Resiliency in Focus (Asynchronous Session)
Anishinaabe Aki Kakendamowin - We Know Our Lands: The Incorporation of the Western Environmental Assessment Process with Traditional Anishinaabe Knowledge View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alrika Rojas
Indigenous nations in Canada must continuously struggle to maintain their rights to cultural autonomy, self-determination, and self-governance in a system dominated by a western worldview. The United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) affirms these rights and acknowledges the importance of Indigenous knowledge for environmental sustainability. This paper introduces a case study of the Niiwin Wendaanimok (Four Winds) Partnership between four Anishinaabe Nations of the Lake of the Woods region in Ontario, Canada, and the Harmonized Impact Assessment model developed by the Partnership for a highway twinning project. This model was developed in response to the conventional Canadian Environmental Assessment Process, which is not reflective of Indigenous teaching and does not easily integrate an alternative worldview. The Harmonized Impact Assessment model is built on the foundational principles of harmonization, which are informed by the Manito Aki Inakonigaawin (The Great Earth Law). This study explores the many principles, processes, and components of the Harmonized Impact Assessment model, with a key objective being to demonstrate the manner in which the use of a harmonized model successfully integrates western science with Anishinaabe knowledge and stewardship practices.
Vulnerable Populations - Climate Change and Weather Threats Facing Urban Communities: Creating Land Development Policies to Enhance Urban Resiliency to Hurricanes, Floods, Extreme Heat, and Wildfires View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Karen "Kara" Consalo
This paper explores increasing weather-threats facing coastal cities due to global climate change, including hurricanes, floods, heat waves, and wildfires. Discussion of these threats includes their adverse impacts on built and natural systems as well as human health and local economies. After discussion of these weather threats, the study explores cases of the response and resiliency measures being undertaken by the cities of New York, Miami, and San Francisco to prepare for weather disasters. Such case studies include the laws, policies, and infrastructure which have been developed by these urban communities as well as the financing tools necessary to enact such resiliency measures. The paper concludes by providing guidance and recommendations for policy-shapers seeking to develop urban resiliency measures in the face of long-term effects and short-term emergencies created by climate and weather extremes. Public input from policy-shapers in the fields of emergency response and land development are welcome.
The Effects of Climate Change on Women's Security: A Case Study in Mozambique View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sophie Luijten
Climate change is a universal crisis. However, its devastation is felt first and worst by women in poor countries. It is crucial to recognize and examine these gender disparities closely in order to understand how to protect vulnerable women and create a more effective, inclusive, and just climate policy framework. Therefore, I pursue the question: How does climate change impact women differently than men? In answering this question, I examine the effects of climate change on the security of women, with a case study of Mozambique. Mozambique is especially susceptible to the effects of climate change due to its low-lying coastal villages, and Mozambican women have borne the brunt of the maleffects associated with the 2016 El Niño-induced drought. This case study contributes an evaluation of the collective findings of the existing literature on gender and climate change. The ultimate findings are that women, particularly rural women in developing countries such as Mozambique, endure greater ill effects of climate change than men, including gender-based violence, reduced educational outcomes, and negative health consequences.
Women's Rights - Evolution in the World and Impacts in the Brazilian Legal System: A Study on Insurgencies that Led to Laws View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gabriella Pampillón R. Gutemberg
The article deals with the existing social disparity between the male and female genders and how the world legal system, throughout contemporary history, helped to perpetuate the devaluation of women, as well as, the need for their consequent insurgency in search of establishing ground for a public discussion that could lead to new regulations allowing for the desired change. It will be analyzed the progress of international legislation, its contribution to the Brazilian system, in the current constitutional text and in the human rights treaties adopted, focusing on the fundamental rights and guarantees offered by them. The final aim is to identify characteristics and retrograde mechanisms maintained worldwide, preventing the overcoming of the impasse.
Reflections on Sustainability Concepts: Aloha ʻĀina and Circular Economy View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kawena Elkington, Dr. Kamanamaikalani Beamer
The circular economy is gaining traction in the European Union and other parts of the world as a transition away from extractive and exploitative linear economy. In Hawaiʻi, the cultural value of aloha ʻāina is a philosophy describing a set of values grounded in a relationship of kinship between people and the environment. Aloha ʻāina has evolved over generations to frame responses to crucial issues such as climate change, oligopolistic markets, and contemporary land management as a tool of sustainability, and method to describe the efficiency of closed loop circular systems historically. Extensive reviews of existing literature, analysis of contextually different case studies, and reflections from practitioners are all utilized to examine economic development, and responses to its effects, from opposite parts of the globe: Hawaiʻi and Europe. Through discussion of historical and modern examples of how to install circular, closed loop systems, this research aims to examine the potential aloha ʻāina and the circular economy have as catalysts for global change, and describes the implications and lessons drawn from the examination of both approaches in light of each other.
