Boston Redlining Visible In Concrete, Ecocide Needs Definition, Climate Threatening Indigenous Food — Nexus Media News
Below are three recent Nexus Media news briefs combined into one article.
Boston Redlining Past Visible In Concrete Today
The racist legacy of redlining and other inequities, exacerbated by continued greenspace disparities, are disproportionately heating — and thus harming — low-income Boston neighborhoods, the Boston Globe reports. Previously redlined neighborhoods, those neighborhoods marked as “hazardous” for loans due to the number of people of color living in them, are now hotter and have fewer trees than neighborhoods marked as “best” or “desirable.” Formerly redlined neighborhoods are 6.7°F hotter than previously “best” or “desirable” neighborhoods” with substantially less parkland and fewer trees.
As climate change, caused by the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, drives up temperatures, Boston is expected to see 40 days per year above 90 degrees by the end of the decade — nearly triple the number it saw in 1990. “It’s profoundly disappointing what the city left,” Richard Parritz, a Jamaica Plain resident who chairs the design committee of the local nonprofit Three Squares. “This is a health and equity issue. It’s not right.”
Sources: Boston Globe $; Recent New England heatwaves: Boston Globe $; Climate Signals background: Extreme heat and heatwaves
Originally published by Nexus Media.
Ecocide Definition Proposed By Legal Experts
A team of a dozen legal experts from around the world have drafted a definition of “ecocide” for use by the International Criminal Court. If adopted by the ICC, ecocide would be one of just five crimes prosecuted by the court, along with war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and the crime of aggression — the crimes prosecuted at the Nuremberg trials. Advocates say the ICC’s prosecution of ecocide could provide a mechanism by which to hold transnational polluters accountable.
“The environment is threatened worldwide by the very serious and persistent damage caused to it, which endangers the lives of the people who live in it,” Dior Fall Sow, a co-chair of the panel, UN jurist, and a former prosecutor from Senegal told The Guardian. “This definition helps to emphasize that the security of our planet must be guaranteed on an international scale.”
Source: The Guardian, NBC and InsideClimate News, Al Jazeera; Commentary: The Guardian, Alexandre Antonelli and Pella Thiel op-ed
Originally published by Nexus Media.
Indigenous Food Systems, Under Climate Threat, Offer Guide To Sustainability
Indigenous peoples’ traditional food systems are among the most sustainable in the world, but are coming under threat from climate change, biodiversity collapse, and economic pressures, a new report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said Friday. The report, which examined eight Indigenous groups across four continents, found people are able to use ancestral knowledge to meet most of their food needs through hunting, gathering, fishing, pastoralism and shifting cultivation, along with adaptive practices including nomadism, without depleting resources or generating significant waste. But climate change-caused impacts, such as drought, loss of wildlife, and disrupted weather patterns, are threatening Indigenous groups’ ability to continue traditional practices. More than half a billion people across 80 countries are members of Indigenous groups, living on more than a third of Earth’s protected territories.
“Despite surviving for centuries, Indigenous Peoples’ agri-food systems are likely to disappear in the next years due to a number of drivers threatening their future,” said Juan Lucas Restrepo, Director-General of the Alliance of Bioversity-International and International Center for Tropical Agriculture, which partnered on the study. Added Yon Fernandez de Larrinoa, chief of the Indigenous Peoples Unit at the Food and Agriculture Organization: “We cannot destroy biodiversity and ecosystems and feed ourselves. Sooner or later we’re going to have more effects from climate change and pandemics.”
Sources: Reuters, InsideClimate News, UN News; Study: UN FAO
Originally published by Nexus Media.
Featured photo by Akhil Dakinedi on Unsplash
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