U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said this week that the Trump administration plans to review and potentially alter the nation’s climate science reports.
In a Tuesday appearance on CNN’s “The Source,” Wright told CNN host Kaitlan Collins the National Climate Assessments have been removed from government websites “because we’re reviewing them.”
“We will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those,” Wright said.
The National Climate Assessments are mandated by Congress and have been released five times since 2000. The federal reports, prepared by hundreds of volunteer scientists, are subject to extensive peer review and detail how climate change is affecting each region of the United States so far and provide the latest scientific forecasts.
Wright accused the previous reports of being politically biased, stating that they “are not fair assessments of the data.”
“When you get into departments and look at stuff that’s there and you find stuff that’s objectionable, you want to fix it,” he said.
His statements came after the Trump administration in April dismissed more than 400 experts who had already started work on the sixth National Climate Assessment, due for publication in late 2027 or early 2028. The administration in July also removed the website of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which housed the reports.
The move marks the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s efforts to downplay climate science. The president and Department of Energy in recent months have championed fossil fuel production and slashed funding and incentives for renewable energy projects. This week, the Energy Department posted an image of coal on X alongside the words, “She’s an icon, she’s a legend, and she is the moment.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed looser regulations for polluting sectors such as power plants and vehicles. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in March proclaimed the administration was “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”
In his CNN appearance, Wright said the previous climate change assessments — including the 2018 report prepared during Trump’s first term — were not “a reasonable representation of broad climate science.”
“They have been more politically driven to hype up a real issue, but an issue that’s just nowhere near the world’s greatest challenge,” he said of climate change. “Nobody’s who’s a credible economist or scientist believes that it is, except a few activists and alarmists.”
Environmental experts were concerned by Wright’s comments.
“Secretary Wright just confirmed our worst fears — that this administration plans to not just bury the scientific evidence but replace it with outright lies to downplay the worsening climate crisis and evade responsibility for addressing it,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who was among the authors dismissed by the administration.
“This is one more alarming example of the Trump administration’s ongoing and highly politicized effort to obfuscate scientific truth to further its dangerous and deadly pro-fossil fuel agenda,” Cleetus said.
The Energy Department last week also released its own climate report, commissioned by Wright, that questions the severity of climate change.
“Both models and experience suggest that [carbon dioxide]-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and excessively aggressive mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial,” the report says.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, noted in a post on X that the previous National Climate Assessments were authored by hundreds of scientists who were leading domain experts in their fields.
“This would mark an extraordinary, unprecedented, and alarming level of interference in what has historically been a fair and systematic process,” Swain said of the possibility that previous reports could be altered.
The Department of Energy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Atlantic salmon populations in England and Wales have plummeted to unprecedented lows, according to the Atlantic Salmon Stock Assessment for 2024, a report published this month by the United Kingdom Environment Agency and Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science.
According to the report by the two government agencies, a massive 90 percent of wild river salmon in England are classified as either “at risk” or “probably at risk”.
This latest classification is due to salmon stocks declining to levels that are insufficient for a self-sustaining salmon population.
“Forty years ago, an estimated 1.4 million salmon returned to UK rivers each year. We are now at barely a third of that – a new low and evidence of the wider, growing biodiversity crisis,” Alan Lovell, chairman of the Environment Agency, said when the report was released.
At the end of last year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an international organisation dedicated to nature conservation, changed the status of Atlantic salmon from “least concern” to “endangered” in Great Britain on its Red List of Threatened Species.
“There are rivers that used to have in the UK maybe 20,000 to 30,000 Atlantic salmon running them, and they’re now down to 1,000 to 2,000, and there are some rivers with literally a few hundred left,” Dylan Roberts, head of fisheries at the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust in the UK, told Al Jazeera.
“We’re looking at about an 80 percent decline over the last 40 years in wild Atlantic salmon.”
An Atlantic salmon jumps out of the water at the Shrewsbury Weir on the River Severn in Shropshire, England, as it migrates upstream to spawn [Shutterstock]
Why is Atlantic salmon endangered?
In December, Atlantic salmon was classified as endangered due to a 30 to 50 percent decline in British populations since 2006 and a 50 to 80 percent projected decline from 2010 to 2025, according to the IUCN.
The IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species has nine categories based on risk of extinction. These classifications help the wider scientific community assess and monitor the conservation status of different species.
They are the following:
Not evaluated: species that have not yet been assessed against the IUCN criteria
Data deficient: species for which there is insufficient information to make a direct or indirect assessment of their risk of extinction
Least concern: species that are widespread and abundant and do not qualify for any higher risk category
Near threatened: species that do not currently qualify as threatened but are close to qualifying for a threatened category in the near future
Vulnerable: species facing a high risk of extinction in the wild
Endangered: species at very high risk of extinction in the wild
Critically endangered: species that face an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild and meet criteria indicating an imminent threat to their survival
Extinct in the wild: species that survive only in captivity or outside their natural range and are presumed extinct in their native habitat after exhaustive surveys
Extinct: species for which there is no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died, confirmed by extensive surveys without sightings
The IUCN’s Red List includes more than 45,300 species that are threatened with extinction, which includes any species in the classifications from vulnerable to extinct in the wild.
According to Roberts, species do not automatically make the IUCN’s Red List just because of low numbers. What gets a species on the list is how sharp the slope of decline is.
“The slope on salmon is endangered. Hence they went on the red list. You’re looking at quite dramatic declines,” he said.
Why are salmon faring so badly in UK rivers?
Agricultural practices
Salmon habitats globally face multiple threats, including agricultural pollution, increased sedimentation on riverbeds, chemical run-off from industrial activities, wastewater discharge and even disruption of rivers due to new road infrastructure.
Additionally, structural barriers built in rivers that impede migration routes, water scarcity due to excessive use and rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change further endanger salmon ecosystems.
Bycatch
European and British salmon travel along a migration route through rivers and streams known as the “smolt superhighway” as they head north to feed into the North Atlantic.
Peak migration time when many of these young fish are heading through this superhighway is around May and June. At this time, young salmon often get caught by large trawlers entering in the same zone in the sea to catch other fish such as mackerel or herring.
This directly reduces the number of fish that can grow to adulthood and return to their natal rivers to spawn.
Bycatch refers to catching fish that are not the main target for trawlers. “Bycatch would be the accidental capture of things like seals, seabirds, dolphins, whales, sharks, rays, skates and [are] protected,” Roberts said. “All these species are recorded. The problem is that salmon just aren’t recorded. And other protected fish as well, such as sea trout, which go to sea.”
According to Roberts, a solution to this problem is to collect better data on how salmon are moving through the rivers and oceans to get a better sense of the impact on the population.
A turtle, shown on deck of a fishing trawler after being caught as bycatch, will be recorded as a protected species. Salmon caught in this way are not recorded, however [Shutterstock]
Maize production
The environmental impact of maize production in the UK has proven to be another factor that has adversely impacted rivers and streams vital to salmon. The growth in the use of maize in biofuels and cattle fodder has exacerbated the problem.
“The habitat has been destroyed by intensive agriculture and all the algae and the sediment run-off. So you get this filamentous algae growing on the riverbed, and the riverbed just gets smothered with it,” Roberts said.
The overproduction of algae is detrimental to insects and invertebrates that live in the river and on which salmon are dependent as a food source.
Farm salmon fishing in Norway, the biggest producer of farmed salmon in the world [Shutterstock]
Can salmon farming make up for these losses?
Not really and, in some cases, it may be making the situation for salmon stocks worse.
According to some estimates, roughly 70 percent of the world’s salmon is produced through salmon farming and not caught in freshwater streams.
Salmon farming in the UK generates 1.5 billion pounds ($1.95bn) a year in revenues.
Some experts argue that vast numbers of salmon raised in cramped conditions in aquaculture facilities pose significant challenges and health risks. These practices not only impact the welfare of the salmon but also carry implications for human health and environmental sustainability.
Intensive salmon farming coupled with cramped conditions in farming sea cages can result in the salmon being more susceptible to catching diseases.
“You end up with disease problems – viruses, biological sea lice, sea lice problems – then all the waste that goes into these lochs because they’re in sheltered areas. They don’t get a full flushing from the tides, and over time, they build up,” Roberts explained.
“And what they’re finding now in these lochs is that they’re getting eutrophication [a build-up of algae]. So the locks are turning green, and that’s killing the fish in the cages,” he added.
Eutrophication is often caused by agricultural practices and can cause salmon to experience hypoxia, a depletion of oxygen levels. This can happen to both wild salmon and farmed salmon.
Salmon sometimes escape from the aquaculture farms through nets damaged by severe weather, just being worn down or via poorly secured drains.
Once these escapees from the “fish asylum” are in freshwater rivers and streams, they can interbreed with wild salmon, disrupting their natural development and passing on diseases.
“If you upset the genetic gene pool, that’s a big problem,” Roberts said.
A salmon farm in Loch Fyne in Scotland that uses round fish ‘cages’ [Shutterstock]
According to a 2023 annual fish health report from the Norwegian Veterinary Institute, roughly 17 percent of the country’s farmed salmon died due to infectious diseases. Norway is the top producer of salmon, contributing roughly 50 percent of global production.
Diseases can range from winter sores to heart skeletal muscle inflammation. Although there are treatments for some of these diseases, the treatments themselves can weaken fish, making them even more susceptible to other infectious diseases.
“Infectious diseases are an extensive problem both for the fish’s welfare and survival in the sea,” said Edgar Brun, department director at the Veterinary Institute.
