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This article It’s time for movements to rethink social media was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Last September I made a short video that was by far the most viral piece of content I’ve ever put out.

I can’t trace all the views, but at least a million people watched it across Instagram and TikTok, and possibly elsewhere. Neighbors in Athens, Greece told me they’d come across my face in their feed; Chinese accounts captioned the video and reposted it. I felt like I’d made a dent in the universe and — I’m not going to lie — a little bit special.

The video wasn’t pop wisdom or a dance routine. It had a job to do: get people to sign a petition, created by DiEM25 and Progressive International, to block Germany’s genocide-enabling former foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, from becoming president of the U.N. General Assembly. 

And on that, it failed. By the end of my week of internet mini-fame, the number of signatures had barely shifted. It had 49,000 signatures that July, two months before I posted. I watched it closely that week, and it barely moved.  Baerbock got the job – the petition now asks her to resign. 

I know a few things about digital communication. For two decades it’s been a key part of what I do — I’ve written about it, researched it, advised movements on it. The petition wasn’t mine, but the video was. And I couldn’t make it work. 

Maybe the video could have been packaged better, or the petition link made easier to find. Maybe my pitch was entertaining but not compelling. Maybe a petition was never the right vehicle for stopping Baerbock in the first place.

My organizer friends thought it went great. They congratulated me on the numbers. Nobody asked about the petition.

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That last part is what’s bothered me since. Because if a million views and no signatures is considered a success, we’re measuring the wrong thing.

And that opens up a bigger question, one I don’t think we ask often enough: When we use social media in our organizing, what are we actually doing? Is it worth the time we put into it? And is there a way of doing it that actually builds something?

Why we’re all on there anyway

Social media is now a given for organizers, and for good reason. We’ve been using it to fill public squares for well over a decade, from Occupy to Black Lives Matter to last year’s Gen Z protests across the Global South. To get around media blackouts and show the world what power does when it thinks no one’s filming, from Ferguson to Gaza. To make and sink political careers. To tank the stock prices of corporations that deserve it. 

Social media has changed how we communicate. It’s forced us to be quicker, sharper and more entertaining. Because attention is scarce — and we’re competing for it against everything else.

But beneath all of this, most of us are working from the same assumption: that platforms are where the work happens. That the posting is the organizing. That if we get the reach, the rest will follow.

What changed

That assumption has a history. Those of us who were around in 2011 will remember that social media held a different kind of promise. We thought we could topple governments and kings, if only we could get enough people onto the streets. And social media was very good at getting people onto the streets, as long as the anger was already there.

Sometimes that was enough. Tunisian dictator Ben Ali went. Egyptian dictator Mubarak went. But when it didn’t hold — when Occupy dissolved, when Tahrir Square gave way to a military government, when the squares emptied — we told ourselves it wasn’t the right moment, or that the repression was too heavy.

My sense is that a lot of us still carry that same idealism about social media’s power. But two things have changed since then.

The first is that governments got very good at pushing us back. They stifle protest at the source now, with monitoring, arrests and social media operations of their own. Movements can still get around censorship, and often do. But the state has learned to work on the same terrain. Amnesty International has documented how last year Kenyan authorities used the same platforms as the Gen Z movement to threaten and discredit organizers.  And where that isn’t enough, the state can reach for the platform itself — banning it, as Nepal did in 2025, or changing who owns it, as happened with TikTok in the U.S.

The second is that the platforms themselves changed shape. We went from follower feeds to recommendation feeds. What you post no longer goes to the people who chose to hear from you — it goes wherever the algorithm sends it, if it goes anywhere at all. Attention is concentrated on a handful of corporate platforms whose incentive is to keep you scrolling, not to help you organize.

That second shift is the one we’ve underrated in terms of its impact on our ability to organize. In 2011 we posted, our followers saw it and we organized in the replies — as I did during the Athens riots. Distribution and coordination happened in the same place, at the same time.

Comments still exist, of course. But when a post reaches few of your followers, and reaches strangers instead, the reply thread stops being a place where a group can form. It becomes a place where individuals arrive one at a time and leave the same way.

And yet we still use these platforms like it’s 2011. We shoot things off into the ether and hope something will stick — that people will hear our calls to rise up and somehow self-organize. Or that if we point at a problem often enough, everyone will arrive at the same solutions we did. And each time something or someone does break through, it feels like luck.

That doesn’t mean a post can’t start something. In India, after the chief justice called unemployed young people cockroaches, a student in Boston asked on social media what would happen if all the cockroaches came together. Within weeks the Cockroach Party had formed, with millions of followers and protests in several states, and almost no organizing in between. That was three months ago. They have since won a major victory, but nobody yet knows what it will become.

A spontaneous movement can still form from social media. You just can’t plan for it, and you can’t repeat it. And yet a lot of what we do is built on waiting for it.

The tools changed. Our habits didn’t.

Why we didn’t change with them

In some ways this is understandable. Social media is the shiniest and most responsive part of our toolkit. It’s free. We all know how to use it. We understand the algorithms, the buzzwords, the memes, how to play the game. And above all, it answers immediately.

Nothing else in organizing does that. A meeting doesn’t tell you how it went. A training doesn’t report back for six months. And a list doesn’t tell you anything at all until you ask it to do something.

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So we borrow like crazy from the people for whom social media genuinely is the whole job: activist influencers. They build an audience out of perceived closeness — a parasocial relationship, the illusion of intimacy and reciprocity. That’s a real skill, and it has its uses. But an audience is only enough if attention is the goal. It isn’t a base. Nobody shows up on a Tuesday night because they feel close to someone on a screen. 

Meanwhile, the dull part of the work gets skipped — the meetings, the follow-up calls, the trainings, the arguments about what we’re actually demanding and from whom. And that’s the part that turns attention into power. As Zeynep Tufekci argues, social media allows networked movements to reach scale without building the capacity that scale used to require.

You can see what that costs. In Bangladesh, Nepal and Madagascar, protests driven by social media brought governments down — but in each case, what filled the space was something that already existed. An established party in Dhaka, a party formed three years earlier in Kathmandu, the army in Antananarivo. Not the movements themselves.

Worse, I think our use of these platforms has begun to shape our strategy. We optimize for what the platform rewards, because that’s the number that gets sent straight back to us. The silent but vital parts of the organizing work get subtly deprioritized — or stop happening at all.

What it looks like when someone gets it right

In February 2025, Americans angry about Elon Musk’s growing political influence started posting about his company, Tesla. Selling their cars, filming these sales and complaining online. It could have stayed there.

What moved it off the feed was small and specific. A Boston University professor saw a showroom protest in New York City run by the group Rise and Resist, held the same action in her own city and posted about it on Bluesky. Others copied her. A few people built a website and a map, and the whole thing ran under one hashtag: #TeslaTakedown. 

Tesla’s weak spot was its showrooms: physical places, with addresses and opening hours, belonging to a company whose value rested heavily on its founder’s reputation. Organizers picked a time and stuck to it — they protested at the same place, every week. By March there were protests at Tesla showrooms in more than 250 cities across the globe.

Previous Coverage

The real reason Musk retreated

The organizers’ own account of why it worked comes down to two things: Presence beats planning, and regularity builds community. That isn‘t an argument against strategy — choosing the showrooms was a strategy, and a good one. It’s an argument against making people wait while you perfect it. In a moment of anger, people didn’t need a planning document. They needed to be told where to go and what to do.

And the sign-ups ran through Action Network, the organizing platform. Not through the comments of the movement’s social media posts. So when those posts stopped performing, the movement still had its list.

Morocco’s Gen Z protests are another example of how to do it right. Last year brought a wave of protests in Morocco, against corruption, inequality and the state of public services. The movement called itself GenZ 212, after Morocco’s country code.

It got the word out on Instagram and TikTok, but it used the communications platform Discord as its backbone. People were sorted into regional channels, reflecting where they actually lived, and decisions were taken in nightly discussions that ended in votes. One estimate put the number of people on the channels at 250,000 last October.

It was untidy; it was sometimes chaotic. But Discord, which has no recommendation feed, did something for Morocco’s protesters that a feed couldn’t: It enabled them to make decisions under pressure, as a group, and to adapt. When the first days brought arrests, the movement moved its protests into working-class neighborhoods. When deaths followed police intervention, members reconvened to establish what had actually happened and to argue for peaceful protest, countering attempts to paint them as reckless.

Like most of the major Gen Z movements we’ve seen, GenZ 212 was leaderless and decentralized. The distinction here isn’t leaders versus no leaders. It’s whether there’s a room where a question can be settled and a decision can be made.

What these movements have in common

One word: a handoff.

In both cases organizers recruited on social media, just as in 2011. But they didn’t stay there. They moved people quickly into spaces they controlled. Here it happened to be Action Network and Discord; it could as easily have been a mailing list, a forum, a group chat or a room with chairs in it. What matters is that it wasn’t an algorithmic feed.

This reframes the arguments we keep having about which social media platforms to be on and which to quit. Platforms rise and fall, and whichever one holds the attention next, it will still only be the top of the funnel. The better question is: What does a movement need to own so that an algorithm change, or a ban, can’t decapitate it?

Case in point: The Gen Z movement in Nepal, operating on Discord, was able to simply route around the sweeping government ban of social media platforms last year. And the movement brought the government down. 

The handoff has to be engineered

But there’s a catch to the handoff: The architecture of the platforms works against you.

Platforms downrate anything that makes people leave the app — that’s the one behavior the whole system is built to prevent.  Their architecture says it plainly: Instagram doesn’t let you put a link in a caption. TikTok confines them to your bio. And on Facebook, posts containing a link have gone from about one in seven to one in 66 — by Meta’s own count.

So the handoff can’t be an afterthought. It has to be designed as carefully and deliberately as the hook.

That means putting your ask wherever the platform allows it — the profile link, the first reply — and telling people where it is, because they won’t hunt for it. It means ideally making the destination a date (“we’re on a call Thursday at 7 p.m.”) rather than a page. It means writing the follow-up before you post, because most sign-ups go cold in the first few days if nothing lands in their inbox. And it means one named person owning what happens next — one person who responds to the people who signed up, who runs the call, who they can reply to and get an answer.

Be clear about what you’re counting

The other half is measurement, and it’s the half we get wrong most often. The platforms hand us a pile of data for free, and we take it, because it’s there. But going viral is not a win. It was never the goal.

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So decide what you’re counting before you publish, and make it something on the other side of the handoff: click-through from the clip to the sign-ups, attendance or completed actions. Set a target. And when the numbers that come back are poor, fix the handoff rather than the hook. 

