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As mothers, we have often felt engulfed by the gnawing worry of climate change, the jagged feeling akin to that moment when you, as a mother, drop off your child in the care of someone who hasn’t yet earned your trust. You see your child’s bright, observant gaze. Their nerves express concern to you with quiet messages designed to tug at your unique receptivity – a tight squeeze, a shifted foot, a tear in the corner of the eye. You might ask yourself, “What if they are threatened and unprotected while I am not there?”
When we read the latest Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.In February and April, which United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres described “a significant period of time”An atlas of human suffering, and a damning indictment against failed climate leadership,” the anxiousness about our children’s well-being was rekindled in all of us.
The three of them form the backbone of the Institute for Climate and Peace, a non-profit organization located in Hawaii that focuses its efforts on the intersections of peace and climate change. We are aware of how fragile the situation is. And we know that many of our leaders – well-intentioned as they may be – are ignoring the truest solutions to bring about peace and climate resilience. Helping to define peace is a key part of our climate justice work.
‘Positive’ peace can help heal planet
Historically, peace has been too often confused with the topic of security and defined simply as an absence of war and violent conflict, otherwise known as “negative peace.” However, there is another type of peace: “positive peace,” which means the presence of active systems and processes that allow human potential to flourish.
Many systems that led to positive peace were integral to ancestral communities but dissipated during the industrial revolution. Indeed, technology has provided many boons to civilization, but it has led directly to our climate crisis, and now technology alone cannot get us out of this emergency.
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Positive peaceful climate solutions offer the best chance to build social cohesion and create lasting commitments that transcend partisanship and can be sustained beyond us all. Our work complements broad efforts in reducing emissions. However, it focuses on localized, more targeted measures. This includes things like the preservation or restoration of cultural assets on our coastlines, just and dignified migration, democracy building and gender inclusive leadership.
Each community is affected by climate change in a different way. The threats to peace and stability also vary. We believe that a process is better than a predetermined remedy. A process that develops custom-designed solutions and trust and unity.
It’s not a reason to celebrate.U.N. climate report states that we are on the way to an ‘unlivable planet’. WE DID IT!
The IPCC report stresses the importance of adapting to climate risks, especially for those who are most vulnerable. However, it presents front-line populations as inherently fragile and in need for top-down solutions. This does not allow for the positive peaceful solutions which are most effective and feasible. It also overlooks the inherent wisdom and lived experience of front-line communities and their ancestors.
This is not to say we shouldn’t set ambitious goals grounded in science; it just means we cannot afford to neglect positive peaceful climate solutions grounded in social sciences if we are to truly build the shared future we imagine for our children.
Let’s just cite one statistic. Natural disasters kill 13 times as many people in regions with low levels of positive peace (characterized by well-functioning governments, strong community relations and equitably distributed resources, among other indicators) than in regions with higher levels of positive peace.
Social science and climate: Linking
Our institute is dedicated to a new narrative. Climate science and social sciences are integrated, collaborative fields that help to advance community-based climate solutions to support thriving, cohesive communities.
Through our research, training, educational workshops, policy guidance, community partnership development and mentorship of young women leaders, our intention is to be in the right relationship with each other and the Earth. While we are not the only organization that is involved in peace work, we are one of few that recognizes its inextricable connection to climate work. Our Pasifika communities have long promoted imaginative, place-based and interdisciplinary climate and policy initiatives.
Climate changeSchools in Hawaii believe that Indigenous knowledge will save Hawaii from climate crisis
We can find Oahu island on the map. community-led Indigenous systems regenerationAnd Educational initiativesThrough the wisdom of ancient Hawaiian protocols, we can learn more about the sacred ecosystems. A high school English teacher on Lanai has been working to create intergenerational connections using a multiyear, student-led program. Community research project about food sovereignty. Her work has helped to connect a small community’s youth with its elders and revived locally grown, culturally significant produce like breadfruit.
We also see Traditional technology at work through the restoration of sustainable mechanisms for catching fish, or reviving turtle populations using tide flow and deep-rooted aquarian knowledge.
WE DID IT!:U.N. climate report states that we’re on the way to an ‘unlivable planet’
The communities and lands where these projects are based are now stronger, healthier, more connected and better prepared to face climate impacts with resilience. These projects are all examples of climate work, even though they are not explicitly designated as such, nor are they given the resources, attention and integration into larger-scale climate policy and funding initiatives they deserve.