However, industry experts say finding the right preventive measures to reduce disease in fish remains challenging. Moreover, the overuse of vaccines can increase antibiotic resistance, making certain pathogens more entrenched in the salmon population.
Is salmon endangered in other parts of the world as well?
In Ireland and Iceland, overfishing and habitat destruction have led to significant declines in the salmon population.
According to Inland Fisheries Ireland, an organisation responsible for protecting inland fisheries and sea angling resources, wild salmon numbers returning to Ireland dropped from 1.76 million in 1975 to 171,700 in 2022.
In the US, specific species, including Chinook and Coho salmon, have endangered status due to overfishing, pollution from agricultural run-off and urban development.
In Canada, the fourth largest producer of salmon, production has fallen from a peak of 148,000 tonnes in 2016 to 90,000 tonnes in 2023, according to the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance. Many experts attribute some of the decline to hundreds of thousands of salmon escaping from sea cages and spreading diseases to the wild stock.
[Shutterstock]
Should we all stop eating salmon?
Until recently, salmon was considered a luxury food in many parts of the world. These days it is eaten much more frequently, and many experts say we eat too much of it.
Although salmon is often celebrated by health experts for its omega-3 fatty acids, which are beneficial for heart health, there is a risk of overconsumption, given the levels of freshwater contamination and diseases that can become pervasive in fish farms, causing populations to fall.
Some farmed salmon has more omega-3 fatty acids than wild salmon but can have high levels of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB). PCBs are synthetic chemicals that have widespread industrial uses. PCBs can “live” in industrial waste that gets dumped into our seas, rivers and streams. PCBs tend to be more prevalent in closed-system environments than open environments, like freshwater rivers.
Many health experts recommend eating wild salmon because of their lower levels of PCBs. Freshwater salmon also tend to be less susceptible to those fish-related diseases that are more common in farm-raised salmon.
According to Roberts, encouraging people to eat less salmon would not be particularly practical.
However, he said, collaboration with organisations like the Missing Salmon Alliance, which brings together other NGOs that advocate for sensible production of salmon while preserving the salmon ecosystem, can help put pressure on governments to implement more stringent rules for fisheries to preserve current populations and increase salmon populations.
A European eel in the River Culm, England [Shutterstock]
Are other fish species in danger as well?
According to Roberts, another endangered fish is the eel. The conditions that have endangered salmon are very similar to those that are threatening eels: overfishing, habitat destruction, pollution and climate change.
Eels are an important food source for mammals that live around rivers and streams, including minks and otters. Smaller eels are an important food source for birds too.
Due to low eel populations, the European Union implemented regulations on eel fishing in 2018.
According to a May report from the European Parliamentary Research Service: “The European eel (Anguilla anguilla) has suffered a 90 percent to 95 percent decline in its population since the 1980s. Within 50 years, the European eel has turned from one of the most abundant freshwater fish to an endangered species.”
How is climate change contributing to this?
Rising water temperatures as a result of climate change pose significant challenges for salmon. As the water warms, its oxygen content decreases, making breathing more difficult for these fish. Consequently, salmon must swim greater distances in pursuit of nourishment and cooler waters, further taxing their already strained systems.
According to Roberts, warmer waters destroy some nutrients in oceans and rivers, which affect food chains. Atlantic salmon typically eat zooplankton, blue whiting, sand eels, small insects, insect larvae and small crustaceans called amphipods or scuds. As food for the salmon becomes more scarce, this can have a negative impact on the size of the salmon.
Smaller salmon produce fewer eggs. Fewer eggs mean a decrease in the overall population.
“Now, as it grows, it gets faster, more powerful. It can evade predators, but if they grow more slowly, they’re more vulnerable to predation,” Roberts said. “And what we found is that the decrease in the growth rate of salmon is most marked during their first summer at sea.”
Balta, Peru – On an overcast afternoon in April, Nolasco Torres and Freddy Capitan navigate their canoe along a jungle-veiled ravine. Along the route, they scrutinise the creeping understory for footprints and broken branches – telltale signs of the imminent return of isolated tribes in this cutoff region.
After rounding a bend, they steer their boat towards Nueva Vida, a tiny Indigenous hamlet hidden within Peru’s eastern Amazon, some 100 kilometres (62 miles) from the Brazil border.
“When this ravine dries, they’ll make contact here,” Torres says. “Summer is coming. We have to make sure our communities are prepared.”
Torres, 47, and Capitan, 33, are Indigenous Huni Kuin fathers and community leaders. They are also friends and neighbours of Nueva Vida’s 30 villagers. But they are not here to pay a social call.
Wearing khaki vests stitched with the letters “PIACI” (Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact), they are among 50 government-contracted, predominantly Indigenous protection agents working for Peru’s Ministry of Culture. Their work has brought them to the Curanjillo Ravine, an epicentre of recent contact.
Protection agents meet distressed villagers in Nueva Vida. The presence of isolated tribes here has caused residents to flee their homes [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]
It was here, last August, during the annual droughts, when more than two dozen isolated Mastanahua suddenly appeared at the edge of Nueva Vida, naked and clutching bows and arrows. Alarmed villagers stood back as the group approached their homes, grabbing machetes, buckets and food before retreating along the dried-out ravine, back into the forest.
The tense interaction ended without violence. However, in recent years, a series of explosive encounters between isolated tribes and villagers in this remote region has generated an undercurrent of panic. As the annual dry season nears, remote streams will soon recede, setting tribes out in search of resources closer to larger, more populated rivers where contact with villages is increasing.
“We’re begging the state to intervene,” said Nueva Vida’s leader, Rafael Montes, 30, in April. “We sleep in fear at night. Our only defence is our shotguns.”
Torres and Capitan grimace at this allusion to violence. The state’s emergency protocols around these incidents instruct villagers to withdraw, remain calm and make a distress call to protection agents. However, these villages tend to lack secure refuge and means to contact assistance, which makes following the instructions almost impossible.
In June, two months after Torres and Capitan’s April meeting with villagers in Nueva Vida, a group of approximately 30 Mastanahua reappeared along the dry ravine and made a similar incursion into the village. This time, Montes and his entire community fled.
Today, Nueva Vida stands abandoned. Its homes, crops and small primary school are slowly being reclaimed by the jungle.
Protection agents Fredy Capitan, left),and Nolasco Torres arrive in Nueva Vida, where sightings of isolated tribes have caused villagers to flee [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]
‘In tremendous crisis’
In the heavily forested province of Purus, in the eastern Amazon rainforest, contact with some of the planet’s most isolated tribes is accelerating. The encounters are transforming the region into a troubling flashpoint of encounters with the Mastanahua and Mashco Piro tribes, which have rejected contact with the outside world for generations.
The situation is creating a powder keg, raising the spectre of deadly confrontation and driving the evacuation of entire villages. It has also prompted questions about the Peruvian state’s commitment to safeguarding the lives of some of Earth’s last isolated tribes amid increased invasion of their territory.
The factors driving the tribes into contact are multifaceted. Experts say extractive industries, criminal economies and climate change are pushing them closer to villages, where they are exposed to various risks, including armed confrontation and contagion.
“The region is in tremendous crisis,” said Beatriz Huertas, an anthropologist who works closely with Indigenous peoples and Amazon organisations. “Illegal logging and drug trafficking is happening in their territory, and the state is not fulfilling its role to guarantee their sovereignty.”
While Peruvian law acknowledges the territorial rights of isolated peoples, it also allows for natural resource exploitation – even within protected areas – if deemed to be a “public necessity.” This allows logging and fossil fuel explorations to operate inside Indigenous reserves, and, in the absence of state protection, drug smugglers move through these areas.
Huni Kuin men and boys ride upriver on a communal hunt [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]
Disrupted habitat
Peru is home to the second-largest population of isolated tribes on the planet after Brazil. Approximately 7,500 people from about 25 ethnic groups live in isolation or are in the early stages of contact with settled society.
Often erroneously characterised as “lost” tribes, living lives “frozen in the distant past”, isolated peoples have interacted with outside populations for generations, Huertas explained. As a result, Indigenous people “faced illness, violence and death”, she added. But following enslavement and the decimation of their populations, including during the rubber boom from the 1890s to the 1920s when Peruvian rubber was in high demand, many groups fled to remote headwaters, where their relatives remain today. “These are peoples who isolate themselves as a survival strategy,” she said.
The greater Purus region, which extends eastward into neighbouring Brazil, is considered to be home to the largest concentration of isolated tribes on Earth. The Alto Purus National Park – an area more than half the size of Costa Rica – along with two protected reserves, serves as a migratory corridor for the Mashco Piro, the largest-known isolated tribe in the world, numbering more than 750 people, and about 300 Mastanahua, who share ethnolinguistic ties with the Huni Kuin and other settled tribes in Purus.
During the Amazon summer, the Mashco Piro and Mastanahua trek hundreds of kilometres along Purus’s dry streams to larger riverbanks in search of resources, including protein-rich turtle eggs.
But as climate change contributes to higher temperatures and extreme droughts, vital habitats and food sources are disrupted. In Purus, earlier and more protracted dry seasons are altering the ecosystems that isolated tribes depend upon for survival.
The lowland forests of Purus are thought to be home to the largest concentration of isolated tribes on Earth [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]
‘We are like watchmen’
Travelling upstream from Nueva Vida, Torres and Capitan enter another canopied ravine. Water levels are beginning to recede. They wade through the shin-deep water sifting for arrowheads or trails suspiciously blocked by branches. They also listen: Isolated peoples can be masterful imitators of wild game and monkeys.
“We are like watchmen,” said Torres. “We find fire pits, charred animal bones and palm huts they put up along beaches. It’s our job to report the evidence to authorities.”
Increased contact by isolated tribes in remote Amazon regions like Purus has led Peru’s government to recruit local Indigenous villagers like Torres and Capitan to work as protection agents.
Their innate knowledge of the forests, along with an ability to communicate government protocols in their native languages, has made protection agents’ work a vital tool for the state – both to monitor their territories and keep villagers alert should they encounter evidence of isolated tribes nearby.
Patrolling the wilderness for days on end, protection agents trek through dense forests, tread remote streams and regularly camp along desolate beaches, searching for traces of their proximity. With little more than GPS navigators and weather-worn cellphones damaged by the unforgiving elements, they compile their findings in field reports for Peru’s Ministry of Culture, which implements policy on isolated tribes. Their fieldwork provides the state with invaluable intel about what little is known about these reclusive hunter-gatherers, from territorial migrations to population sizes.
Increasingly, their briefings note the indicators of outside invasion by illicit actors. Purus’s forests have become an emerging drug smuggling corridor. Last year, nearly 230,000 acres of coca, cocaine’s raw ingredient, were cultivated in Peru. Of that, more than 43,000 acres (17,400 hectares) were grown in protected areas home to isolated tribes, according to Peru’s National Commission for Development and Life without Drugs (DEVIDA).
Fredy Capitan, an Indigenous protection agent for Peru’s government, surveys a village where isolated tribes are making increased contact [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]
Authorities from Peru’s National Service of Natural Protected Areas (SERNANP) confirmed the presence of traffickers moving cocaine paste through Purus’s rivers and forests. Remote jungle airstrips thought to be used for the cocaine trade have also been registered adjacent to and inside of the Mashco Piro Indigenous Reserve, a two million-acre (800,000-hectare) protected area inhabited by the Mashco Piro tribe within the Alto Purus National Park.
Despite the immense size of this territory, invasion by drug traffickers, as well as hunters and loggers, is pushing isolated tribes away from remote tributaries and towards more populated areas, typically near rivers, where there are crops like plantain and cassava. This puts them in dangerous proximity to armed villagers who are increasingly on edge.
As intermediaries between the state and local communities, it is Torres and Capitan’s work to calm rattled nerves and ensure that proper protocol is followed. Beyond monthly patrols searching for the presence of isolated tribes along forested trails, rivers and ravines, they also brief villagers on their findings and inform them of government “action plans”, which include a strict no-contact policy meant to defuse violence in the event of sightings.
“We make sure villagers stay calm and leave the area immediately. Then, we put out an alert to the Culture Ministry and wait for instructions,” Capitan explains.
But the protocols devised in Lima do not often reflect the immediacy of actual threats in Purus’s forests, according to Torres and Capitan. “Government ministers can only comprehend our territory from studies and books,” says Capitan. “They don’t understand our reality on the ground.”
Both men decried a shortage of personnel, poor communication and a lack of dependable boats to usher villagers to safety in the event of raids. And absent more robust state measures to protect isolated tribes’ territories and stem their arrival near villages, the region has turned into a tinderbox.
The lowland forests of Purus are thought to be home to the largest concentration of isolated tribes on Earth [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]
A family killed
Torres and Capitan hack through the jungle and arrive at a wooden cabin enveloped by forest. Its door and walls have been lacerated by machetes.
Not far from Nueva Vida, the Cetico Outpost, named after a nearby ravine, served as a government base camp for protection agents for more than a decade. Today, it is home to a colony of shrieking bats, and the floors are littered with tattered maps and logbooks.
As isolated tribes emerge in this region, the abandoned outpost serves as a grim testament to their volatile relationship, not only with villagers, but also with groups who, until recently, lived in isolation like them.
The Cetico Outpost was abandoned by Peru’s government in 2020 after a deadly raid by isolated tribes in the Amazon region of Purus [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]
“[The] Mashco Piro hacked through the door and took anything they could find,” says Capitan. “No one was here at the time. But after the killings, the government abandoned it.”
In November 2020, following the raid on this outpost, three dismembered corpses of a local Indigenous family living close by were found slashed by machetes and pocked by arrows. The victims were a family of Mastanahua tribespeople who had been lured out of isolation by Christian missionaries in the early 2000s.
Slowly adapting to sedentary life, the family lived alone in a jungle encampment a short trek from the government outpost. Despite cultural and linguistic barriers with their Huni Kuin neighbours, they would make regular visits to nearby communities, including Torres’s.
“My wife would cook them meals. They loved rice and sweet drinks,” Torres says, adding that initial contact tribes did not have previous experience with these foods.
However, following the family’s absence in his community for more than a week, and alerts by neighbours, Torres and fellow protection agents went to investigate. When he was trekking to the family’s home, Torres saw hundreds of large footprints, he recalls.
“We knew they were Mashco Piro footprints. The Mastanahua’s are the size of our own,” says Torres. “As we got closer, we saw vultures.”
When he arrived at the family’s encampment, Torres says he saw the family’s decomposing corpses beside the remnants of their burned home.
The motive for the killings – whether owing to a longstanding tribal feud with the Mastanahua, territorial invasion or other perceived threats – remains unclear, Torres said, but the protection agents suspected the Mashco Piro.
What is evident is that external pressures are driving the Mashco Piro – who inhabit a wide swath of territory beyond Purus – to increased aggression. In late August, two loggers operating within the tribe’s territory were killed by arrows in the southern region of Madre de Dios. Another two remain missing.
In the wake of the family killing in Purus, weeks would pass before a commission led by the National Prosecutor’s Office and Peru’s National Police was sent in to investigate and remove the bodies. The Ministry of Culture, which coordinated the evacuation of nearby villagers, confirmed arrows characteristic of those used by the Mascho Piro at the site of the murders. Official findings from the state’s investigation were not made available.
Following the killings, the Culture Ministry abandoned the Cetico Outpost, and fearful Huni Kuin villagers in the nearby community of Santa Rey fled. Four years later, their village remains empty, its 10 families displaced upriver.
Following a deadly raid by an isolated tribe in 2020, villagers in the Huni Kuin community of Santa Rey fled. It remains abandoned today [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]
‘We could be killed at any moment’
The sun sinks below the forest canopy as Torres and Capitan arrive home to their community of Balta. Straddling the Alto Purus National Park, Balta is surrounded by boundless forest. A boat journey here from Purus’s capital of Puerto Esperanza takes about 30 hours. During the dry season, however, the village of 40 is nearly cut off from the outside world.
After a meal of roasted monkey and boiled cassava, Torres and Capitan sway in hammocks, talking with their wives and children.
Capitan, a father of four and former school teacher, became a protection agent a year ago.
“For me, it was a calling. Both to help our communities and understand the reality of our uncontacted brothers,” he says. “I wanted to understand how the state can protect them.”
Fredy Capitan, left, and Nolasco Torres in their village of Balta. As government protection agents, they monitor the remote jungle for signs of isolated tribes [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]
After five years of theological studies, Torres led a Huni Kuin evangelical organisation in Purus during the late 2000s while also dedicating himself to a life of agriculture and hunting. Years of friendly relations with the slain Mastanahua family led him to take an interest in isolated tribes. He became a protection agent in 2019.
However, the $275 monthly salary is hardly enough, Torres says, to provide for his eight children and is not enough to compensate for the dangers of their job.
“We go to work knowing we could be killed at any moment,” he says. “But [isolated tribes] have a right to live. They have their culture and customs, that’s why we can’t force them into contact. It’s their decision alone to make.”
It was a decision the Huni Kuin ultimately made themselves after they were brought out of isolation by American missionaries in the 1940s and 50s and settled in Balta. The missionaries eventually left, along with hundreds of Huni Kuin who today live scattered throughout Purus.
The increased arrival of isolated tribes near Balta has caused many more to flee. But Torres and Capitan remain, in part because their livelihoods depend on it. Following the 2020 killings, the Culture Ministry moved its monitoring outpost here.
“We are the brave ones representing our Huni Kuin people,” says Torres. “But this is an emergency zone.”
Both men say that requests to authorities for better communication, including satellite phones and functioning internet, as well as a safehouse in the event of raids, have gone unheeded.
The lack of state resources for protection agents is impeding the success of their work, according to Beatriz Huertas, the anthropologist. While their intended function is “a strong concept in theory,” she said, lacking personnel and proper training, agents here are ill-equipped to manage increased contact and can only coordinate evacuations and community lockdowns. Meanwhile, the state has channelled resources to other regions where isolated groups are emerging, leaving Purus with a shortage of protection agents and neglected monitoring outposts.
Peru’s Ministry of Culture declined an interview with Al Jazeera, but in a written response stated that there were no officially reported sightings of isolated groups in 2023 or 2024, contradicting testimony from more than a dozen villagers interviewed by Al Jazeera. The ministry stated that “contingency plans” to help villagers flee in the event of raid scenarios were being implemented in five communities in the region. The state’s emergency plans include the construction of wooden escape canoes and petrol supplies.
But the boats have not arrived, and residents said the state’s plans were a stopgap fix that would do little to protect villagers or isolated groups.