If your video gets 200,000 views and 40 signups, the problem probably wasn’t the video. Look at what you asked people to do, whether they could find it and what arrived once they’d done it. Every piece of content needs somewhere to go.

Back to the video

My petition problem may not have been the hook. It may have been the thinness of what was behind it.

A form is fine. Tesla Takedown used one. But that form led to a protest at a named showroom at a named time, run by a host with people behind them. Mine led to a signature. If even a fraction of the people who saw that video had been given something more to do  — a call the following week, run by someone with a name, with one clear task at the end of it  — there would have been something left when the attention moved on.

Work out the handoff before you work out the hook. That‘s the whole lesson, and it took me a million views to learn it.

This article It’s time for movements to rethink social media was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On Sept. 16, 2025, an estimated 100,000 people flooded the streets of Cuenca, Ecuador’s third-most populous city, in one of the largest environmental mobilizations in the country’s recent history. Protesters marched under a simple slogan: “We are water.”

The demonstration was aimed at stopping mining projects in Quimsacocha, a fragile, high-altitude ecosystem that supplies water to hundreds of thousands of people across southern Ecuador. But beneath the immediate conflict over mining lies a deeper struggle over how people understand their relationship with the natural world.

For decades Ecuador has been at the center of a global experiment. In 2008 it became the first country in the world to recognize the Rights of Nature in its Constitution, transforming ideas rooted in Indigenous cosmologies into enforceable legal principles. Yet translating those ideas into political reality has proven far more difficult than writing them into law.

To understand how environmental movements bridge radically different worldviews — from Indigenous understandings of territory to the language of constitutional law, science, and public policy — I spoke with David Fajardo Torres, an environmental activist, lawyer, and member of Yasunidos, a movement defending Ecuador’s ecosystems from extractive industries.

Our conversation explored how narratives shape environmental conflicts, why metaphors such as “We are water” can mobilize entire communities, and what Ecuador’s experience reveals about the challenges of communicating across competing visions of nature, development, and progress.

This interview was conducted during a research visit in Ecuador in November 2025, carried out as part of the research field work for a Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy and social communication.

Environmental movements often struggle to turn complex ecological issues into stories that people can relate to. Yet in Cuenca the slogan “We are water” helped mobilize more than 100,000 people. What makes that metaphor so powerful?

In Cuenca one of our most powerful narratives connects the city — not merely as an urban center, but as a territory shaped by a long and ancient history — to water. We are water people. That idea has become the central metaphor that unites communities and guides our resistance to mining projects.

These projects threaten the páramos, the high-altitude Andean ecosystems that serve as natural water reservoirs. The páramos regulate water flows, sustain extraordinary biodiversity, and supply freshwater not only to Cuenca, but also to the Amazon basin and Ecuador’s Pacific coast.

El Cajas National Park is a high-altitude wetland area with many lakes, streams, and páramo ecosystems that store and filter water. Photo by Alice Deliau.

For us the phrase “We are water” is both symbolic and literal. Human beings are made largely of water, but the expression goes beyond biology. It reflects how we understand ourselves: as part of rivers, lakes, forests, and páramos rather than separate from them. It allows us to connect three dimensions of Cuenca at once — Cuenca as a city, Cuenca as a territory, and Cuenca as an ecosystem.

This narrative has proven remarkably effective. During the mass mobilization in September, many people referred to the protest as Cuenca’s Fifth River, a reference to the city’s historic nickname, Santa Ana de los Cuatro Ríos — the City of Four Rivers. The metaphor captured something deeper than political opposition to mining. It expressed a biocultural identity in which water is not merely a resource but a defining part of who we are. Without its rivers, Cuenca would not exist.

On Sept. 16, 2025, an estimated 100,000 people flooded the streets of Cuenca with the message “Kimsa cocha no se toca” (“Quimsacocha Is Not to Be Touched”), uniting communities to protect one of Ecuador’s most important water sources from pollution from mining activities. Photo by Alice Deliau.

Cuenca’s identity is rooted in conflict between nature and industry?

Cuenca was founded three times: first by the Cañari people, then by the Incas, and later by the Spanish colonizers. Despite these very different civilizations, all three settlements shared one essential foundation: water.

The valley is crossed by four rivers and countless smaller waterways known as quebradas, which remain just as important to the region’s ecological health. Water has shaped every chapter of Cuenca’s history and every layer of its identity.

This is not a new conflict. As early as the colonial period, local authorities faced a choice between gold and water. Extracting mineral wealth often threatened the water sources on which communities depended. Time and again, Cuenca chose water.

That choice continues today. For more than three decades, local communities have defended water sources in areas such as Quimsacocha and Río Blanco against mining projects, gradually building support far beyond rural communities and into the city itself.

In 2021 nearly 80% of voters in a local referendum supported a ban on mining in the páramos that supply water to the region. Four years later, tens of thousands of people returned to the streets to reaffirm that decision. For us this is not simply an environmental debate. Water remains the foundation of our identity, and defending it means defending the future of Cuenca itself.

Cuenca, Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. During the mass mobilization in September 2025, many people referred to the protest as Cuenca’s Fifth River, a reference to the city’s historic, colonial nickname, Santa Ana de los Cuatro Ríos — the City of Four Rivers. Photo by Alice Deliau.

One of the recurring tensions in environmental politics is whether nature should be protected because it serves human needs (anthropocentric view), or because it possesses intrinsic value and rights of its own (biocentric). Is this a real conflict, or are we dealing with different ways of understanding the same relationship between humans and nature?

That’s a very good question. In Ecuador we are increasingly realizing that it is impossible to fulfill human rights without also respecting the rights of nature. Most human rights ultimately depend on healthy ecosystems.

If we destroy the ecosystems on which we depend, we undermine the very conditions that make a dignified life possible. For us, that is the central horizon: living with dignity.

This idea is deeply connected to the philosophy of Sumak Kawsay. It is often translated as “good living,” but that translation is incomplete. A better interpretation would be vivir en plenitud — living in fullness or living in harmony. At its core, Sumak Kawsay is about flourishing alongside nature, not apart from it.

From this perspective, there is no fundamental separation between humanity and nature. We are one species within a much larger web of life. Ecology, after all, is the sum of the relationships that sustain life on this planet. Every species, every ecosystem, plays a role within that network.

The problem is that modern capitalist societies have encouraged us to see not only a distinction between humans and nature, but a hierarchy. Humans are placed at the top, while nature is reduced to an object that exists to serve our needs.

You mentioned anthropocentrism and biocentrism. In Ecuador, however, we increasingly speak about ecocentrism. Ecocentrism shifts the focus away from individual actors — whether humans or nature — and toward the relationships that connect them. It is not about separating humanity from nature, but about understanding the complex web of relationships that makes life possible.

Scientific concepts such as ecology increasingly emphasize relationships, ideas that seem to resonate with many Indigenous worldviews. Can scientific language serve as a bridge between Indigenous knowledge and the modern industrial world?

It can, and I think it is one of the keys — but not the only one. In many cases Western science is only now beginning to understand ideas that Indigenous peoples have lived with for centuries: the importance of relationships, diversity, and interdependence. The difference is that modern science often seeks universal explanations, a single framework capable of describing the world as a whole.

Indigenous worldviews tend to operate differently. They do not necessarily aspire to explain everything through one universal lens. Even among Indigenous peoples, there is enormous diversity. The Shuar and the Amazonian Kichwa, for example, have distinct ways of understanding the world.

For the Shuar, the forest is not an external environment but a community to which they belong. The Amazon is so rich and biodiverse that it provides everything necessary for life. Because they see themselves as part of that living system, the goal is not endless accumulation or growth but maintaining the relationships that sustain life.

Mining companies often argue that modern science allows them to extract resources responsibly. They present environmental studies and technical expertise as evidence that mining can coexist with ecological protection. How persuasive is that narrative?

One of the biggest mistakes is to focus only on what can be measured. Statistics and technical reports are important, but they never tell the whole story.

In Ecuador we work with a concept known as the dialogue of knowledges — a conversation between different ways of understanding the world. This idea is reflected in our Constitution, particularly in the articles recognizing the Rights of Nature.

Take the concept of Pachamama. It is often translated as “Mother Earth,” but that translation is incomplete. Pacha refers not only to the Earth, but to the space-time in which life unfolds — the Earth, the stars, the sun, the moon, and the cycles that connect them. Mama means mother. In that sense, Pachamama is closer to a living cosmos than to a simple environmental concept.

Nature, by contrast, is a concept that emphasizes relationships. Those relationships are not confined to the planet itself. Life on Earth depends on the sun, the moon, and countless natural cycles that can be observed scientifically — from the tides to seasonal rhythms. In Ecuador’s Constitution, Pachamama and nature are treated as equivalent concepts, allowing us to defend the Rights of Nature through both scientific and Indigenous knowledge.

As a lawyer specializing in the Rights of Nature, I build cases using multiple forms of knowledge. We rely on science, Indigenous knowledge, and the knowledge of rural and peasant communities, all of which are essential for understanding and defending ecosystems.

The problem is that many mining companies rely on a very narrow understanding of science. Their science is designed primarily to facilitate extraction and economic growth. It leaves little room for dialogue between different ways of knowing.

I am not criticizing science itself. There is a science that seeks to understand nature, question its own assumptions, and engage with other forms of knowledge. That kind of science is indispensable. But there is also a science that serves capital, markets, and extractive industries. The challenge is to distinguish between the two.

For us, the Rights of Nature are possible only through a genuine dialogue between scientific and Indigenous knowledge. Otherwise we risk reducing Pachamama to a slogan or falling into simplistic narratives about nature that fail to address the complexity of the living world.

Rivers Puyo and Pastaza, November 2025. Puyo and Pastaza rivers support Amazonian aquatic ecosystems: provide habitats for fish, amphibians, insects, and riverside plants. They also help maintain rainforest biodiversity, but are sensitive to pollution, deforestation, and urban growth. Photo by Alice Deliau.

What do you mean by the narrow narrative of Pachamamismo?

For us, Pachamamismo can become a shallow narrative when it reduces complex realities to slogans. Much of the contemporary discourse around Pachamama risks becoming symbolic rather than transformative.

To challenge the narratives of mining companies and extractive industries, we need something deeper: a genuine dialogue between different forms of knowledge. And when I speak of science, I do not mean only biology or physics. I also mean anthropology, sociology, law, and other disciplines. Indigenous peoples, too, possess their own systems of knowledge, law, and social organization. What matters is the conversation between them.