Despite the proven success of locally-based efforts like these governments and philanthropies still invest most climate finance in top down and technology-centric approaches, despite the obvious successes. An Assessment by International Institute of Environment and DevelopmentBetween 2003 and 2016, less than 10% of climate finance was allocated to local climate change projects.
One of the biggest reasons that gatherings like the U.N. Climate Change Conference or publications like IPCC reports fail to achieve large goals, or inspire global change, is because too few of the solutions they promote invest robustly in communal infrastructure that fosters healthy communication, compromise and the realization of shared goals.
Take deep care of the earth.
The ancient Polynesians traversed the Pacific in double-hull canoes known as waʻa kaulua. Polynesians invented wayfinding or open-ocean navigation to help their cultures expand and survive. These canoes allowed Voyagers to reach almost every island in central Pacific. More than 6 Million Square Miles, the voyagers were guided by celestial navigation techniques, ocean currents, sea birds and wind patterns.
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Nainoa Thompson, a contemporary Polynesian wayfinder, frequently speaks about the doldrums, which occur when hot air rises from an ocean belt causing long periods of utter stillness with no wind, followed by violent and severe storms with zero visibility. Doldrums can cause the boat to move very fast in a storm, while the crew cannot see the way to safety. Thompson emphasizes how critical it is to reach beyond technical navigational skills like mathematics in these times and rely on other practices, including senses outside of vision, cues from the natural environment, the familial bond between the canoe’s crew and one’s instincts.
The climate crisis is likened to the doldrums. The outlook is grim and the horizon is undistinguishable.
Instead of standing shoulder to side with a sense that we are all responsible for our actions, humans embark on a shared journey and rely on only technical solutions to navigate the storm. While leaders of most states want to contribute to solutions, political, social and behavioral incentives encourage them to do so only in ways that limit burdens on their own economies and political systems. If we stay on this particular course, states will continue to negotiate minimal commitments, then fail to uphold them in the near or long term.
Is there a better alternative?
We must make investments in positive, peaceful climate solutions throughout the world. In essence, dividing the planet into smaller canoes where people come together to build stronger vessels that navigate even the most unknown reality beyond the horizon – beyond the doldrums.
Canoes in which each member of crew is valued and appreciated, and where everyone feels connected to one another through a familial-like trust. Boats where mothers are able to place their children onboard and trust that all of them, even if they are not parents, will paddle with as much passion as a mother would. Our leaders in this scenario would bend their heads to the surface of the water, turn their ears to the sky and listen deeply to nature, one another and those who have had to withstand many storms.
Learn to listen. This is the message that we would put on the sleeves of our children when we place them in the care and responsibility of others. Even the most distant, quietest cries can wake up a mother from deep sleep. This is why we need to establish similar visceral bonds in order to take effective and just climate action.
Our intellect and emotions meet deep within our bodies to ground us in our present. It is a feeling, location and knowingness at the same time. In Hawaiian, this is known as the naʻau. It is this part of our bodies that activates when our children laugh or cry, and when our bodies are removed from them.
It is also the central point from which we catalyze and act for the human experience, as well as our children and yours.
Climate work is not about a list of watered down commitments, which are then discussed in a boardroom. It is not a slow and intellectual process. It is about knowing and feeling all that is at stake and helping others to discover this same source of deep care for the Earth – so that they, too, wake up in the middle of the night instinctually when they hear its cries and respond.
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Kealoha Fox is a senior adviser with the Institute for Climate and Peace and is an Obama Leader: Asia Pacific with the Obama Foundation. She earned her Ph.D. from the John A. Burns School of Medicine in Biomedical Science.
Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng is a co-founder at the Institute for Climate and Peace and a Faculty Specialist in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she serves as the liaison to the Obama Foundation and works with the Foundation’s Leaders program and Global Girls Alliance on initiatives in Hawaiʻi and the Asia-Pacific region.
Zelda is the executive director at the Institute for Climate and Peace. She works with other organizations to create peacebuilding initiatives in the Pacific Asia region. She received a BA in Peace Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi, a graduate certificate in Asia Pacific Leadership from the East-West Center.