There is concern that regular sightings of isolated tribes could be a prelude to more sustained contact. If that happens, many here doubt the state could safely bring them into the fold of sedentary life. “There is a harsh culture shock and political destructuring when isolated peoples integrate. The state tends to abandon them to their fate,” said Huertas.
Huni Kuin children in the remote village of Balta carry bush meat from a recent hunt. Their village is a flashpoint of recent contact with isolated tribes in Peru’s eastern Amazon [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]
‘We need action’
The following morning, Torres and Capitan gas up their boat and travel two hours downriver to the Huni Kuin village of Colombiana, where villagers said the Mastanahua have made contact twice since 2019, entering homes and taking items.
The agents gather villagers to update them on the Ministry of Culture’s contingency plans, which have been delayed for nearly a year.
Colombiana’s leader, Paco Pinedo, is distressed. With dry season approaching, and after a series of raids in Colombiana, including one on his own home in 2020, villagers are on edge, he said.
“We need action,” said Pinedo. “Every year, the situation is getting more dire. We can’t wait on the state. Our kids and elders are terrified.”
Pinedo muses aloud that perhaps life would be easier if isolated tribes would finally come out of the forest for good, living as neighbours of the Huni Kuin. But then he pivots.
“Our ancestors used to live like them,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s their right to stay in the bush.”
Ultimately, it will require true state commitment to legally defend the territorial rights of isolated tribes and an overhaul of the extractivist policies degrading their forests, according to Huertas. Stronger alliances with local Indigenous communities, she said, would also help call to attention the importance of protecting Earth’s remaining isolated peoples.
“[The state] must double down on work to monitor their territories, their food sovereignty, and environment to protect their integrity, their lives, their health and their future as peoples,” said Huertas.
Protection agents outline emergency measures to villagers in Colombiana, which has had repeated contact with an isolated tribe [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]
Among the victims were a newborn baby and a one-year-old boy who were killed in a landslide in the mountains of northwestern Vietnam.
At least 24 people have been killed and 299 injured in Vietnam amid landslides and floods triggered by Typhoon Yagi.
The typhoon was Asia’s most powerful storm this year and made landfall on Vietnam’s northeastern coast on Saturday, after causing havoc in China and the Philippines.
Among the victims were six people, including a newborn baby and a one-year-old boy, who were killed in a landslide in the Hoang Lien Son mountains of northwestern Vietnam.
Their bodies were discovered on Sunday, a local official told the AFP news agency.
Other victims included a family of four who were killed after heavy rain caused a hillside to collapse onto a house in mountainous Hoa Binh province in northern Vietnam, state media reported.
The Vietnamese government said the storm disrupted power supplies and telecommunications in several parts of the country, mostly in Quang Ninh and Hai Phong in the northeast.
The weather agency on Monday warned of more floods and landslides, noting that rainfall had ranged between 208mm and 433mm (8.2 inches to 17 inches) in several parts of the region over the past 24 hours.
“Floods and landslides are damaging the environment and threatening people’s lives,” the National Centre for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting said in a report.
Yagi weakened to a tropical depression on Sunday, but several areas of the port city of Hai Phong were under half a metre (1.6 feet) of water and there was no electricity.
At Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site about 70km (43 miles) up the coast from the city, the disaster management authority said 30 vessels sank after being pounded by strong wind and waves.
The typhoon also damaged nearly 3,300 houses, and more than 120,000 hectares (296,500 acres) of crops in the north of the country, the authority said.
Before arriving in Vietnam, Yagi tore through southern China and the Philippines, killing at least 24 people and injuring dozens of others.
Typhoons in the region are now forming closer to the coast, intensifying more rapidly, and staying over land for longer due to climate change, according to a study published in July.
Heavy flooding in the Wayanad district of India’s southern state of Kerala set off a landslide that killed at least 194 people. Continual rain is hampering rescue efforts.
Yaad Ali is dreading the rainy season’s arrival this year.
The 56-year-old farmer from northeastern India’s Assam state lives with his wife and son on Sandahkhaiti island on the Brahmaputra River.
The island, like 2,000 others on the river, floods with increasing ferocity and unpredictability as human-caused climate change makes rain heavier and more erratic in the region.
The family move away with every flood, and move back to their house every dry season.
Ali said politicians in the region have made promises to provide relief for them, including during the current election, but little has changed for his family. For now, they contend with being displaced for large parts of the year.
“We need some sort of a permanent solution,” Ali said. “In the last few years, it’s only a short time after we recover from flood damages that we have to be ready to face another flood.”
A permanent piece of land in a safer region of the state can be the only solution to their troubles, he said. And while local governments have talked about it, only a few river islanders have been offered land rights in the state.
When The Associated Press met Ali and his family last year, they were relocating because of incessant rain that had flooded their island home. Now, during the dry season, Ali and his family cultivate red chilli peppers, corn and a few other vegetables in their small farm on the island.
‘Nobody cares about our problems’
Like most other islanders, farming is their livelihood: An estimated 240,000 people in the Morigaon district of the state – where some of the river islands, known as Chars, are located – are dependent on fishing and selling produce like rice, jute and vegetables from their small farms.
When it rains, the family stays as long as they can, living in knee-deep water inside their small hut, sometimes for days; cooking, eating and sleeping, even as the river water rises. But sometimes the water engulfs their home, forcing them to flee with their belongings.
“We leave everything and try to find some higher ground or shift to the nearest relief camp,” Monuwara Begum, Ali’s wife, said last year. The relief camps are unhygienic and there’s never enough space or food, Ali said, and “sometimes we get only rice and salt for days”.
But when it is dry, the family has temporary respite. They move back to their homes, tend to their farms, and are able to make a living selling the produce they harvest.
India, and Assam state in particular, is seen as one of the world’s most vulnerable regions to climate change because of more intense rain and floods, according to a 2021 report by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a New Delhi-based climate think tank.
Like many others on the Chars, Ali and his family are unable to afford to permanently relocate and have reconciled themselves to their fate of moving back and forth to their home.
“Nobody cares about our problems,” said Ali. “All the political parties promise to solve the flood problems but after the election, nobody cares about it.”
The city of Pinole is temporarily banning new gas stations in an effort to cut down gas emissions
There are similar bans in other parts of the Bay Area as cities look for ways to reduce emissions and as California plans to ban new gas-powered cars by 2035.
The new gas stations ban is catching the attention of Pinole residents like Marcus Maxwell, who feels a bit torn about the idea but he said that he understands why it’s happening.
“We are going towards a lot of electric vehicles, right?” he said.
The Pinole City Council recently voted unanimously to pass a temporary ordinance, banning the building of new gas stations.
“Really, just make sure we as a community, welcoming EV charging and welcoming hydrogen hubs,” said Pinole vice mayor Cameron Sasai.
Pinole is the first East Bay city to enact such a ban. But not everyone is on board with the ban.
The Western States Petroleum Association released the following statement:
“Good climate policy would not force people to drive further for the fuel they need. Gas stations bans are effective at only one thing — limiting supplies of fuels to consumers. When government policy limits supplies of fuels, costs usually go up.”
The association cites a working study out of UC Berkeley, focusing on more than a thousand gas stations in Mexico, showing a 6% reduction in gas prices, when stations are three minutes apart.
Pinole’s temporary ban on new gas stations expires in 45 days. But the city can renew the ordinance for up to two years before voting on a permanent ban down the road.
Australians are used to seeing messages with advice on preparing for bushfires and other extreme weather at this time of year.
“Amid the Christmas promotions, [we’re] seeing increased warnings about extreme heat and fires and how to cope and stay safe,” Belinda Noble, the founder of climate advocacy organisation Comms Declare, told Al Jazeera.
While there is nothing new about these kinds of public service announcements, the messages have taken on added meaning as the weather becomes more unpredictable and memories of severe bushfires three years ago linger.
“Australia desperately needs national public information campaigns to keep people safe,” Noble told Al Jazeera, stressing that similar campaigns were also needed on how to “reduce emissions and to combat lies about fossil fuels, renewables and climate science”.
Australia passed breakthrough climate laws in March this year, 10 months after a new centre-left Labor government under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese took office.
“In contrast to our last government,” the new government now “acknowledges that climate change is very real, is with us now and is worsening extreme weather and disasters,” Greg Mullins, the former commissioner of fire and rescue for the state of New South Wales told Al Jazeera.
But, Mullins added, it is “inexplicable that as they strive to reduce emissions, they undo all of their good work by continuing to approve new fossil fuel projects.”
Even as the Albanese government passed its new legislation in March, its annual Resource & Energy Major Project list included 116 new fossil fuel projects, “two more than at the end of 2021”, according to Canberra-based think tank the Australia Institute.
Combined, Australia’s oil and gas expansion plans are the eighth largest of any country, the advocacy organisation Oil Change International said recently.
Many of the planned fuel projects – on land and sea – are facing opposition from Indigenous people, who are seeing the effects of fossil fuel extraction and climate change first-hand.
“My community is facing not just fracking, but mining [and] overgrazing” said Rikki Dank, the director of Gudanji For Country, an Indigenous charity. “On top of that, we are feeling the effects of climate change. The weather patterns are all over the place,” she said.
“There’s not as much rain as there used to be and the heat is becoming almost unbearable,” said Dank, who spoke to Al Jazeera from COP28 in Dubai where she was bringing attention to Australia’s plans to frack her traditional lands.
Fracking or hydraulic fracturing involves the high-pressure injection of liquid into shale rock to release gas.