This is important because knowledge itself is never fixed. What a society considers rational, scientific, or legitimate changes over time. The challenge is not to replace one worldview with another, but to create a dialogue between them.

At the heart of the conflict over mining and extractivism lies a struggle between two competing visions of development. One assumes that development follows a universal path, with nature treated primarily as a resource and humans placed above it. The other begins from a different premise: that humans are part of nature and that development should strengthen, rather than undermine, the ecological relationships on which life depends.

For us the key question is not whether development should occur, but what role human societies should play within the ecosystems they inhabit. The answer will be different in every territory. The ecological realities of Cuenca are not the same as those of Poland, just as their histories and relationships with nature are different.

In Cuenca our responsibility is to protect water sources, páramos, rivers, and lakes. That requires adapting our institutions and planning systems to ecological realities rather than forcing ecosystems to adapt to economic demands.

Today, we have powerful tools that help us think this way. The Ecosystem Approach developed by the IUCN and the concept of planetary boundaries developed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre both remind us that human societies operate within ecological limits. Those limits are not obstacles to development; they are the conditions that make life possible.

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The post We Are Water: Metaphor As a Tool for Environmental Policies Communication appeared first on The Revelator.

OATI seeks federal funding for widespread deployment of dynamic line rating software, near-real-time inter-regional coordination and AI-enhanced resource dispatch — none of which requires new poles or wires, the company says.

By WildMon, August 2026Across Latin America, thousands of autonomous recording devices are capturing the sounds of forests every day. Hidden within these recordings is valuable information about...

Starting on Monday, about 10,000 government negotiators, scientists, journalists and campaigners will gather at a purpose-built venue in a national park in Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar to discuss how to stop land turning into desert as the world warms.

Drought is currently sweeping much of the Northern hemisphere, leaving normally green urban parks looking like dry savannah, causing crops to fail, food prices to rise and billions to be shaved off economic output. 

On Wednesday, Britain’s prime minister chaired an emergency meeting of the government’s Cobra committee. These are usually reserved for wars, terrorist attacks, riots and pandemics – but this one was on the extreme heat and drought the UK has been suffering since May. 

With many countries facing far worse with fewer resources than the UK, the issues to be discussed at the UN’s COP17 summit in Mongolia – often overlooked – should be nearer the top of policy-makers minds.

But what is COP17?  What will be decided and announced there over the next two weeks? How does it relate to climate change and how will it help restore the lands on which we all rely for our food, water and other essential resources? Climate Home News explains all below.

What is COP17?

It is the conference of parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). The parties are 196 governments, which includes all of the countries recognised by the UN.

The convention was conceived at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, at the same time as the other two larger “Rio trio” conventions on climate and biodiversity. 

While the climate convention’s COP takes place every year, the UNCCD COP happens only once every two years. COP17 will be its seventeenth gathering.

Negotiators at COP16 in Riyadh (Photo: IISD/ENB | Anastasia Rodopoulou) What is desertification?

It is the process by which land degrades and becomes more like a desert, making it harder – and sometimes impossible – to grow crops or graze livestock there.

Climate change and other human activities – like excessive irrigation which depletes ground water – are making this process worse, causing poverty, hunger, health problems, forced migration and loss of species.

It’s a widespread problem. The UN estimates that half a billion people live within areas that have experienced desertification since the 1980s and that two-fifths of the world’s land is degraded.

What has it got to do with climate change?

The planet’s climate is heating up, mainly due to humans burning fossil fuels, and drying out its land. This kills plants and exposes the soil which can then be blown away by wind and washed away by water.

Without a top layer of soil, plants struggle to grow again and the land gets closer to being a desert. So combating desertification is a way of adapting to climate change.

It is also a way of lessening the pace of climate change, as land degradation releases carbon dioxide previously stored in healthy soils and plants.

What will be negotiated at COP17?

The main issue is what form a new initiative to tackle drought could take. The last COP saw Africa push hard for this to be a protocol – a kind of binding sub-treaty to the UNCCD.

But the US, Europe, Argentina and others argued that would take too long to set up, cost too much and take money away from what can be spent on the ground. They prefer a legally weaker alternative – a framework instead of a protocol. 

Negotiations went late into the last night of talks in Riyadh, with the Saudis hosting informal consultations, but eventually governments had to agree to disagree and pick up talks again in Ulaanbaatar. 

As Earth dries out, countries fail to reach drought agreement

Governments will also negotiate a new policy on protecting rangelands and pastoralists from degradation. Rangelands are areas where animals graze. They cover around half the Earth’s land and include almost everything other than forest, deserts, farms, glaciers and cities. Pastoralists are people who herd animals on these rangelands, often moving from place to place to find fresh pasture. 

COP17 host country Mongolia has a lot of both – and pushed successfully for the UN to declare 2026 the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. It is keen to agree a decision at COP17 bringing those issues more to the forefront of the UNCCD.

Negotiators will also debate the UNCCD’s post-2030 strategic framework, which they hope to adopt at COP18 in 2028. Campaign groups like the World Wildlife Fund want a stronger focus on biodiversity and nature-positive food systems.

What will happen when?

The COP will formally open with a ceremony on Monday August 17, followed by opening statements by governments and the adoption of the agenda.

Negotiations will begin, mostly behind closed doors for two weeks until the closing plenaries on Friday August 28.

While talks rumble on in the background, the second week will see senior government representatives including ministers get involved, with a “high-level segment” running from August 24-26.

A delegate at COP16 in Riyadh (Photo: IISD/ENB | Anastasia Rodopoulou)

They will discuss issues like drought resilience, finance and pastoralist communities. This is likely to be when any announcements – of new funding, for instance – are made.

On Monday August 24, there will also be an open dialogue between government officials and civil society members. Here, local practitioners are likely to share stories of how they are helping their communities reverse land degradation. UNCCD prides itself on being a bottom-up convention.

Unlike climate COPs, which often end a day or two over time, UNCCD COPs usually finish on the evening of their last day and – while they have gone late into the night – have never run into the next day.

What else should we watch out for?

At the last COP two years ago, host Saudi Arabia led the creation of an initiative called the Riyadh Global Drought Resilience Partnership to help 80 of the poorest nations deal with drought. 

It received $12 billion in pledges, mainly from Gulf-based development finance institutions. Saudi Arabia is expected to report back on whether these pledges have been delivered and how the money will reach those in need now.

There are also hopes that governments will announce financial support for Mongolia’s Rangelands Flagship Initiative, which aims to mobilise investment in projects to fight land degradation.

Who will preside over COP17?

While the last five and the next two climate COPs have been or will be presided over by men, COP17 will be woman-led with Mongolia’s foreign minister, Battsetseg Batmunkh, as president.

Mongolia’s foreign minister and COP17 president Battsetseg Batmunkh (Photo: Uugansukh Byamba)

This will also be the first COP for the UNCCD’s new executive director Yasmin Fouad. Before being appointed environment minister in her native Egypt, Fouad was a scientist and lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on desertification. She played a key role at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in 2022.

Although Saudi Arabia’s UNCCD COP presidency is ending, the Gulf power house will likely continue to be influential. It has supported the COP financially as part of the Riyadh-Ulaanbaatar action agenda and will be following up on initiatives announced two years ago.

While Saudi Arabia is often blamed for obstructing progress at climate talks, as a desert nation it is generally thought to have played a constructive role at UNCCD COPs.

What are the negotiating dynamics?

The UNCCD has six main negotiating groups: Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Northern Mediterranean, Central and Eastern Europe, and developed donor countries. Governments can also speak in their own capacities.

While divisions between the Global North and Global South do exist at UNCCD COPs, they are not as stark as at climate COPs. The Global South’s umbrella group – the G77 and China – usually only speaks on finance issues, on which developing countries tend to be united.

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Civil society groups are present but not as vocal or as confrontational as at climate COPs. There are generally no protests and campaigners tend to try to hold governments accountable more quietly. There are likely to be far fewer journalists than at climate COPs too.

What role will the US play?

While the US has left the UN’s climate convention, it remains in the UNCCD and is expected to bring a delegation of officials from its departments of agriculture and state. It is likely to resist any renewed push from Africa for a drought protocol.

The post Will the world’s drying lands get relief from COP17 in Mongolia? appeared first on Climate Home News.

• August 13, 2026

SA’s Increasing Energy Costs Put Pressure On The Most Vulnerable Among Us

As winter grips South Africa, millions of households are facing an impossible choice between keeping the lights on, putting food on the table, and paying essential expenses such as school fees and transport costs. The Green Connection believes that the country’s current tariff structure may be deepening poverty and inequality while forcing ordinary citizens to shoulder the cost of institutional failures over which they have no control.

“Every tariff increase could further entrench inequality and may place an unbearable burden on families already struggling to make ends meet. The problem extends beyond inflationary pressures, pointing to an electricity pricing system that compels consumers to pay for historical inefficiencies, cost overruns, governance failures, and mistakes associated with major infrastructure projects. For many South Africans, rising electricity tariffs are no longer simply a matter of economics but a matter of survival,” says The Green Connection’s Outreach Ambassador, Neville van Rooy.

Since 2015, Eskom has implemented 12 consecutive annual tariff increases – all approved by the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (NERSA). Electricity costs have dramatically increased over the past two decades, rising by around 190 per cent in real terms while continuing to outpace inflation. Meanwhile, in 2023, StatsSA reported that more than 23 million South Africans live below the lower-bound poverty threshold, highlighting concerns that rising living costs could place many households at risk of falling into extreme poverty.

The Green Connection notes that the pressure is especially severe for households that purchase electricity through municipalities. Unlike customers who buy electricity directly from Eskom, municipal consumers often pay additional charges because local authorities must recover the costs of maintaining infrastructure and funding essential public services. As a result, the same tariff increase can have vastly different consequences depending on where people live and how they access electricity.

Electricity transmission lines (left), Prepaid Electricity meter (right)

“The current situation demonstrates how deeply energy insecurity is affecting vulnerable communities. Winter has once again exposed the reality facing millions of people across South Africa. Families are being forced to make impossible decisions between electricity, food, medicine, school fees, and other basic necessities. These are not abstract policy discussions. These are real decisions being made in real homes every day,” adds van Rooy.

