in science, guided by justice, and shaped by the lived realities of Pacific communities. As seas rise, storms intensify and ecosystems shift, the combination of traditional knowledge, modern science and intergenerational leadership has become one of the Pacific’s strongest contributions to global climate diplomacy,  and one the world is increasingly recognizing as essential.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Excerpt: