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“Gardi Sugdub is a tiny island the size of five soccer fields with 1,300 inhabitants off Panama’s Caribbean coast. It has been home to Guna Indigenous people for over 100 years. However today, Gardi Sugdub faces new challenges. Floods and storms, in addition to a lack of space for expansion, have made life even harder on the island, affecting housing, water, health, and education. Such extreme weather is only expected to become more common as the climate crisis accelerates. While urgent government action can still mitigate the worst climate change scenarios, scientists are also virtually certain of a rise in sea levels globally, undermining the habitability of the island these residents call home. Facing these inevitable realities, the Gardi Sugdub community has been requesting government support for their relocation to a safer mainland site since 2010 . Our work on the planned relocation of Gardi Sugdub led to recent concrete...

In close partnership with Sudanese diaspora groups, we raised the alarm about how the war in Sudan is creating a famine and a massive humanitarian crisis. We documented mass atrocities by the RSF paramilitaries – and focused global pressure on the United Arab Emirates to stop supplying arms to the RSF. We helped successfully push the U.S. government to make a formal determination that atrocities are occurring in Sudan, and to appoint a special envoy to lead diplomacy to end the war.

Some of Malaysia’s most precious rainforests and the Indigenous communities who live there will now be protected.   We partnered with Indigenous leaders and environmentalists in the state of Sarawak, home to 25 Indigenous peoples and most of Malaysia’s remaining rainforests, to document how laws and policies enable the takeover of Indigenous land by private companies, leaving communities displaced and destitute.  We met with Malaysian officials, and we impressed our findings on European Union authorities, urging them to use their leverage.   On February 20, Sarawak announced the state will no longer issue provisional leases for oil palm plantations, specifically with the aim “to mitigate deforestation” and citing “international scrutiny, especially from the European Union.”    These “provisional leases” have been one of the most harmful weapons the Sarawak government has yielded against Indigenous peoples, as they do not require the state to survey the land before leasing it and can last up to 60 years.  Our researchers met repeatedly...