According to Lisa Makaula, Advocacy Lead at The Green Connection “Increasing tariffs, without addressing the underlying problems within the system, simply shifts responsibility onto those who are least able to bear the cost. The public may effectively be paying for a R54.7 billion mistake made by someone else. That is fundamentally unjust. Communities should not be expected to absorb the costs of poor planning, regulatory failures, or infrastructure mismanagement. Accountability must become part of the conversation.”

In January 2026, The Green Connection submitted recommendations to NERSA regarding Eskom’s Multi-Year Price Determination process – its second input into the MYPD6 evaluation process – emphasising the need for greater transparency, stronger public participation, and a comprehensive review of the country’s electricity pricing framework. The organisation argues that the existing approach is unsustainable because it relies heavily on assumptions linked to costly coal infrastructure projects, including Medupi and Kusile, despite the growing affordability of renewable energy technologies.

According to The Green Connection, the country’s continued reliance on fossil fuels is placing unnecessary pressure on consumers while slowing progress towards a more affordable and resilient energy future.

Makaula says that South Africa has reached a turning point in how electricity should be priced, and that the Electricity Pricing Policy – which has been approved by Cabinet – should be an opportunity to correct injustices of the past. She says, “We cannot continue relying on outdated models that ignore changing economic and technological realities, and that no longer serve the interests of the people. Renewable energy is already cheaper to build than new coal infrastructure, yet electricity pricing continues to be influenced by assumptions rooted in a broken system. The pricing overhaul should serve the public interest because access to affordable energy should not be a luxury but is essential for dignity, health, education, and economic opportunity.”

The Green Connection maintains that greater public participation is essential if long-term solutions are to be developed. According to the eco-justice organisation, communities must be given meaningful opportunities to participate in decisions that directly affect their lives. The country’s long-term energy security depends on embracing a just transition that prioritises affordability, sustainability, and accountability. This includes expanding investment in renewable energy, improving transparency within the electricity sector, and ensuring that vulnerable households are protected from excessive price increases.

The Green Connection also believes that the reform of South Africa’s Electricity Pricing Policy presents an important opportunity to align electricity pricing with current energy needs while shielding vulnerable households from escalating costs. This should include expanding and strengthening Free Basic Electricity provisions so that poor and working-class communities are better protected from tariff increases. Electricity pricing must support equitable access to energy and ensure that people are not penalised simply for remaining connected to the national grid.

As South Africans continue to confront rising living costs, The Green Connection is calling for urgent intervention to prevent even more households from being pushed into poverty. “The country is facing a defining moment,” says van Rooy. “We cannot build a just society while people are being forced to choose between warmth, food, education, and electricity. Access to affordable energy should strengthen communities rather than push them further into hardship. If we fail to act now, the social and economic consequences may affect future generations.”

Community comments:
Reinett Pullen, a small-scale fisherwoman and community activist from the Eastern Cape, believes that rising electricity costs are placing unbearable pressure on fishing communities that depend on reliable power to sustain their livelihoods. Deborah De Wee, environmental activist and founding member of the Spirit of Endeavour Fisherwomen in Doring Bay, is of the opinion that escalating electricity prices are driving already vulnerable fishing households deeper into poverty. Voices from Elands Bay echo these concerns, warning that unaffordable electricity tariffs may result in fishing families, pensioners, and unemployed residents struggling to survive as household costs continue to outpace already limited incomes.

Pullen says, “For fishing communities, electricity is not a luxury. It is the difference between putting food on the table and going hungry. We rely on electricity to preserve our catch, feed our families, and sustain our livelihoods, yet every increase in tariffs forces us to make impossible choices between electricity, food, education, and other basic necessities. A just energy transition cannot be measured only by market efficiency but also by whether it protects those who already carry the heaviest burden. We urge NERSA and government to put affordability, social justice, and meaningful public participation at the centre of all electricity reforms. Access to affordable electricity is not a privilege. It is essential to our dignity, our livelihoods, and our future.”

De Wee says, “In Doring Bay, our livelihoods depend on the sea, but our income is seasonal and uncertain. Electricity costs, however, continue to rise regardless of whether families have an income or not. Many households are surviving on social grants, while others are being forced to return to collecting firewood because electricity has become unaffordable. We are spending more money than ever for fewer units of power, and for many families, electricity now lasts only a few days before they have to buy again. This is not just an energy issue. It is a poverty issue, a dignity issue, and a community survival issue. Policymakers must recognise that people cannot continue to absorb endless increases while struggling to meet their most basic needs. Affordable electricity is essential if communities like ours are to have any chance of a secure and dignified future.”

Small-scale fisher in Elands Bay, Patrick Adonis says, “Electricity tariffs are currently beyond what we can afford. Our households are struggling, our expenses are greater than our income, so we have to stretch every cent as far as possible. But the electricity increases and tariffs have gone through the roof. This hits us very hard, and it is affecting us as the fishing community of Elands Bay in a very negative way.”

Elands Bay resident, pensioner Michelle Engelbrecht says, “Why is electricity becoming so expensive? As a pensioner and a resident of Cederberg and Elands Bay, I am deeply concerned because electricity prices have gone up again. For people – who are already struggling to make ends meet – our way of life is being affected. How are we supposed to survive with only R2,400 each month (the pensioner’s grant) when more than half is spent just on electricity? It is simply unliveable. Today, I am being forced to go back to the old days of cooking our daily food over an open fire, because I cannot afford electricity. It’s simply too expensive. And what about those who are currently unemployed? Even if you are working, all you can afford is electricity, because the price keeps rising higher and higher. Is there no solution? We cannot continue to live like this.”

Elands Bay fisherman, Andries Booysen says, “Government and NERSA should take a careful look at these electricity tariffs, because excessive price increases are bringing us to our knees. The cost of living is already too high. It’s not fair that we are already struggling to keep our heads above water, and now we also have to bear the burden of these additional increases.”

May 26, 2026 Past News WEST COAST SEISMIC SURVEY CASE MOVES CLOSER TO HEARING

This Energy Month, the legal challenge between Aukotowa Fisheries Primary Co-operative, The Green Connection, and Natural Justice (the Applicants), and the government together with TGS Geophysical Company UK Ltd (the Respondents), concerning authorisation for offshore seismic surveys along South Africa’s West Coast and Northern Cape coastline, has entered a critical new phase.

June 4, 2026 Latest News JUDGMENT RESERVED: HIGH COURT CONSIDERS ARGUMENTS CHALLENGING WEST COAST SEISMIC SURVEY APPROVAL

On Tuesday afternoon, the Western Cape High Court concluded a two-day hearing in the ongoing legal challenge by Aukotowa Fisheries Primary Co-operative, The Green Connection and Natural Justice (the Applicants) against the State and TGS Geophysical Company UK Ltd.

June 26, 2026 Latest News Saldanha Red Dust Emissions Decision Referred to National Environment Department

On 25 June 2026, The Green Connection welcomed the West Coast District Municipality’s decision to reject Transnet Port Terminals’ application to renew an Atmospheric Emission Licence (AEL) for the Saldanha Iron Ore Terminal.

June 30, 2026 Latest News (Op-Ed) Ska Fela Moya: Don’t Give Up, Just Breathe The Fumes

When a corporation wraps itself in the language of human endurance while polluting the air that athletes breathe, we should name it for what it is. A lost opportunity.

The post SA’s Increasing Energy Costs Put Pressure On The Most Vulnerable Among Us appeared first on The Green Connection.

The number of Cheaper Home Batteries installations has passed the half-million mark, a huge new milestone for the hugely successful rebate that is slashing bills and delivering "enormous benefits" to the grid.

The post Home battery rebate hits 500,000 milestone as households “take control” and deliver grid benefits appeared first on Renew Economy.

As droughts and wildfires damage economies, 350.org called on governments to push for a global tax treaty that can make big oil and gas corporations pay for mounting climate costs.

This week in New York, governments wrapped up negotiations for the UN Tax Convention with some governments strongly pushing for a global tax system aligned with the Paris Agreement and other environmental treaties, which can hold big polluters accountable for climate damage.

Campaigners called on governments to support a global tax on fossil fuel profits to raise critically needed funds to help communities and countries hit hardest by climate disasters and ensure a fast, fair shift to renewable energy. Revenues can also be directly channeled to households struggling to pay bills or put food on the table due to spikes in energy and food prices.

While tax treaty negotiations took a step in the right direction, several rich countries tried to halt progress by sidelining positions that push for stronger environmental taxation and taxing rights for developing countries.

Set to be finalized in 2027, the UN Tax Treaty talks will resume in December, with the inclusion of a “polluters pay” principle on the table. If adopted, a legally binding mechanism can be set up to collect a global tax on the profits of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies, which posted more than $90 billion dollars in profits in the second quarter of 2026 alone.

Lisa Rose, Campaigner at 350.org, said:

"Big Oil’s staggering second quarter earnings prove that the money we need for solutions exists, it’s just in the wrong hands. As droughts and heatwaves drain public budgets and push up the cost of living, countries need these funds now to protect people from extreme heat and rising bills. The momentum for permanently taxing fossil fuel profits is here. Our leaders must not squander this chance to put that wealth where it belongs – into building a safer and more livable planet, not a hotter and more destructive one.”

Josh Bayly, Director of Sustainability at Consumers International, said:

"Affordability stands out as the top consumer concern worldwide. Spiking energy and food prices have turned essential daily activities like cooking a meal or using the air conditioner into a dilemma for ordinary households. Globally, consumer trust in fossil fuel companies is low, and the outstanding profits they just posted only deepens this distrust. The UN Tax Convention gives governments a real chance to make the energy system fairer: tax excess profits to ease the burden on consumers.”

Notes to the Editor:

• Analysis by Eurodad and the Global Alliance for Tax Justice estimates that a 20% surtax on profits of the world's 100 largest oil and gas companies could have generated more than $1.08 trillion since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015.

The planet’s oceans are an ally for fighting climate change. They absorb about a third of all human-generated carbon dioxide emissions. Many researchers are looking at ways to speed up the ocean’s ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

One proposed solution is to dump iron into ocean waters. This would trigger a bloom of phytoplankton—microscopic plant-like organisms that use sunlight to produce food—which would pull large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

But research published in the journal Nature shows that not all places are equal when it comes to ocean iron fertilization (OIF). The carbon dioxide removal strategy could have unintended side-effects, and its ecological impact and effectiveness depends on where it is put into action.

The team from the University of California, Irvine has found that implementing OIF at higher latitudes rather than near the equator could reduce environmental impacts while still achieving removal of carbon dioxide

“The Central Pacific should be avoided for OIF due to the severe ecological risks, and the Southern Ocean may offer the best balance between carbon sequestration and ecological risk over decadal timescales,” says Jun Yu of UCI’s department of earth systems science.