“We’re seeing a lot of people in Australia lose their homes because it’s becoming too hot or because we can’t live there any more because of the mining or fracking,” she added.
But at a special COP28 meeting where leaders were encouraged to speak off-script on Sunday, Australia’s Climate Minister Chris Bowen backed calls for the global phasing out of fossil fuels.
The comments sparked confusion given Australia’s fossil fuel expansion at home.
“We don’t think of ourselves as a petrostate, but Australia is a bigger fossil fuel exporter than the United Arab Emirates, by far,” Ebony Bennett, the deputy director of the Australia Institute wrote last week, comparing Australia with the host of COP28.
Australia is “the third-largest exporter of fossil fuels in the world,” Bennett added. The country is one of the world’s top exporters of coal with Russia and Indonesia.
‘Your whole world’
While Australia’s messages on the world stage may seem mixed, at home, the messages, at least on the dangers of fire, are much clearer.
A Queensland Fire and Emergency Services advertisement shows images like a warped dog’s bowl and a children’s bike in a burned landscape while a narrator says “your best friend” and “your whole world”.
A fire preparation sign at the Rural Fire Service (RFS) station in Shannons Flat, Australia says, ‘Sorry guys, you are all too late now!’ in January 2020 [Tracey Nearmy/Reuters]
While more disaster preparedness is welcome, Mullins says recently-announced funding is “still just a drop in the bucket and climate change is causing that bucket to leak.”
The former fire chief who is also the founder of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action says greater efforts are needed to address the growing climate crisis.
“It doesn’t matter how many helicopters, how many planes, or many trucks you have,” Mullins told Al Jazeera. “We cannot just deal with the damage once it has been done, we need to tackle it at its root cause – which is the continued extraction and burning of coal, oil and gas.
“We must take urgent action now to get emissions plummeting during this crucial decade”, he added, “to give some hope to future generations”.
For Dank, the solutions include drawing on the experience of Indigenous people in caring for their land as a nature-based solution.
“Unfortunately”, there is a “current culture” of “band-aid solutions for how we can fix something that’s making us uncomfortable now as opposed to actually looking at and addressing the problem,” she said.
Meanwhile, Noble says public awareness campaigns are also needed to dispel the fossil fuel industry’s influence.
“Communities need more consistent, accurate and reliable climate information to manage the massive challenges ahead,” said Noble, whose organisation is also campaigning to see misleading fossil fuel advertising banned in Australia.
“There’s no doubt people are anxious,” she added, but it is possible to turn “anxiety into action against the fossil fuel companies causing the extreme heat, fires and storms”.
The president of Colombia has compared the “genocide of the Palestinian people” to climate change.
Speaking at COP28 on Friday, Gustavo Petro linked the Israel-Gaza conflict to the climate emergency.
He claimed “barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people is what awaits those who are fleeing the south because of the climate crisis”, adding the conflict is a “rehearsal for the future”.
Weeks of Israeli bombardment and a ground campaign have left more than three-quarters of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million uprooted, leading to a humanitarian crisis.
More than 13,300 Palestinians have been killed – roughly two-thirds of them women and children – according to the health ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza. Hamas is a UK-proscribed terrorist organisation.
Some 1,200 Israelis have been killed, mostly during Hamas’s deadly 7 October attack that triggered the war.
Petro, the left-wing president who was sworn in last year and is a former member of Colombia’s M-19 guerrilla group, said at the second day of COP28: “I invite you, ladies and gentlemen, to think about a fusion, a combination of events: the climate crisis and the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Israel restarted combat operations in Gaza on Friday. (AFP via Getty Images) (SAID KHATIB via Getty Images)
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“Are these events disconnected, is my question, or are we seeing here a mirror of what is going to happen in the future? The genocides and the barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people is what awaits those who are fleeing the south because of the climate crisis.”
He went on: “Most victims of climate change, which will be counted in their billions, will be in those countries that do not emit CO2 or emit very little. Without the transfer of wealth from the north to the south, the climate victims will increasingly have less drinking water in their homes and they will have to migrate north, where the melting glaciers will make it possible for people to have drinking water. The exodus will be of billions.
Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro said the Israel-Gaza conflict is a ‘rehearsal for the future’. (Reuters) (Amr Alfiky / reuters)
“There will be pushback against the exodus, with violence, with barbaric acts committed. This is what is happening in Gaza. This is a rehearsal for the future. Why have the major carbon-consuming nations made it possible for the systematic killing of thousands of children in Gaza, is my question?
“Because if they do not kill them, they will invade their country to prevent them from consuming their carbon. We can therefore see what the future will look like. There will be a shrinking of democracy and unleashed barbaric acts against our peoples. Those of us who do not emit CO2. Those of us who are poor.”
Israel restarts operations
Israel restarted combat operations in the Gaza Strip minutes after a temporary truce expired on Friday, blaming Hamas for breaking the ceasefire.
Within hours of the truce ending, Hamas-run Gaza reported 109 people had been killed and dozens wounded in air strikes.
In light of this, Petro was not the only world leader at COP28, which is being held in the UAE, to speak out about the conflict.
Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said: “While discussing the climate crisis, we cannot ignore the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the Palestinian territories right beside us. The Israeli attacks that have claimed the lives of over 16,000 innocent Palestinian civilians, the majority of whom are children and women, can in no way be justified.”
Jordan’s King Abdullah also said: “Nor can we stand by as the massive destruction of a relentless war in Gaza threatens more people and holds back progress towards a better global future.”
It comes as UK prime minister Rishi Sunak said the UK is exploring alternative routes to provide aid to Gaza following the breakdown of the truce.
Sunak also renewed calls for “sustained humanitarian pauses” as he met regional leaders on the sidelines of the COP28 summit.
The 86-year-old pontiff is recovering from the flu and inflammation of respiratory tract.
Pope Francis has cancelled his trip to the United Arab Emirates for a United Nations climate summit on doctors’ orders as he recovers from the flu and lung inflammation, the Vatican says.
Francis, 86, was scheduled to leave on Friday to address the Conference of the Parties (COP28) in Dubai on Saturday. He would have become the first pontiff to address a UN climate conference.
He also was set to inaugurate a faith pavilion on Sunday on the sidelines of the event.
On Tuesday, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said Francis’s health was improving after the flu and inflammation of his respiratory tract had forced him to cancel his audiences on Saturday, but the doctors advised him not to travel to Dubai.
The pope agreed not to travel “with great regret”, according to the Vatican statement, which added that it would look into ways that the leader of the world’s Roman Catholics could contribute to the climate discussions remotely.
Francis, who had part of one lung removed as a young man, came down with the flu last week and had a CT scan. The Vatican subsequently said the test had ruled out pneumonia.
On Sunday, he skipped his traditional appearance at his studio window overlooking St Peter’s Square to avoid the cold. Instead, he gave the traditional noon blessing in a televised appearance from the chapel in the Vatican hotel where he lives and asked a priest to read his written daily reflections out loud.
The pope had to postpone a trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan in 2022 because of knee inflammation. He was able to make that journey early this year.
When asked about his health in a recent interview, Francis responded in what has become his standard line: “Still alive, you know.”
In the small village of Sesklo in central Greece, 46-year-old Vasilis Tsiamitas has felt the extremes of both freak weather phenomena this summer, as Greece has become a climate change hotspot.
Storm Elias flooded his house, damaged his beach bar and swept away his car in September. That finished off what was left weeks earlier by Storm Daniel, Greece’s most intense on record, and a July wildfire that scorched his family’s almond grove.
“God only knows how I will get past this,” said Tsiamitas, standing outside his two-storey family house. The front door is off its hinges, propped up against a wall next to wooden boards soaked by floodwater.
“What else could hit me? It can’t get any worse,” he said.
Fierce storms and floods have become more frequent in recent years, while rising temperatures make summers hotter and drier, creating tinder-box conditions for wildfires.
Muddy roads and household furniture, stacked up outside to dry, in villages across the central mainland region of Thessaly are a constant reminder of the steps Greece needs to take as it adapts to climate change and seeks to mitigate the effects of such freak weather events.
Sesklo, a village of about 800 residents near the port city of Volos, and home to one of Europe’s oldest prehistoric settlements, has survived natural disasters through the centuries.
But its oldest residents, Tsiamitas says, have never experienced anything like this year’s devastation.
“It’s the first time that our village is tested so much,” said Tsiamitas, who is also the local community leader. “We have elderly people sitting at the village square who are 95 years old. They have never experienced such a thing before.”
The wildfire that broke out in July was burning uncontrolled for at least two days.
Sesklo residents were evacuated in time but the flames, fanned by strong winds, burned through farmland and groves, destroying approximately 70 percent of the village’s almond and olive oil production, said Tsiamitas.
“The weather conditions were so bad, the wind, there was no humidity that day, the fire was moving fast. There was not enough time to do anything,” he said.
In early September, Storm Daniel hit Thessaly after Greece’s longest heatwave in more than 30 years. It killed 16 people and turned the area into an inland sea, destroying homes, farms and wiping out swaths of crops.
Tsiamitas, whose beach bar flooded, said most Sesklo residents were not as badly affected as others in the wider region. But their feeling of relief was short-lived.
Weeks later, Elias, a less intense but unexpected storm, was the final straw.
Tsiamitas recounts that he had his youngest son in his arms when a raging torrent flung his front door open, forcing him to race upstairs where his in-laws live.
Since then, the water has subsided, revealing the devastation that villages like Sesklo suffered.
