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We need rapid response support for Indigenous peoples in the face of growing extreme weather events (commentary)

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In recent weeks, Rainforest Foundation UK (RFUK) has seen Indigenous peoples and local communities we work with in the Peruvian Amazon and the Congo Basin devastated by unprecedented rains. In Peru, the Ene River recently burst its banks, leaving hundreds of Asháninka families in desperate need of food, drinking water and shelter. In a cruel irony, their ancestral lands that were saved a decade ago following a powerful campaign against large-scale dam construction were submerged, destroying the very crops these families rely on. Hundreds of hectares of cocoa, painstakingly nurtured as part of the Kemito Ene cooperative, an award-winning model of Indigenous-led enterprise in the Amazon, are now ruined. Thousands of miles away in Central Africa, the Congo overflowed at the beginning of the year following the worst rains there in more than 60 years. In Irebu, a community forest in the Equateur province of DRC, villagers spoke of hundreds of homes destroyed, people displaced, crops ruined and food scarcity. These cases are only a snapshot of what is happening in remote forest areas: there were reports of scores dead and thousands displaced due to the flooding along other parts of the Congo River. Only weeks before flood warnings rang out across Peru, swathes of the Brazilian Amazon suffered the worst droughts in living memory. As the recent piece in Mongabay shows, such extreme weather events — which are made much more likely by global warming and now compounded by the increasing frequency and severity of El Niño weather effects…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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