 

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Artificial OIF is more than a theoretical concept, Yu says. Researchers have conducted field tests in the past. But those short-term OIF experiments were designed to see whether iron “is the limiting nutrient for phytoplankton growth in ocean regions, not to serve as a climate solution.”

To work as a climate solution, OIF would need to be done at much larger scales over longer periods. That could have unintended environmental consequences such as biodiversity loss, expansion of oxygen minimum zones, and disturbance of fish habitats. That’s because the added iron can deplete nutrients from water. That results in less zooplankton, tiny organisms that serve as food for fish and larger marine animals.

Yu, J. Keith Moore, Adam Martiny and colleagues set out to see which regions can achieve efficient, durable carbon dioxide removal, and what the ecological impact would be. They used an ocean iron fertilization model to analyze the fertilization potential and ecosystem impact across ten ocean biomes over 60 years.

The team found that OIF removed up to 5.3 parts per million of carbon dioxide, or 0.70 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year. They also found that the areas with the largest plankton blooms, and hence the most effective at carbon dioxide removal, were the Southern Ocean and the equatorial Pacific.

However, the strategy depleted nutrients near the equator. Fertilizing 0.35% of the ocean in the equatorial Pacific leads to at least 10% decline in zooplankton. Meanwhile, fertilizing 0.2% of the Southern Ocean led to a 10% increase in zooplankton.

“The next step would be to explore the fishery impact of OIF, with additional model experiments at more locations in the Southern Ocean to test the benefits and risks,” Yu says.

Source: Jun Yu et al. Climate benefit and ecological cost trade-offs for ocean iron fertilization. Nature, 2026.

Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory

The company plans to double its manufacturing capacity as it continues to see a “strong supply-demand environment” for gas turbines in the U.S., CFO Hiroshi Nishio said.

This week we’re finally doing it! We’re going to Kingwood, Texas, and talking about the greenbelt trail system I’ve been telling everyone about for years. This is a storytelling episode, featuring guests John Walsh, Jerry Lunow, and Bill Neuhaus, so I hope folks enjoy hearing about NASA, timber companies, bike trails, and Houston’s bayous. But also, stick around to hear how a suburban development in Texas from the 1970s mirrors and pre-dated Dutch bike planning with special guest, Steve Vance from Streetsblog Chicago.

Now, as you know at Talking Headways, we offer you three ways to enjoy our fine content:

• Read the full transcript (with a few AI typos) by clicking here.
• Reading an edited segment below the player on this page.
• Or simply putting in those AirPods and clicking the audio player below to get the full dulcet tones of our host and his guests:

Here’s the partial excerpt:

Steve Vance: I did not think about the benefit of living in Houston when we moved there. It only came to light when we moved away from Kingwood in 1996 to Batavia, Illinois.

And then my perspective and appreciation for the design of Kingwood changed again when I visited Houten in the Netherlands in 2011, where I recognized some of the design principles in Houten were actually present in Kingwood. And I was shocked that somebody in the ’70s had this idea that has been replicated 4,000 miles away at around the same time, but also I think in Davis, California, there are some parallels between Kingwood and their bike path system and Davis’s bike path system.

Jeff Wood: Throughout the production of this episode, I couldn’t shake thinking about how the United States and the Dutch diverged in the 1970s. In 1973, an oil crisis hit and prices spiked. To many people, this is a line of demarcation. Gary Nelson notes that 1973 is the year that petroleum killed America, and auto-oriented sprawl clearly won out over communities designed for active transportation like walking, biking, and transit.

Some countries, such as the Netherlands, made deliberate choices, moving towards less energy-intensive modes as the United States shifted further towards auto dependence. In 1979, with more oil embargoes and the election of Ronald Reagan, auto dependence and urban sprawl were set in stone for another generation.

Steve and I enjoyed a rare Texas bubble, a place where you could bike everywhere if you wished.

Steve Vance: Growing up there, I was a free-range kid before that phrase even existed. And I had a bicycle, and I was able to ride my bicycle to any of my friends’ houses in other subdivisions and ride it to the grocery store, which I think was called Randall’s at the time, and the library and school and the pool in my subdivision or in my friend’s subdivision because there was a greenbelt trail system, a network that was grade separated through the forest.

And then when I moved to Batavia, like, I was put on lockdown. I was not allowed to bike to certain parts of Batavia or Geneva. There’s a road in that part of Illinois called Randall Road. It probably has a state highway number. But I was not allowed to cross that road. And the thing is, the grocery store was on the other side of that road, and thus I was severely restricted.

Things that were normal for me to do in Kingwood, I was not allowed to do in Batavia because Batavia had very little bike infrastructure, had almost no on-street bike lanes, although Kingwood didn’t have any because it had such a robust trail network. And then the middle school that I attended in Batavia was built on a greenfield site at the edge of town, and so I either had to take a bus or one of my parents had to drive me

Jeff Wood: Steve wanted to bike and walk. But as kids, we didn’t know why we couldn’t or what was really different aside from the fact that one place had accessible transportation and the other really didn’t.

Steve Vance: So later the Dutch Consulate sent planners to come to Chicago to work with the Chicago Department of Transportation’s bike lane designers and planners.

And some events were open to the public, and so I attended one where one of the Dutch planners explained this layered network system. So there’s a network of roads for cars and vehicles, and there’s a separate network for biking, and they will intersect at certain points and you make certain treatments so that those intersections are safe.

But between points, you have completely separate networks. They don’t have to be the same network with the bike path and the road in the same alignment. You can separate them. It was neat to learn in like 2010 that there was a name and a concept and a process for doing what I had experienced as a child in Kingwood for five years.

These Dutch planners would say, “Get a map out. Mark the points of interest that you’re trying to promote cycling to, and draw straight lines between them.” So you can see the beginning of a network. Obviously, you can’t build bike trails in a straight line because there are buildings and natural resources in the way, and so then you try to draw the straightest line possible between the two points.

And so if you look at a map of Kingwood and you mark all the playing fields and the schools and the pools, it’s, it’s basically the whole bike path or multi-use path, the Greenbelt Trail, was designed to just connect all of those things. It hit every point that someone like me or my sister needed to go to frequently on our bikes.

The network was there for that.

Headline News:

• “Trump-Connected Greenland Energy Company Falls On Its Face” • The self-declared US firm Greenland Energy Company was all set to drill for oil in Greenland. It had no permit, but it did have a personal connection from President Donald Trump. As may be expected, the plan soon unraveled and Greenland Energy put the plan on hold. [CleanTechnica]

Pump jack (US DOE image)

• “Extreme Weather And Jellyfish Knock One-Fifth Of France’s Nuclear Capacity Offline” • France normally gets around 70% of its electricity with nuclear power. But the country is experiencing a shortfall of over 20% in nuclear power production as it was hit by environmental-related outages linked to drought, extreme heat, and an invasion of jellyfish. [Euronews]
• “How Nuclear, Gas, Wind, And Solar Power Are Affected During Heatwaves” • When temperatures soared past 40°C in parts of Europe this year, nuclear reactors shuttered, gas plants’ efficiency fell, wind speeds dropped, and electricity networks sagged. But solar power production increased because the heat came with clear skies. [CleanTechnica]
• “Nordex Lands 82-MW German Citizen Deal” • Nordex Group took orders totaling around 82 MW from EFG Energy Farming Group to supply and install twelve wind turbines for citizen wind projects in Lower Saxony. Nordex said the orders cover the Erlte-Endel project in the district of Vechta and the Bad Essen project cluster in the district of Osnabrück. [reNews]
• “What To Know About Elon Musk’s Massive $16.8 Billion Chip Factory” • Elon Musk plans to build a $16.8 billion chip factory that he says is set to be the largest building in the world. Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, announced the project as chip makers worldwide ramp up production in response to a surge of demand triggered by advances in AI. [ABC News]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

From CLOC La Via Campesina South America, we call on social organisations, popular movements, trade unions, youth and all peoples to strengthen international solidarity and remain vigilant in the face of the consequences of this catastrophe.

The post Colombia Earthquake: CLOC South America expresses its solidarity with the Colombian people appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Alberta faces a growing orphan well crisis that poses significant risks to the environment and to the provincial economy. Orphan wells are non-operating oil and gas wells with no responsible owner. They often become orphaned when the most recent...

There is a crisis unfolding across Ontario that most people will never see. It is happening inside group homes at three o’clock in the morning...

The post No end to the wait: Ontario’s Developmental Services system is failing workers and families first appeared on Spring.

• Manteca Bulletin: SoCal killed off Owens Lake & Colorado River Delta; the Sacramento-SJ Delta is next
• Sierra Club: Can a Water Renaissance Put California on a Sustainable Path?
• The Guardian: Drought, water rationing and dry rivers: our water crisis is here

A recent editorial by Dennis Wyatt in the Manteca Bulletin criticizes irresponsible policies that have threatened critical water sources and ecosystems, contributing to concerningly low water levels in Mono Lake, Owens Lake, and the Colorado River Delta. Wyatt argues that California’s current approach to water management risks doing the same to the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, as tightening restrictions on Colorado River usage lead powerful water users in Southern California to seek more diversions. 

The editorial points to costly proposals like the Delta Conveyance Project (DCP), which would cost billions while damaging critical ecosystems and diverting resources away from local water needs. Instead, the author advocates for more pragmatic and sustainable solutions, including  repairing aging levees and investing in local water supplies.

In another recent article, the Sierra Club raises similar concerns, uplifting the Water Renaissance Plan as a roadmap for developing sustainable local water supplies. The article notes that climate change, as was similarly argued in this Guardian opinion piece, and aging infrastructure are making large-scale diversions and imported water increasingly unreliable.

The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta already faces degraded water quality, declining fish populations, and harmful algal blooms, yet Governor Newsom and state water agencies continue to push forward projects like the DCP.

The sustainable strategies outlined in the Water Renaissance Plan, including stormwater capture, wastewater recycling, and water conservation, could generate between 1.8 to 2 million acre-feet of local water supply by 2045, at a lower cost than the DCP, while providing more resilient water supplies in the face of climate change. 

As Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director at Restore the Delta, states, “To date, recommendations around restoration of the delta—from levee upgrades to use of tribal ecological knowledge, restored flows, and local restoration practices around land management—have taken a backseat in water planning to infrastructure that will not hold up to the climate change scenario.”

