Analysis

Two years after B.C. legislated the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), busloads of RCMP officers arrived on Wet’suwet’en territory in northwest B.C. They were there to enforce a civil injunction against land defenders acting on the authority of Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs to prevent the Coastal GasLink pipeline from being built on unceded Indigenous land.

This is not a game. Regarding climate change, that much is abundantly clear. Even at a few 10ths of a degree shy of the aspirational ceiling of 1.5 C of warming above pre-industrial levels, the often overwhelming impacts of extreme weather driven by the changing climate have hit hard in North America and beyond.