“We should learn our lesson,” Tsiamitas said, looking at stumps of burned almond trees. “We need to uproot them … we need to plant them again. Again and again, we need to start everything from scratch.”
Swedish activist held at protest against the influence of the fossil fuel industry on UK and global climate politics.
Greta Thunberg has been detained by UK police at a climate protest outside a London hotel hosting a major oil and gas industry conference.
Thunberg was among dozens of protesters who chanted “oily money out” and sought to block access on Tuesday to the Energy Intelligence Forum by sitting on the pavement by the entrance.
Video footage showed Thunberg standing calmly as two police officers spoke to her. One was seen holding her arm. Still images showed her being searched and placed in the back of a police van.
Protesters held aloft banners and chanted “oily money out” and “cancel the conference,” while some lit yellow and pink smoke flares.
Two activists from the environmental group Greenpeace abseiled down from the roof of the hotel to unfurl a giant banner reading, “Make Big Oil Pay.”
The group said hundreds of demonstrators had gathered in front of the venue to protest against the influence of the fossil fuel industry on UK and global climate politics.
Thunberg inspired a global youth movement demanding stronger efforts to fight climate change [Toby Melville/Reuters]
London’s Metropolitan Police said six people were initially arrested on suspicion of obstructing a highway during the protest. The force said a further 14 were detained on suspicion of disrupting public order, and one other person was detained for criminal damage.
Police said they engaged in conversations with the protesters on allowing people to access the venue safely and prevent serious disruption to the hotel and guests, but some of the activists refused to move from the road.
No charges have been issued yet.
The protesters accuse fossil fuel companies of deliberately slowing the global energy transition to renewables in order to make more profit.
“The world is drowning in fossil fuels. Our hopes and dreams and lives are being washed away by a flood of greenwashing and lies,” Thunberg told reporters before she was detained. “It has been clear for decades that the fossil fuel industries were well aware of the consequences of their business models, and yet they have done nothing.”
“We cannot let this continue. The elite of the oil and money conference, they have no intention of transition,” she added. “We have no other option but to put our bodies outside this conference and to physically disrupt. And we have to do that every time, we have to continue showing them that they are not going to get away with this.”
Police said those detained were taken into custody and that officers remained on site.
Environmental groups say they will continue to protest throughout the planned forum, which is expected to last three days.
Thunberg inspired a global youth movement demanding stronger efforts to fight climate change after staging weekly protests outside the Swedish Parliament starting in 2018. She was recently fined by a Swedish court for disobeying police during an environmental protest in Sweden.
The global investment and lending systems are on the verge of a climate-centric metamorphosis as the consequences of global warming on economies around the world become impossible to overlook.
That change should be good news but it is the economically-challenged Global South that could bear the heaviest burden of this shift.
Before 2021, climate change was primarily regarded as a concern that disproportionately affected the Global South. International financial institutions and advanced economies directed significant amounts of their finance earmarked for climate-related mitigation and investments towards vulnerable areas to enhance their ability to adapt.
However, the past two years have brought about a radical shift. The year 2023, specifically, has witnessed an unprecedented surge in dramatic climate change effects across North America, Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. Prolonged heatwaves, floods, raging wildfires and devastating hurricanes have struck these wealthier regions, leaving them bewildered.
Against this backdrop, it should surprise no one if richer nations redirect financing that was previously allocated for the Global South’s adaptation efforts, channelling it instead towards domestic recovery efforts.
The shift is already noticeable in mechanisms like multilateral climate funds, as highlighted recently by the struggles of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) in securing pledges from rich countries for its upcoming funding cycle. Remember, there are only limited dedicated sources of climate financing to begin with.
And while accessing funding from such platforms is exceedingly challenging, they play a crucial role and may be the only lifeline for many vulnerable regions. If these funds run dry, the Global South will have no doors left to knock on. The Loss and Damage (L&D) Fund, established just last year, might also fall prey to this changing landscape. To some degree, it already has.
The fund doesn’t yet have enough commitments, let alone necessary capital, to address climate change. Additionally, it regularly encounters dismissive comments from rich countries concerning contributions. The United States, in particular, remains opposed to the idea of holding historical emitters responsible for the current climate landscape, or compensating countries affected by disasters.
COP28 is expected to include the operationalisation of the L&D fund on its agenda. It will be intriguing to witness how delegates will navigate the challenge of operationalising a fund that’s nearly empty.
Another implication of the climate-driven transformation of financial systems, which could have the most significant impact on the Global South, relates to concessional elements within global debt.
For institutional lenders like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, climate exposures are becoming increasingly evident through an elevated probability of loans that borrowers are not able to repay due to hardships.
Such challenges stem from borrowers facing recurring climate-induced disasters or depreciation of their existing assets caused by the escalation of global inflation, which itself may be driven by climate change.
Lenders face a quandary. On the one hand, their core mandate is to provide financial assistance to countries in need. However, they must also exercise caution when extending loans to countries that may be unable to repay them.
Consequently, as a delicate balancing act, institutions are now moving away from the concessional nature of debt instruments, relinquishing their prior leniency.
Pakistan serves as a notable example.
Last year’s floods plunged the country into poly-crises, pushing it dangerously close to a sovereign debt default. Ultimately, the economic collapse was averted through the approval of a $3bn loan program by the IMF.
One would expect that the IMF would provide this amount on favourable terms to help alleviate Pakistan’s economic woes. However, the reality is quite the opposite.
Reforms tied to the bailout package have resulted in a surge in annual inflation in Pakistan, reaching a historic high of 38 percent in May. Interest rates have also climbed, and the Pakistani rupee has reached unprecedented lows, with a 6.2 percent decline against the US dollar last month.
Climate-vulnerable African nations present other cases in point. According to the IMF’s own assessment, 13 African countries are currently teetering on the edge of climate and debt distress. Drought-stricken Zambia and, more recently, flood-prone Ghana have already defaulted on their debt payments.
The prospect of debt pardoning, a plea the debt-burdened Global South fervently advocates for, is not one that lenders like. The climate has changed, not the tenets of capitalism.
“We want to pay,’’ said Kenyan President William Ruto during the New Global Financial Pact Summit in June. ‘’But we need a new financial model,’’ he argued. “The current financial architecture is unfair, punitive and inequitable.’’
To be sure, the Global South will need to depend on its internal resources for the most part to drive climate investments. These countries must look to break free from the relentless cycle of debt and climate crises.
Yet, to accomplish this, they need a financial system founded not on the principle of survival of the fittest, but rather on equitable opportunities for all.
Mere sympathy from the rich will no longer suffice. What the Global South needs, and rightfully deserves, is systemised empathy.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Activists brandish signs like ‘Fossil Fuel Subsidies are Not Cool’ and warn extreme temperatures are a sign of the future if fossil fuels are not abandoned.
Police deployed water cannon to disperse thousands of climate activists protesting on a highway in the Netherlands to demand an end to government subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.
More than 10,000 people marched along the A12 highway into The Hague on Saturday, ignoring warnings from authorities not to block the major traffic artery into the Dutch seat of government.
The police said in a statement they detained 2,400 protesters, including minors. There were no reports of injuries.
Extinction Rebellion, which organised the event, has said it will continue to hold protests until the government of the Netherlands stops using public funds to subsidise the oil and gas industry.
“The seas are rising and so are we,” chanted the crowd, which included children and the elderly.
A report last week detailed 37.5 billion euros ($40.5bn) in subsidies in the Netherlands, notably related to the shipping industry, prompting calls for a quick halt to the practice.
The protesters — from Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace and other organisations — broke through a police barrier and sat on a main road.
They threatened to stay until the subsidies were lifted and to come back every day if police removed them. “This is much larger than any one of us. This concerns the whole world,” activist Yolanda de Jager said.
Protesters block a highway during a climate protest near the Dutch parliament in The Hague [Peter Dejong/AP Photo]
End the subsidies
The activists brandished signs with sayings such as “Fossil Fuel Subsidies are Not Cool”, and warned extreme temperatures around the world this summer are a sign of the future if fossil fuels are not abandoned.
After several hours, police moved in and fired volleys from water cannon at the crowd. They picked up or dragged some protesters, wheeling them away in special orange wagons.
Protesters on the front line held up their fists in resistance or put their heads down to protect themselves from the jets of water. Those farther back danced and jumped up and down under the spray, appearing to enjoy the shower on an unusually hot September day for the Netherlands.
The roadblock is part of a series of protests led by Extinction Rebellion targeting the Dutch parliament.
The Netherlands is often seen as a leader in renewable energy and progressive climate policies. Minister for Climate and Energy Rob Jetten acknowledged the country has to end the subsidies but has offered no timeline.
A new protest is planned for Sunday.
At the G20 summit in India on Saturday, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told world leaders the planet is facing an “unprecedented climate emergency“.
Extinction Rebellion and other activists protest near the Dutch parliament on Saturday [Peter Dejong/AP Photo]
Fierce rainstorms have battered Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria, triggering flooding that caused at least eight deaths, including two holidaymakers swept away by a torrent that raged through a campsite in northwestern Turkey.
In Istanbul, heavy rain flooded streets and homes in two neighbourhoods, killing at least two people, according to a statement from the governor’s office.
About a dozen people were rescued after being stranded inside a library, while some subway stations were shut down.
In Greece, police banned traffic in the central town of Volos, the nearby mountain region of Pilion and the resort island of Skiathos as record rainfall caused at least one death, channelled thigh-high torrents through streets and swept cars away.