In “Here There Was Cerrado” — the Second-Place Winner of the 2026 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest — Natascha Otoya shows how industrial farms are plowing up the Brazilian savanna, changing the flow of water, and skewing human memory of the landscape.

Read more on E360 →

In May of 2017, Juan Mancias became an overnight sensation in France. Standing over 6 feet tall with a mane of salt-and-pepper hair, a medicine wheel-emblazoned ribbon shirt, beaded belt, and feathered medallion bearing the seal of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, he was conspicuous on the streets of Paris, and he had a message: French banks were financing the desecration of sacred Native lands and burial sites. They were, he said, aiding in the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Indigenous people in Texas through their support of natural gas pipelines and export terminals.

“It’s the same thing for 500 years,” Mancias told Observatoire des Multinationales. “We were occupied by the Spanish, by the Mexicans, then by the Texans, then by the Americans. And now it’s the oil industry.”

Three months before Mancias arrived in France, the last camps at Standing Rock emptied. For nearly a year, thousands of Indigenous water protectors and environmental allies had gathered near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, or DAPL. Oil was now flowing through DAPL, but activists and environmental organizations kept the momentum of the protests going. 

In South Texas, Mancias had been fighting the same battle on a different front. He and Bekah Hinojosa, a grassroots activist in the Rio Grande Valley, spent weeks organizing against the proposed Rio Grande terminal and Rio Bravo Pipeline. The $18-billion projects would carry tens of millions of tons of natural gas each year to the export terminal in Brownsville, where it would be liquefied and shipped overseas as LNG. The battle led them to collaborate with Rainforest Action Network on a study documenting what it identified as the projects’ threat to the area, which included Carrizo/Comecrudo lands. The proposed industrial corridor, Mancias said, threatened the tribe and Garcia Pasture, a village site near Brownsville with human burials, ruins, and a rare coastal ecosystem the World Monuments Fund, an organization dedicated to raising global awareness of endangered cultural heritage sites, declared “threatened by natural resource extraction.”

“It used to be one of the places that we would gather as different clans and set up our lean-tos and be there for awhile while we were fishing,” Mancias said. “That’s why we were real concerned.”

The report circulated. People were paying attention.

Read Next 5 takeaways from our investigation into the ‘ghost’ tribe that got millions in climate funding Tristan Ahtone

Les Amis de la Terre, or Friends of the Earth France, saw an opportunity: French banks — including BNP Paribas and Société Générale — were, at the time, still financing DAPL and petrochemical industries in South Texas, including the Rio projects. Organizers believed they could pressure them to stop. 

“We had a broad objective of trying to prevent more financial flows and loans going from France to this project,” said Lorette Philippot, with Les Amis de la Terre, who worked on the campaign. “We had the difficulty to try to mobilize people on a project that was happening far away with impact on people that were far away.” 

By early spring of 2017, Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club, and Les Amis de la Terre had a plan: Mancias and Hinojosa, who was a Sierra Club campaigner at the time, would travel to France to help launch an international divestment campaign. They would work alongside Indigenous activists and allies involved with Stand Up With Standing Rock, a European solidarity tour aimed at demanding banks divest from oil and gas projects in North America. 

Over the next week, they appeared in nearly a dozen print and radio outlets, including Le Monde and Radio France. They spoke at rallies. They built a symbolic oil pipeline inside a Paris branch of the bank Société Générale. A video of Mancias discussing Indigenous rights went viral. The pair were applauded by shareholders at BNP Paribas and booed by those at Société Générale. Mancias even secured a meeting with newly elected President Emmanuel Macron’s diplomatic advisors, where he explained how the United States government ignores Indigenous rights in Texas. 

“It was a very strong narrative and it helped us mobilize a lot of media at the time because there were these chiefs coming to France to address French companies,” said Philippot. “It was very strong, it was very new, so it helped really create attention.”

Juan Mancias, center, appears at a demonstration in front of the George R. Brown Convention Center ahead of Super Bowl Live events in Houston in 2017. Marie D. De Jesus / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

In the wake of Standing Rock, the global climate movement was eager to elevate Indigenous voices in the fight against fossil fuels, and Mancias stepped up. By leveraging the story of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe as a victim of ethnic cleansing at the hands of fossil fuel interests, the European campaign eventually helped push the two banks to withdraw from U.S. oil and gas projects. This high-profile victory launched Mancias and the tribe into the international media ecosystem, transforming them into environmental media darlings. 

Mancias’ visit to France was a massive public relations victory for the climate movement.

But an extensive review of historical and genealogical records reveals that key documents underpinning Mancias’ claims to being of Carrizo/Comecrudo descent contain significant historical inconsistencies and cannot be verified or authenticated. His platform instead rests on family lore that has generated immense financial and social capital for Mancias, who is the group’s chairman, while fueling a broader trend that has detrimental global repercussions for Indigenous Peoples and the fight to address climate change.

“At the time we met him in the United States, Juan Mancias was clearly recognized as a representative of Indigenous communities,” said a spokesperson for Amis de la Terre France. “Regardless of his origins or ancestry, we believe that everyone has the right to oppose LNG projects and their financiers.”

Everyone had a reason to believe the story Mancias told. And somewhere in the years of campaigns and headlines, the question of whether it was true fell away. The story worked, and that was enough.

If you’re a Native reader, you know the word pretendian — its history, the personalities attached to it, and the debates over identity and “pretendian hunting.” The next two paragraphs are not for you. Feel free to skip ahead. 

Pretendian — a portmanteau of “pretend” and “Indian” — describes someone who poses as Indigenous but is not. The term has broken out of Indian Country in recent years, with coverage, unmaskings, and think pieces by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers alike in outlets ranging from The Atlantic and National Public Radio to the New York Post and others as far away as Aotearoa, New Zealand. You know these people; some of your friends and family may even be pretendians, and the problem is bigger than your weird aunt with high cheekbones waving the results of a recent DNA test. Instead, tribal nations and international bodies agree that Indigeneity is a political identity requiring verifiable citizenship within a historically continuous community.

The consequences of false claims to Indigenous identity are not abstract and have brought pretendians significant financial, professional, and cultural benefits. In 2017, three fake Cherokee tribes received $300 million in federal contracts by claiming minority-owned business status. Twin sisters Amira and Nadya Gill received more than 158,000 Canadian dollars earmarked for Inuit kids after pretending to be tribal members. Scholars Elizabeth Hoover and Andrea Smith built careers on bogus claims of Indigenous identity. Perhaps most famously, an investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in 2023 found that Buffy Sainte-Marie, the internationally known singer whose career spanned nearly six decades, had falsified her claims of tribal identity and was born in Massachusetts to Italian and English parents. 

Tribal Recognition 101

Recognition indicates whether a group has a formal political and legal relationship with a government — not simply whether individuals have Indigenous ancestry. Recognition can come from the federal government or a state government.

Federal recognition establishes a government-to-government relationship with the U.S. The Bureau of Indian Affairs recognizes 575 tribal nations. Each is inherently sovereign, with partial exemption from state and local jurisdiction, the ability to place land into federal trust, some civil and criminal jurisdiction over its lands, and other rights.

State recognition: Some states recognize tribes within their borders, but these tribes lack the inherent sovereignty that comes with federal recognition. They cannot exercise jurisdiction over land or access most federal programs, though some economic and business opportunities are available, such as the Small Business Administration’s section 8(a) program.

Non-recognized groups are, legally speaking, voluntary associations or nonprofits. They have no governmental authority, cannot exercise sovereignty, and lack legal standing as tribal nations under federal or state law.

Who qualifies as American Indian? Generally speaking, members of a federally recognized tribe. Tribal nations set their own criteria, such as lineal descendancy or blood quantum requirements, through formal, legally binding processes based on genealogical documentation. This is in contrast to informal systems in which leaders grant membership at their discretion.

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Stories are powerful, and in the world of climate action, an idealized Indigenous narrative can be more malleable, and more valuable, than facts. In France, the story of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe provided exactly what activists needed to pressure international banks into divesting from oil and gas: a moral front line. It was a victory built on a collective willingness to believe a story that no one bothered to question, let alone investigate.

In the years since he returned from Paris, Mancias has transformed the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, which lacks federal and state recognition, into a formidable environmental force. He has raised more than $5 million from major philanthropic foundations and joined heavyweights like Earthjustice and World Monuments Fund, and he has engaged with several United Nations agencies to battle oil and gas terminals, President Donald Trump’s border wall, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. 

Those partnerships have allowed the Carrizo/Comecrudo to behave as a tribal nation in the public eye while evading the responsibilities — and burdens of proof — genuine sovereign nations must bear. That has brought financial windfalls and international influence, revealing a troubling shadow recognition system, one in which well-heeled environmental organizations, well-meaning but unwitting journalists, and trusting international human rights bodies unknowingly prop up unverified Indigenous groups and pretendians to wage the climate war at the expense of legitimate Indigenous Peoples, tribes, and organizations.

For Indigenous policy experts, the elevation of unverified groups by environmental organizations represents a systemic issue that extends far beyond any single region. Speaking broadly about the nationwide trend of illegitimate actors and unverified groups entering the environmental movement, Kyle Whyte, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a climate justice scholar at the University of Michigan, noted the widespread damage caused by this dynamic.

“It’s actually hurting, I would say at an exponential rate, the possibility for Indigenous people to be major players in climate change,” said Whyte. “It’s completely undermining the potential that tribal nations and Indigenous people have.”

Juan Mancias, as seen in the Carrizo/Comecrudo YouTube video “Teaching of the Hands.” Courtesy of Juan Mancias

The Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, which also goes by Esto’k Gna, claims historical connection to the Texas Gulf Coast and Rio Grande Delta, a region with a thin record of its Indigenous history. While many primary documents about tribes in the region exist in the official archives of Spain, Mexico, and Texas, as well as parish records and municipal files, these threads have rarely been woven into a cohesive narrative. 

Spanish archives from the 16th through 18th centuries contain information on more than six dozen distinct groups in the region, but do not describe a unified “Comecrudo” or “Carrizo” tribe. Instead, Comecrudo, which is Spanish for “eats food raw,” and Carrizo, which translates as “river cane,” were simply derogatory, catchall descriptors colonizers applied to bands, tribes, communities, and groups that likely knew little of each other. These fragmentary colonial records capture little of the lived history of South Texas Indigenous communities, reducing complex human beings and societies to scattered chalk outlines of births, baptisms, and geographic displacements. 

