RIOHACHA, Colombia — Amid the low slopes of a tropical dry forest, families from the Wiwa community of Gomke are building a new home. Their ancestral settlement lies higher on a lush mountain in the town of Dibulla, overlooking the Caribbean coast in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Across this region, many Indigenous communities have been forcibly displaced by climate-related disasters or uprooted by armed actors. Gomke’s move to lower terrain, however, is described by community representatives as voluntary: a collectively led adaptation strategy to protect social, educational and spiritual cohesion amid intensifying climate pressures and the presence of paramilitary groups. They call their new settlement Shegunamke. Shegunnamke is a recently rebuilt Wiwa village. Severe weather events and the spread of paramilitary violence have made their home village increasingly isolated and dangerous. In response, the community is building a new settlement in a safer and more accessible location in order to preserve its social and spiritual structures. Image by Roberto Maccariello. The Wiwa have also acquired other parcels of land elsewhere in the Sierra, including at higher elevations. “We have left [those] untouched so that rivers, springs and bodies of water do not die,” said Roberto Carlos Coronado Calvo, rector of Shenzhawimaku, the Wiwa educational institution that combines conventional learning with the community’s language, culture, knowledge systems and relationship to the territory. “If we begin clearing and cutting into the páramo [ecosystem], how can we guarantee life for those living below?” Across the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, known…This article was originally published on Mongabay
GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo — High above the lush forests of protected areas in the Congo Basin in eastern Congo, the calls of endemic birds and monkeys echo through the trees. Beneath the canopy, the Maiko, Salonga, Kahuzi-Biega, and Virunga National Parks sprawl across millions of hectares. For millennia, long before these protected areas were established, Indigenous peoples lived in, roamed and shaped these lands, only to be expelled during the 20th century. “We lived in harmony with the forest,” says Julien Basimika, a young Mutwa man, one of the Indigenous Twa people in Congo. “We protected everything that needed protecting, because our lives depended on it. If we had started destroying the forest, we would have suffered the consequences.” Today, many descendants of those who were displaced live in extreme poverty owing to lack of land, armed conflicts and discrimination. Discussions on how to better involve these communities in conservation fuel passionate debates among protected area managers, environmentalists, lawyers and human rights advocates: Should they return to their ancestral lands or not? Should they be part of environmental projects? If so, which ones? How can we mitigate armed conflicts and the involvement of Indigenous peoples in illegal logging, which complicate the situation? Among the communities living near these four national parks, views vary on how to address these issues. Meanwhile, policymakers are discussing how best to involve communities in the Belém Call to Action, announced in November 2025, which aims to halt and reverse deforestation and forest degradation…This article was originally published on Mongabay
In 2020, a strange rumor began circulating in villages around the Yangambi Biosphere Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Tshopo province. A newly constructed scientific tower, people said, was extracting oxygen from the surrounding rainforest and sending it to Europe, where it was being sold for profit. Not long after, an initiative to plant acacia trees around the reserve was incorporated into the rumor: the trees, some people claimed, were being planted to produce more oxygen for the tower to extract. Then, during an unusually hot spell in May 2024, another version spread rapidly through social media in Kisangani, the provincial capital. This time, the tower was accused of causing the extreme heat by removing oxygen from the atmosphere. When that rumor spread in 2024, the DRC’s then environment minister, Ève Bazaiba, publicly attributed such claims to “ignorance” and “superstitions.” She posted a video on social media to demonstrate that the tower, CongoFlux, does not extract oxygen: it measures exchanges of greenhouse gases between the rainforest and the atmosphere, helping scientists understand the Congo Basin’s role in global climate regulation. But correcting the science only gets us so far. Rumors can also tell us something about the people who spread them — and their relationship with conservation. While conducting research in Yangambi, recently published in Environmental Sociology, we learned that the rumors are ways for people to contest conservation, but also to make claims about who should benefit from it. At the same time, they are shaped by a…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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