Five people were reported missing, possibly swept away by floodwaters.
Authorities sent mobile phone alerts in several other areas of central Greece, the Sporades island chain and the island of Evia, warning people to limit their movements outdoors.
Streams overflowed their banks and swept cars into the sea in the Pilion area, while rockfalls blocked roads; a small bridge was carried away and many areas suffered electricity cuts.
Authorities evacuated a retirement home in the city of Volos as a precaution.
Farther north in Bulgaria, Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov said, two people died and three others were missing after a storm caused floods on the country’s southern Black Sea coast.
Overflowing rivers caused severe damage to roads and bridges. The area also suffered power blackouts, and authorities warned residents not to drink tap water due to contamination from floodwaters.
Climate negotiators representing two dozen countries will hold meetings on Tuesday to iron out details of the United Nations’ “loss and damage” fund, created last year in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and expected to be presented at COP28 in Dubai in November.
The fund is mean to provide compensation for poor nations suffering the impact of climate change. The committee meeting this week has been tasked with determining where the fund will be located, how it will be managed, who will be eligible and how it will be funded.
The committee is considering whether the fund should be hosted by an already existing institution, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the Green Climate Fund, or whether a new institution will be created.
Loss and damage funding includes money for such things as relocating or rebuilding after extreme weather, the loss of livelihoods due to ecosystem destruction and non-economic losses, such as loss of culture and tradition, or trauma.
It is different from mitigation, which is financial support that helps address the root cause of climate change, namely greenhouse gas emissions, and adaptation, which helps reduce the impacts of climate change, although the terms are often used interchangeably.
Small island developing states and the least developed countries group have been advocating for loss and damage funding for nearly three decades, and they are finally sitting at the negotiating table determining what the fund will look like.
“I think it’s real to people now because everyone is affected by climate change,” Ayesha Dinshaw, loss and damage programme officer at the Climate Justice Resilience Fund, told Al Jazeera.
“People in developed countries understand now more than ever what it feels like to lose their loved ones, places that matter to them, their homes and belongings,” she said.
$671bn needed annually by 2030
Dinshaw was asked to present the work of the Climate Justice Resilience Fund, which focuses specifically on social justice and community-determined projects in their funding, at the committee’s second workshop in July.
Funds required for loss and damage are expected to reach $671bn annually by 2030, according to calculations by the Loss and Damage Collaboration. Current funding stands at less than $500m annually.
The majority of current funding is directed through financial instruments called the Santiago Network and Global Shield, which were created at the UN climate change conferences, or COP summits, in 2020 and 2022, respectively.
The V20, a coalition of the 55 most climate-vulnerable countries, has estimated its members already spend more than 20 percent of their combined GDP on loss and damage because of climate change.
The conversations happening at the UN-level are coming alongside work by the Bridgetown Initiative, a coalition formed last year by world leaders, including the heads of the World Bank and IMF.
At a summit in Paris in June, the coalition announced a number of achievements including channeling $100bn in the IMF’s reserve currency, called “special drawing rights”, towards vulnerable nations.
Additionally, it announced there was a “good likelihood” that developed countries will contribute their promised $100bn in climate financing this year, based on a commitment made at COP14 in Copenhagen in 2009.
“We’ve seen a significant change in action,” Avinash Persaud, a development economist and climate envoy representing Barbados, told Al Jazeera. “We’ve seen for the first time people looking at questions that have been previously considered closed.”
Resistance to reparations
As the world battles record heat, extreme weather and rising sea levels, climate action is also accelerating with the tables appearing to turn in favour of vulnerable countries. Yet many fear the mobilisation of international finance is not moving fast enough.
Climate financing from developed to developing countries, which currently stands at an estimated $57bn annually, is a far cry from the $2.5 trillion for adaptation, mitigation, and loss and damage that experts calculate developing countries need annually.
The majority of climate finance is still leveraged through debt and prioritizes adaptation and mitigation efforts over funding for loss and damage. A recent UN report calculated more than 25 percent of countries in the world are either in debt distress or at risk from it.
Although China sent Prime Minister Li Qiang to the Paris summit, some of the largest carbon polluters, namely India and Russia, have been largely absent from meaningful climate action.
Additionally, most countries are resistant to a reparations framework that would encourage richer, more developed countries, which have historically contributed the most to climate change, to contribute financially to less developed countries that have historically contributed the least to climate change yet bear the major burden.
Under that framework, a vulnerable country such as Bangladesh, which contributes less than 4 percent of global carbon emissions and is one of the most vulnerable to climate change, would contribute the least to a loss and damage fund and have preferential access.
“Our position is that those who are responsible for climate change – developed countries – should provide resources to this fund,” Hafij Khan, environmental lawyer and adviser to the least developed countries group, told Al Jazeera.
“At the same time, we also agree that other parties who are in a position to do so should be encouraged to provide some resources,” he added.
‘Moral responsibility’
When Scotland gave a breakthrough grant of $1.26m to the Climate Justice Resilience Fund ahead of last year’s COP summit, then-First Minister Nicola Sturgeon acknowledged developed countries had a “moral responsibility” to support developing ones in the face of climate change.
So far, more than a dozen countries already support some form of loss and damage funding, the largest being Germany’s pledge of 170 million euros ($184m) at COP27 last year.
When the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was ratified in 1994, countries said developed nations had contributed the largest share of carbon emissions and agreed on the principle that countries had “common but differentiated responsibilities” in combating climate change. But diplomats vary on what that means.
As part of the Paris Agreement, which was signed at COP21 in 2015, countries agreed to remove any mention of liability and compensation from conversations about loss and damage.
The United States, for its part, has stated explicitly it is against climate reparations.
“No, under no circumstances,” US climate envoy John Kerry told the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the House of Representatives last month when asked, “Are you planning to commit America to climate reparations?”
Kerry’s senior adaptation adviser, Christina Chan, told Al Jazeera when asked whether the US would contribute to the loss and damage fund: “No funding commitments have been made at this point in the process.”
Numbers, not words
Although some negotiators place the burden on nations to contribute, others are more focused on leveraging the private sector and other mechanisms, such as taxation on the shipping industry.
The Bridgetown Initiative – named after the capital of Barbados, where the coalition was first convened by Prime Minister Mia Mottley last year – has made significant progress by uniting institutions such as the World Bank with leaders of more than 40 countries.
In addition to increasing the IMF’s special drawing rights and potentially making good on the nationally determined contributions, the Bridgetown Initiative has announced a number of other achievements.
It expects a $200bn increase in lending from development banks over the next 10 years and has also fundraised more than $40bn for the IMF’s new Resilience and Sustainability Trust.
During its Paris summit, it also announced a renegotiation of $6.3bn in debt owed by Zambia to China, a deal the Zambian president described as being “like a mission impossible”.
But can these developments be considered reparations?
“We need new taxes and levies that have a broad reach,” Persaud told Al Jazeera. “In the breadth of their reach, it should certainly be slanted to the wealthier countries.”
Yet, he added, “we are not going to get the $2.4 trillion we need through reparations”.
“We want to debate the issue of numbers and funding, not words.”
The fire was at a scale that has never been seen before in the Canary Islands, officials say.
Thousands of residents from Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands have been evacuated as a wildfire authorities deemed “out of control” rages on for a fourth day.
The Canary Islands emergency services said more than 26,000 people had been evacuated by Saturday afternoon, according to provisional estimates, a sharp rise from 4,500 on Friday. Some 11 towns have now been affected.
The Atlantic island is home to about one million people and is also a popular tourist destination.
The seven-island archipelago is located off the northwest coast of Africa and southwest of mainland Spain. At their nearest point, the islands are 100km (60 miles) from Morocco.
Fierce flames lit up the night sky overnight and on Saturday helicopters were seen dropping water on areas close to homes where smoke billowed into the air.
Some 5,000 hectares (12,000 acres) have been burned so far with a perimeter of 50km (30 miles).
The fire was at a scale never been seen before in the Canary Islands, Tenerife Council President Rosa Davila told reporters. She said the priority was to “protect people’s lives”.
The blaze has not destroyed any homes so far, she added, citing the fire brigade.
The island’s popular tourist areas have so far been unaffected and its two airports have been operating normally.
The blaze broke out on Wednesday in a mountainous national park around the Mount Teide volcano – Spain’s highest peak – amid hot and dry weather.
The fire is located in a steep and craggy mountain area with pine trees, with several municipalities on its flanks. Access for firefighters is extremely difficult.
The Canary Islands have been in drought for most of the past few years, just like most of mainland Spain. The islands have recorded below-average rainfall in recent years because of changing weather patterns impacted by climate change.
Scorching heat and dry weather this year have contributed to unusually severe wildfires in Europe, including in Spain’s La Palma Island in July, and Canada. Blazes on Hawaii’s Maui Island earlier this month killed more than 110 people and wrecked the historic resort city of Lahaina.
Scientists have said climate change has led to more frequent and more powerful extreme weather events.
European Union officials also blamed global warming for increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires in Europe, noting 2022 was the second-worst year for wildfire damage on record after 2017.
Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela sign declaration to safeguard the Amazon.
Eight South American countries have agreed to launch an alliance to protect the Amazon, pledging at a summit in Brazil to stop the world’s biggest rainforest from reaching “a point of no return”.
Leaders from South American nations also challenged developed countries to do more to stop the enormous destruction of the world’s largest rainforest, a task they said cannot fall to just a few countries when the crisis has been caused by so many.