Indigenous homelands in South Texas have played a reluctant host to the shifting, militarized edge of the Spanish, Mexican, and, later, Texan and American frontiers. Nearly 50 years of perpetual war against Native peoples into the late 19th century ended in forced removal and genocide. By the 1870s, many surviving tribal nations had been pushed out of the state altogether, including the Waco, Kiowa, and Tonkawa, all of which are now based in Oklahoma — a brutal reminder of Texas moxie. Historians have called the state “a cauldron of racist violence.”

These landscapes appear in the Carrizo/Comecrudo video ‘Teaching of the Hands.’ ​Courtesy of Juan Mancias

Few authoritative books compile the Indigenous history of South Texas. The most prominent, Martín Salinas’ Indians of the Rio Grande Delta, was praised for painstakingly compiling what one reviewer called the “recorded sherds of Indian existence” in the lower Rio Grande Valley. Those sherds, created by Spanish colonizers and military leaders, document Carrizos and Comecrudos at Spanish missions into the 19th century, and is punctuated by an 1886 visit from noted Swiss ethnologist Albert Gatschet, who found elderly Comecrudos living on the riverbanks of the border town of Reynosa Diaz. Some could still speak their language, which he wrote down, but after Gatschet the tribe disappears from the historical record.

For more than a century, the prevailing academic and historical consensus has held that Gulf Coast groups like the Carrizo, Comecrudo, and Karankawa ceased to exist as distinct societies by the late 1800s. According to the Texas State Historical Association, leading anthropologists, and historians, the surviving populations of South Texas died from colonial violence and disease, or they were assimilated into Mexican and Tejano society, leading to their de facto extinction as distinct cultural groups. To modern scholars, these tribes simply do not exist today.

According to Mancias, those scholars are wrong. He insists the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe and its history, culture, and language survived.

Mancias claims that in the 1940s, his grandfather, Juan Ramirez Mancias, a Carrizo/Comecrudo chief, led 29 tribal families from their traditional homelands along the Rio Grande 600 miles north to the Texas Panhandle. There, the families adopted identities as Mexican farmworkers and deliberately assimilated into the Hispanic population. The Mancias family, however, secretly maintained its Indigenous identity, language, and oral histories — the only people to keep the tribe alive. Mancias has said he knew as a child that he was Indigenous, and that he was dismissed and marginalized for it. He claims to have endured anti-Indian racism and expulsion from school for fighting his tormentors, but he never abandoned his convictions or his grandfather’s orders to “go get our land back.” Mancias says he is the hereditary leader of the tribe due to his family’s singular role in preserving its identity and history, and that those convictions have fueled his mission of protecting his ancestors’ homelands from billionaires, pipeline companies, banks, and the federal government, while rebuilding those homelands one parcel at a time.

“They almost annihilated us,” Mancias told a reporter in 2024. “That genocide continues.” 

The story Mancias tells echoes the Book of Exodus in the Bible: a multigenerational quest to return home that requires concealed identities, years in hiding, and a history physically carried forward — ending, at last, in a hard-fought, triumphant return. 

“This is pretty standard for people to make a life out of a story like this,” said Kim TallBear, who is Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, professor at the University of Minnesota, and an expert in Indigenous self-definitions. “This is a pretty standard hiding-out-in-the-wilderness kind of thing, and it is very common in the South.”

When ‘Hiding’ Doesn’t Hold Up

When unverified groups cannot prove continuous existence, some rely on a common defense: They were hiding. Like the Carrizo/Comecrudo, who claim their ancestors survived by blending into the Mexican-American population, some have argued that oppression forced them underground.

In Vermont, four state-recognized Abenaki groups — the Elnu, Koasek, Missisquoi, and Nulhegan — say their ancestors lived in hiding for nearly 200 years, citing the state’s 20th-century eugenics and sterilization policies as the primary reason for their secrecy.

Yet the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Vermont’s attorney general found no evidence of a hidden, continuous Abenaki community in the state, and historians found nothing to prove the eugenics policies specifically targeted Abenaki people.

The federally recognized Odanak First Nation in Quebec has explicitly rejected the Vermont narrative and have said their ancestors never went underground. Experts call “hiding” a convenient loophole that weaponizes historical trauma to excuse a lack of genealogical proof.

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Mancias said around a dozen of the 29 families who moved north remain active in the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe, but would not provide a full list or contact information for them. But he said his ancestral claims go back even further. He has told journalists his lineage starts with Chief Naz’tazea, a Carrizo/Comecrudo warrior, and his son, Manuel Cavazos — the lone survivor of an alleged massacre of more than 300 Carrizo/Comecrudo people in 1801 at the hands of Spanish soldiers, acting with Catholic priests, along the Devils River in South Texas. 

The sole basis for this claim is an unverified 19th century document that Mancias insists he discovered in the archives of the Texas Railroad Commission — a find he has repeatedly said corroborates his family’s oral history and confirms his relation to Naz’Tazea and Cavazos. According to Mancias, the report details an 1871 incident in which surveyors for the Gulf, Western Texas, and Pacific Railway stopped work after excavating an earthen mound containing the skeletal remains of more than 300 people. The document chronicles a subsequent military investigation during which an elderly Cavazos testified through a Spanish and Apache interpreter about the slaughter and his miraculous survival.

Mancias has recounted the story many times. In 2002, he read the alleged report aloud while testifying before the Texas Senate on the need for a state agency for Native American affairs, including a quote he attributed to Cavazos: “As I have said many times before, even though I am old, it will never pass in my eyes on what happened to my family when I was a little boy of 11.” In 2019, Mancias provided additional passages to a reporter, including a particularly graphic recollection from Cavazos that Spanish soldiers “put our little ones on spear tips and held them up for all to see. My sister was with child and Long Spears cut her with their knives where her unborn baby slept.”

‘I didn’t make it up.’

Juan Mancias

Mancias has been inconsistent about when he discovered the document. He told Grist that he had to threaten the state Railroad Commission to release it in the late 1980s, but also told Texas state senators that he’d discovered it only the week before his 2002 testimony. He has also placed the discovery in 2005, and in a recent interview claimed the report was not translated until 2023 because it was written in what he called “Castilian/Galego” Spanish. That translation, Mancias said, was done with the help of reporter Frank Hopper at Indian Country Today, now ICT, but the article in question was published in 2019. 

“I didn’t translate the story,” Hopper wrote in an email. “I don’t have the original document. I tried researching the massacre online but could find very little.”

Mancias would not share the document despite repeated requests, blaming technological issues and suggesting that state officials may have altered or removed it from public viewing. “I know that it exists somewhere, and maybe they changed it, so I can’t do anything about them changing it,” he said when confronted with our findings.

Extensive searches of digital and physical repositories within the Texas State Library and Archives Commission found no evidence that the report exists. Instead, it revealed multiple discrepancies and historical anachronisms in Mancias’ story. 

Mancias has been inconsistent on where the massacre occurred, with the railroad report naming two counties that did not exist at the time it was allegedly created and hundreds of miles from the traditional territory of the Carrizo/Comecrudo. He claims the document was written in a dialect of Spanish that would not have been used by an American railroad company operating in Texas almost 30 years after statehood. His chronology has also been historically illiterate: There weren’t any railroads operating in the area until nearly a decade after the discovery of the human remains purportedly occurred. None of the individuals named in the deposition, including the interpreter and a former Civil War captain, were found in the military and genealogical databases examined.

“I doubt any railroad survey crews would have been in such a remote area 10 years before the tracks were being laid,” said Rick McCaslin, the Texas state historian. “I strongly doubt that an Anglo company would have a deposition in Spanish without a translated version to accompany it.”

Don Hofsommer, a railroad historian and author of several books on the topic, also noted that the Texas Railroad Commission — the agency Mancias claims held the report — was not established until 1891, two decades after the alleged survey. “Typically, railroads did not move that sort of information to the public domain,” said Hofsommer. “It’s extremely unlikely that such a document would have migrated, and I can’t see any reason why it would have migrated to the Texas Railroad Commission. Improbable.” 

“I didn’t make it up,” said Mancias.

The Texas Railroad Commission did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Mancias has cited the purported document as evidence to his claims in federal court. In 2019, he sued the federal government, alleging genocide against the Carrizo/Comecrudo people, the desecration of sacred sites, and the use of discriminatory waivers to expedite border wall construction. He asserted “absolute land sovereignty” over six South Texas counties and sought sweeping remedies: an immediate halt to border wall and energy development, the transfer of land from corporations to the tribe, and $1 trillion in reparations — including $400 billion up front and $200 billion annually for 500 years.

When a judge required Mancias to specify the basis for alleging that the Carrizo/Comecrudo held a legal interest in the territory, Mancias submitted the text of the alleged Devil’s River report but did not produce a physical copy. Mancias later dismissed the lawsuit after the government challenged his legal standing to sue as an unrecognized tribe. In 2020, Mancias cited the railroad report in a Sierra Club lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s border wall, but neither he nor the environmental group provided the original document in the court filings, instead referencing the article Hopper wrote for ICT in 2019.

The alleged report is the only documentary evidence Mancias has publicly referred to in order to establish his connection to the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe. 

A lack of proof extends to his other ancestral claims, including the foundational lore of his activism: a childhood command from his grandfather to “go get our land back.” When pressed by the judge in his 2019, $1-trillion lawsuit against the federal government about whether he held traditional title to the lands he was suing over, Mancias admitted that while his grandfather claimed to own land in Peñitas, Texas, the family had “never been able to find a recorded deed or a document verifying this.”

A typed transcription of the purported 1871 interview with Manuel Cavazos, submitted by Juan Mancias as an attachment in the federal lawsuit Mancias v. United States of America. PACER

Grist also reviewed census, birth, baptism, marriage, and death records spanning the mid-18th century to the end of the 20th century from across Texas and in Tamaulipas and Nuevo León, Mexico. They show Mancias descends from a well-documented colonial family with deep roots in northern Mexico, including at least three documented Indigenous ancestors born in Mexico between approximately 1770 and 1800. They lived six to seven generations ago and are among the roughly 64 to 128 direct ancestors a person has at that generational depth. However, parish records show this Indigenous ancestry likely originates from the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains, not the Rio Grande Delta, the historic territory of the Carrizo/Comecrudo. More crucially, those ancestors are found on Mancias’ maternal line, not paternal — the foundation of his Indigenous claim. Those genealogical records also do not support Mancias’ assertion that he is related to Manuel Cavazos — the historical paper trail breaks at the precise generational link required to connect Mancias to the Devil’s River survivor. Nobody by that name, or the name Naz’tazea, appears in any records, including those by Gatschet, the Swiss ethnologist. Mancias did not respond to a detailed request for comment outlining our findings.

