Fukushima

Such a summit would have been unthinkable a dozen years ago in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, but a warming planet creating a need to phase out fossil fuels and war in Ukraine laying bare a dependence on Russian energy have turned the tables over the past half decade.

After years of nuclear detonations in the Marshall Islands, fallout and forced relocations of communities began a ripple effect: Many Indigenous Marshallese people who had relied on subsistence farming and fishing for 4,000 years suddenly couldn’t trust the safety of their food, becoming reliant on imported and processed foods. And those were the lucky ones.