The closely-watched summit of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) adopted on Tuesday what host country Brazil called a “new and ambitious shared agenda” to save the rainforest, a crucial buffer against climate change that experts warn is being pushed to the brink of collapse.
The group’s members – Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela – signed a joint declaration in Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon River, laying out a nearly 10,000-word roadmap to promote sustainable development, end deforestation and fight the organised crime that fuels it.
But the summit attendees stopped short of agreeing to the key demands of environmentalists and Indigenous groups, including for all member countries to adopt Brazil’s pledge to end illegal deforestation by 2030 and Colombia’s pledge to halt new oil exploration. Instead, countries will be left to pursue their individual deforestation goals.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has staked his international reputation on improving Brazil’s environmental standing, had been pushing for the region to unite behind a common policy of ending deforestation by 2030.
The two-day summit opened on the same day the European Union’s climate observatory confirmed that July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. Lula emphasised the “severe worsening of the climate crisis” in his opening speech.
“The challenges of our era and the opportunities arising from them demand we act in unison,” he said.
“It has never been so urgent,” he added.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro urged a radical rethink of the global economy, calling for a “Marshall Plan”-style strategy in which developing countries’ debt is cancelled in exchange for action to protect the climate.
“If we’re on the verge of extinction and this is the decade when the big decisions have to be made… then what are we doing, besides giving speeches?” he said.
The failure of the eight Amazon countries to agree on a binding pact to protect their forests was greeted with disappointment by some.
“The planet is melting, we are breaking temperature records every day. It is not possible that, in a scenario like this, eight Amazonian countries are unable to put in a statement – in large letters – that deforestation needs to be zero,” said Marcio Astrini of the environmental lobby group Climate Observatory.
Beyond deforestation, the “Belem Declaration”, the gathering’s official proclamation issued on Tuesday, also did not fix a deadline on ending illegal gold mining, although leaders agreed to cooperate on the issue and better combat cross-border environmental crime.
Al Jazeera’s Latin America editor Lucia Newman, reporting from the summit in Belem, said Lula da Silva had hoped for a strong commitment from peers at the summit to end deforestation in the Amazon.
“Critics say the final document was full of good intentions but short on deadlines,” Newman said.
“Nevertheless, there did seem to be a greater sense of urgency among the eight Amazonian nation leaders. Deforestation of the world’s largest rainforest has already reached 17 percent and, according to scientists, the tipping point is almost here,” Newman said.
Home to an estimated 10 percent of Earth’s biodiversity, 50 million people and hundreds of billions of trees, the vast Amazon is a vital carbon sink, reducing global warming.
Scientists warn the destruction of the rainforest is pushing it dangerously close to a “tipping point” beyond which trees would die off and release carbon rather than absorb it, with catastrophic consequences for the climate.
Seeking to pressure the gathered heads of state, hundreds of environmentalists, activists and Indigenous demonstrators marched to the conference venue, urging bold action.
This is the first summit in 14 years for the eight-nation group, set up in 1995 by the South American countries that share the Amazon basin. The summit is also being seen as a dress rehearsal for the 2025 United Nations climate talks, which Belem will host.
As climate change and rising sea levels threaten the island of Gardi Sugdub, leaders in the local Indigenous community are increasingly worried that the Panamanian government will fail to follow through on promises to help with relocation.
In a 52-page report on Monday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said “ongoing government delays” pose a serious threat to the human rights of Panama’s Indigenous Guna people.
According to the group’s findings, the government has repeatedly failed to provide housing and infrastructure to a new community site on higher ground, despite repeated assurances and plans stretching back to 2010.
“Panama should follow through on its promises and provide immediate support so the Gardi Sugdub community can relocate with dignity,” said Erica Bower, a climate displacement researcher at Human Rights Watch and author of the report.
“It’s not too late for the government to take this opportunity and create a blueprint that coastal communities elsewhere in Panama and globally can turn to as they confront the climate change crisis.”
Small island, big problems
Gardi Sugdub — or “Crab Island” — is part of an archipelago on Panama’s Caribbean coast expected to face “the most severe impacts” of climate change, according to the report.
At its highest point, the island is only one metre (3.2 feet) above sea level. And as the tides creep higher and higher, the island’s Guna residents are finding themselves with less and less space.
An estimated 1,300 Guna people are packed onto an island only 300 metres (984 feet) long and 125 metres (410 feet) wide. And yearly floods — lasting up to two weeks at a time — have caused significant damage to their homes and livelihoods.
“When I got home, the pier and the toilet had washed away,” one Gardi Sugdub resident, Eustacio Valdez, told Human Rights Watch, as he recalled one flood in 2008.
“The canoes were gone. There were high waves. It was flooded for a week. School was suspended.”
High schoolers from the Guna Indigenous community celebrate Panama’s Independence Day in Panama City in 2015 [File: Arnulfo Franco/AP Photo]
A difficult decision
In 2010, the Guna community on Gardi Sugdub arrived at a heavy conclusion: The only sustainable solution was to relocate to a different site.
“We are already too many in this town and we don’t fit,” Magdalena Martinez, secretary of the Neighborhood Committee on Gardi Sugdub, told Human Rights Watch. “There isn’t any more room.”
To house their growing population, Guna community members donated a site for the project on the mainland, nicknamed “Isperyala” for its abundance of loquat trees.
Around that time, Panama’s government also promised to build a “model school” and hospital for the area by 2014. But both have yet to be completed, according to Human Rights Watch.
In 2017, the Ministry of Housing likewise committed to building 300 homes for the Guna people, as well as providing services like potable water, sanitation and roads.
The project was originally slated to take 450 calendar days, according to Human Rights Watch. But then the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic slowed construction. A new completion date was set for September 2023. That too was delayed.
“The government is not complying with what it agreed to for this project. Look at that delay. That is not fair,” community member Dillion Navarro said in the report.
A measure of ‘last resort’
Meanwhile, on Gardi Sugdub, the Guna people struggle with overcrowding, a lack of educational resources for their children and unreliable access to fresh water, contributing to a high rate of gastrointestinal disease and poor sanitation.
The Human Rights Watch report noted that the conditions in Gardi Sugdub reflected hazards facing vulnerable coastal communities around the world.
“Even under the most optimistic scenarios of planetary warming, sea level rise is inevitable,” the report reads. “But planning today will mitigate some of the risks of tomorrow.”
The report adds that relocation is “a measure of last resort” for Indigenous communities, who often have strong ties to their homelands.
For the Guna, the islands provided sanctuary from centuries of colonial oppression. Starting in 1650, missionaries forced their people into settlements. Spanish colonisers confronted them with violence. And later, the Panamanian government attempted to suppress their traditional ways.
The islands also allowed the Guna to escape the mosquito-borne diseases common on the mainland.
But conditions on Gardi Sugdub are only expected to worsen due to climate change.
A health worker fumigates a house in the region of Guna Yala after 50 reported cases of Zika in 2016 [Panama Ministry of Health handout/Reuters]
A widespread crisis
Human Rights Watch has estimated that at least 38 other islands in Guna Yala — the Guna’s ancestral territory — will soon require relocation, as well, due to climbing sea levels. That includes a total of approximately 28,000 people.
And the Guna are hardly alone in facing this plight. The report noted that climate risks and other threats have prompted more than 400 planned relocations worldwide.
But, the report concludes, results have been slow to materialise for the Guna: “To date, not a single person has moved.”
It calls for “immediate support” to be given to the Guna people, as they contend with the worsening crisis.
![Protection agents Fredy Capitan (left) and Nolasco Torres arrive in Nueva Vida, where sightings of isolated tribes have caused villagers to flee [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Peru-tribes-Torres-and-Capitan-on-Patrol-2-1727542222.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C578)
![Huni Kuin men and boys ride upriver on a communal hunt [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Peru-tribes-Balta-Villagers-2-1727541111.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C513)
![The lowland forests of Purus are thought to be home to the largest concentration of isolated tribes on Earth [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Peru-tribes-Purus-Drone-2-1727541553.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C433)
![Fredy Capitan, an Indigenous protection agent for Peru’s government, surveys a village where isolated tribes are making increased contact [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Peru-tribes-Freddy-Capitan-1727540797.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C513)
![The lowland forests of Purus are thought to be home to the largest concentration of isolated tribes on Earth [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Peru-tribes-Purus-Drone-1727541631.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C433)
![The Cetico Outpost was abandoned by Peru’s government in 2020 after a deadly raid by isolated tribes in the Amazon region of Purus [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Peru-tribes-Puesto-Cetico-2-1727541470.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C433)
![Following a deadly raid by an isolated tribe in 2020, villagers in the Huni Kuin community of Santa Rey fled. It remains abandoned today [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Peru-tribes-Santa-Rey-Abandoned-1727541994.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C433)
![Fredy Capitan (left) and Nolasco Torres in their village of Balta. As government protection agents, they monitor the remote jungle for signs of isolated tribes [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Peru-tribes-Agents-Torres-and-Capitan-1727541340.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C406)
![Huni Kuin children in the remote village of Balta carry bush meat from a recent hunt. Their village is a flashpoint of recent contact with isolated tribes in Peru’s eastern Amazon [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Peru-tribes-Balta-Villagers-1-1727541195.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C604)
![Protection agents outline emergency measures to villagers in Colombiana, which has had repeated contact with an isolated tribe [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Peru-tribes-Colombiana-Meeting-1727540851.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C578)
