Indigenous Rights Amidst Global Turmoil

From the introduction: The year 2020 cannot end quickly enough. We enter the final quarter of a year in which cataclysmic fires erupted across Australia and the United States (US) west coast, devastating floods swept across Sudan, a pandemic ravages the lives of millions while bringing the global economy to a virtual standstill, and acts of profound injustice have acted as a startling reminder of the systemic racism that pervades American society as well as others around the world. Environmental concerns are deeply interwoven with each of these storylines. In many respects 2020 represents a glimpse into the future that climate science has warned us about for decades. The risk of intensified fires and floods has long been a major theme of such warnings. Epidemiologists have cautioned that infectious diseases may spread faster and further in a warmer world. Also, social unrest, with its invariably racist inflections, will no doubt result from climate migration, from strains on global food supply, from water insecurity, and from the multitude of other ways in which environmental change and climate change expose and exacerbate existing social and ecological vulnerabilities.