Losing Ground: When Climate Change Takes Land, Food, and Culture Together
Losing Ground: When Climate Change Takes Land, Food, and Culture Together
Learning Goal: I can examine the connection between environmental destruction, climate change, and the loss of Indigenous land, food sovereignty, culture, and language.
Climate change does not affect every nation the same way. For Indigenous peoples whose food, ceremonies, and languages are tied to a specific piece of land, a shifting climate does not just change the weather. It can take the land itself, and everything built on top of it. Three case studies, from the Torres Strait to Central America to the Arctic, show what that loss looks like in practice, and what happens when governments are asked to answer for it.
Boigu, Poruma, Warraber, and Masig are four low-lying islands in Australia's Torres Strait. In 2019, eight Torres Strait Islanders and six of their children filed a complaint with the UN Human Rights Committee, describing how rising seas and heavier storms were destroying their way of life. Tidal flooding had washed out family graves and scattered human remains across the islands, and maintaining those graveyards is central to their culture. Saltwater seeping into the soil was killing coconut trees, a key part of the traditional diet. In September 2022, the Committee found that Australia's failure to adequately respond to climate change violated the Islanders' rights to enjoy their culture and to be free from arbitrary interference with their family life, and it ordered Australia to compensate them.
Three years later, a separate case reached a different answer. Uncle Pabai Pabai and Uncle Guy Kabai, elders of the Guda Maluyligal nation, brought a class action on behalf of the Torres Strait's own people, the Zenadth Kes, asking an Australian federal court to recognize a legal duty of care requiring the government to cut emissions and fund seawalls. On July 15, 2025, Justice Wigney ruled that no such duty exists under Australian law, because emissions targets and infrastructure funding are matters of government policy, not something a court can enforce. The judge did not dispute the science or the harm: he described the impacts on the Torres Strait as devastating and acknowledged the threat to Ailan Kastom, the Islanders' customary culture, as real. He simply found current law offers no way to compensate for that specific loss. The applicants filed an appeal in November 2025.
Guna Yala is an autonomous Indigenous region on Panama's Caribbean coast, governed by its own General Congress since the Guna expelled Panamanian colonial authorities in a 1925 revolution. Gardi Sugdub, one of its islands, had become dangerously overcrowded and increasingly flooded. In June 2024, the Panamanian government relocated about 300 Guna families from Gardi Sugdub to Isberyala, a new $12 million community on the mainland, the first full climate relocation completed in Latin America. Isberyala includes a gathering space built in traditional Guna style, and children now learn Guna music, dance, and craft in its school. But the community still has no hospital, water service is unreliable, and the boxy, city-style houses make it hard to hang the hammocks central to Guna home life.
A second island, Uggubseni, home to about 2,500 Guna, is likely next. Sea level rise near Guna Yala has accelerated from 1.5 millimetres a year in the 1960s to 5.5 millimetres a year today, and residents say their fish catch has dropped from six or seven boats a day to half a boat. Elder Eligio Alvarado has pushed for relocation since the 1990s, but younger residents like Alina Vázquez insist any future move has to actually listen to people, unlike Isberyala, where the housing style and services were decided without enough community input.
The Sámi are the only Indigenous people recognized within the European Union, and their homeland, Sápmi, stretches across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula. Reindeer herding is not simply an economy for Sámi communities. It is a knowledge system passed down through generations, built on reading snow, ice, and migration routes. Climate change is now producing rain-on-snow events: rain falls onto existing snowpack, then refreezes into a hard ice layer that seals off the lichen reindeer depend on to survive winter. In Inari, Finland, herder Osmo Seurujärvi describes watching his herd struggle through 2024's unpredictable mix of rain, snow, and summer heat. Logging of old-growth forest compounds the problem, since it destroys the tree-hanging lichen reindeer also rely on. A 2025 study in the journal Science Advances projects that global reindeer populations could fall by more than half by 2100.
Some protections exist. In 2009, herders negotiated a moratorium with a state logging company to stop cutting in part of the Nellim forest, an agreement that runs until 2029. Skolt Sámi leader Pauliina Feodoroff argues that protection needs to be permanent rather than temporary. Community organizations such as the Snowchange Cooperative have started buying and protecting reindeer forest directly, including land in the Muddusjärvi cooperative area, to secure land that government policy has not.
Key Idea: In each case, climate change works through a chain. An environmental disruption, a flooded grave, a falling fish catch, an ice-locked lichen bed, breaks one specific relationship between a people and their land. Once that relationship breaks, food, culture, and language are all put at risk together, because none of them exist separately from the land they come from.
OHCHR. "Australia violated Torres Strait Islanders' rights to enjoy culture and family life, UN Committee finds." September 23, 2022. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/09/australia-violated-torres-strait-islanders-rights-enjoy-culture-and-family
Human Rights Law Centre. "Federal Court determines the Commonwealth owes no duty of care to protect Torres Strait Islanders from climate change." Case summary of Pabai v Commonwealth of Australia (No 2) [2025] FCA 796. https://www.hrlc.org.au/case-summaries/federal-court-finds-commonwealth-owes-no-doc-tsislanders-climate-change/
Bower, Erica. "Panama Completes First Climate-Related Relocation." Human Rights Watch, May 29, 2024. https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/05/29/panama-completes-first-climate-related-relocation
Mongabay. "In Panama, Indigenous Guna prepare for climate exodus from a second island home." April 2025. https://news.mongabay.com/2025/04/in-panama-indigenous-guna-prepare-for-climate-exodus-from-a-second-island-home/
Mongabay. "Climate change puts pressure on reindeer populations, both wild & domestic herds." October 2025. https://news.mongabay.com/2025/10/climate-change-puts-pressure-on-reindeer-populations-both-wild-domestic-herds/