“If you go back six generations, that’s a lot of ancestors,” TallBear said. “Why are you focusing on the one who might or might not have been Indigenous? Even if there’s an actual Indigenous person, who cares? That’s not a claim. Ancestry alone is not a claim.”

That point is essential to understanding Indigenous identity. Tribal nations, the federal government, and international human rights bodies agree that Indigeneity is fundamentally a political and collective identity, not a private matter of individual racial descent or even blood quantum. As recognized by both the Bureau of Indian Affairs and international bodies like the United Nations, a group cannot simply self-identify into existence or reexistence; legitimate Indigenous Peoples must demonstrate historical continuity by tracing an unbroken line of political authority, typically through formal treaties, acts of Congress, or historical archives that document unbroken, collective lines to preinvasion and precolonial societies. When recognition politics shift from collective, land- and place-based rights toward individual rights that rest on ancestral claims, Indigenous Peoples, rights, and movements face compounding harms — a point scholars emphasize. To avoid that, and distinguish inherently sovereign tribal nations from groups composed merely of individuals claiming descent, the United States relies on a formal, if imperfect, legal system to vet claims of nationhood. 

It’s important to note that recognition status indicates whether a group has governmental authority and collective political rights as a sovereign nation. It does not, in and of itself, validate individual Indigenous heritage, just as the lack of federal recognition does not invalidate it. But it does determine whether a group is a sovereign governmental authority or merely an association or nonprofit organization. Indigenous leaders and scholars say that failing to respect those political boundaries enables individuals and groups fraudulently claiming Indigenous heritage for professional, political, and financial gain, ultimately harming legitimate Native communities.

Mancias rejects these bedrocks of Indigenous identity.

“We don’t abide by the colonial mentality of a procedural recognition process,” he said, referring to the tribe’s lack of political status.

Still, Mancias submitted a letter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA, in 1998 with the intent of petitioning for federal recognition of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe. Although Mancias frequently cites the multimillion-dollar cost of the process as the primary barrier to proceeding, documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show the group continues to interact with the agency. In March 2016, Mancias and his daughter Christa Mancias submitted a signed letter to the BIA to officially update their tribal council roster and maintain the petition.

This is a scanned copy of an envelope, postmarked March 28, 2016, containing an update to the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe’s 1998 letter to petition the Department of the Interior for federal acknowledgment. Grist obtained it through a Freedom of Information Act request. United States Department of the Interior via FOIA

The financial barriers and public condemnation of the recognition process haven’t stopped Mancias from emulating those federal systems. Since the 1990s, when Mancias established a nonprofit under the tribe’s name and began fundraising, he has created a tribal government with himself as the hereditary leader, recruited members, and issued identification cards. During the Texas Senate hearing in 2002, Mancias claimed the tribe had 352 members. By 2009, that figure had risen to 9,000 and by 2017 to 17,000 before tumbling to 2,500 four years later. It jumped again to 6,500 in 2024. This year, Mancias claims 30,000 members, a surge that would require adding roughly 65 members every day for an entire year. Mancias said membership is granted through lineal descendancy. 

“It’s family connections,” said Mancias. “Because of the blood that runs through us.”

That recruitment strategy helped bring in Christopher Basaldú, one of the tribe’s most prominent and outspoken members. Basaldú grew up in South Texas hearing family stories of his Indigenous heritage, but that changed when he met Mancias. According to an article featuring Basaldú, who did not return requests for comment, Mancias asked for his family names and where his relatives were born, then declared: “Those are my families, too. We’re related. You’re Carrizo.” Basaldú has since co-founded the tribe’s closest ally fighting oil and gas terminals, the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, along with frontline activist Bekah Hinojosa, whom Mancias also claims is a “distant cousin.”

Presented with our findings, Hinojosa said, “I’m not aware of any familial ties with Juan Mancias.”

Over the last two decades, global leaders have increasingly looked to Indigenous Peoples for solutions to climate change. That shift started in 2004 with the release of the landmark Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, which pushed Indigenous ecological expertise into the mainstream. Three years later, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues — among the largest global gatherings of Indigenous leaders and advocates — dedicated its annual session to climate change, helping establish Indigenous stewardship as a pillar of global environmental policy. 

Institutional acceptance deepened in 2014, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change formally recognized Indigenous expertise as an important resource for climate adaptation, a stark departure from earlier reports that marginalized or ignored those perspectives. The following year, the Paris Agreement wove Indigenous ecological knowledge into its framework. 

Then came Standing Rock. Nearly a year of intense protest put Native people in the international spotlight and pushed the Indigenous climate movement to the fore.

Juan Mancias addresses a crowd in Zuccotti Park during an environmental justice rally in New York City in June 2024. Gina M. Randazzo / ZUMA Press Wire / Shutterstock

Eventually, the federal government caught up. In 2021, the Biden administration elevated Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge to federal policy and established an interagency working group to ensure Native stewardship informs decision-making. “Tribal and Native communities have stewarded these lands since time immemorial,” said Brenda Mallory, who chaired the White House Council on Environmental Quality, at the time. “Their voices and their expertise are critical to finding solutions to address the climate crisis, an issue that disproportionately affects tribal and Native communities.”

Mounting recognition brought an unprecedented flood of money. In 2021, a coalition of governments and private funders unveiled a $1.7 billion pledge to support Native-led land defense, the largest investment ever in Indigenous climate action. By the time world leaders gathered in Brazil last year for the COP30 international climate summit, that commitment had expanded to an additional $1.8 billion for Indigenous and locally led conservation efforts. If the climate crisis is a defining marker of this century, Indigenous Peoples are becoming keystone parties in the fight to address it. 

How an Indigenous Claim Can Attract Millions

The Carrizo/Comecrudo aren’t the first to turn an unverified Indigenous claim into major environmental funding. In 2019, The Los Angeles Times found a similar pattern in California, centered on one man’s multimillion-dollar nonprofit empire.

Mati Waiya, born Frank Rocha, identifies as a member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, an unrecognized group separate from the federally recognized Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. In 1997, Waiya founded the Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation.

The foundation was created to provide environmental preservation, education, and advocacy. 
Between 2005 and 2018, it generated more than 130 news stories in outlets like The New York Times and NPR. That profile helped the nonprofit acquire a 67-acre former golf course for $5.5 million — nearly two-thirds the size of Santa Ynez’s own 99-acre reservation.

The Times later found that Waiya’s family originated in Mexico, with no documentation to support his claims of Chumash ancestry. The investigation also revealed that the Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation had raised more than $12 million in just four years.

Today, Waiya sits on the board of the Center for Biological Diversity and other nonprofits. In 2023, Wishtoyo listed total assets at $30.7 million from grants and contributions. Waiya, his wife, and one other employee earned $366,000 combined last year.

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When that unprecedented funding reaches legitimate tribal nations, the impact is undeniable. “One million dollars that goes into an entity with accountability and due process and cultural integrity could allow [it] to actually do things that lower carbon footprints or protect themselves from the fossil fuel sector,” said Whyte, the University of Michigan professor.

But the sudden influx of money also created a lucrative new pathway for bad actors. That shift led some funders and advocacy groups to unwittingly elevate people and organizations with no legitimate claim to indigeneity, said Whyte. “After Standing Rock and during the Biden administration, you have philanthropy and federal resources focused on Indigenous people,” he said. “They didn’t have a lot of long-term relationships with tribes or with Indigenous people with legitimate organizations.”

Historically, financial support for Indigenous people and organizations has been dismal. A 2019 Native Americans in Philanthropy report found that between 2002 and 2016, large U.S. foundations gave, on average, 0.4 percent of their total funding to such communities and causes. Similarly, tribal leaders quoted in a 2021 study from the Center for Effective Philanthropy reported that nonprofits had denied requests because program participants were already deemed successful. 

“We interpreted that as, They just want to fund drunk, starving Indians on the reservation or on skid row in the city. They’re not interested in what Native American leaders can contribute to society,” said one survey participant. These misconceptions, fueled by racist stereotypes, have been documented in other studies. Research has also found that philanthropy fundamentally misunderstands Indigenous experiences, tribal sovereignty and governance, and organizations operating in Indian Country — to say nothing of the growing problem of people fraudulently claiming Native identities.

“They didn’t understand, for example, that maybe in a certain region there was a legitimate tribal nation or Indigenous organization that was representing actual communities,” Whyte said of philanthropy in general. “They didn’t understand that there’s a difference between a group that is a nonprofit and a state-recognized tribe and a federally recognized tribe. Or in another country, a group that has a certain status. They didn’t know anything about it, and often, they were sucked in by these very powerful stories.”

Those same blind spots plague news coverage, where journalists with little or no understanding of Indigenous affairs are ill-equipped to engage in critical reporting or recognize when sources mislead them.

Vetting Indigenous Identity

Confirming Indigenous identity matters as much for philanthropists and activists as journalists. It can be uncomfortable, but here are essential questions to ask individuals and organizations before taking a claim at face value.

For individuals: What’s your connection to the community, and do you have family within its boundaries? Are you claimed by a recognized nation, verifiable by elders or leaders? How does the community view you and your work?

For organizations: Who leads the group, and with what verifiable ties to recognized communities? Is there transparent governance, membership criteria, elections, and active engagement? Is it recognized as legitimate by established tribal nations or national authorities?

Proceed with caution if someone relies on DNA tests, family lore, or “cultural adoption” instead of documentation; claims no living relatives; cycles through different tribal identities; uses romanticized spiritual language; or only claims identity when it’s professionally convenient.

These conversations are not comfortable, but generally, legitimate, enrolled, and connected Indigenous people understand why you are asking these questions. Anger, defensiveness, or frustration with being questioned can be a potential red flag.

Not knowing Indigenous affairs doesn’t excuse skipping verification, and assuming someone else already vetted a claim doesn’t, either. Verification is a systemic issue and a necessary professional obligation is essential to maintaining integrity.

For more information:
• Indigenous Identity Reporting Guide, Indigenous Journalists Association
• Indigenous Substantiation Recommendations Report, University of Toronto
• SPJ Code of Ethics, Society of Professional Journalists

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Media access is essential for the well-being and civic participation of legitimate Indigenous nations. But it can also grant visibility and credibility to illegitimate individuals and groups whose claims go unscrutinized, and non-Native reporters often feel overwhelmed by the complexities of Indigenous identity, a vulnerability that is easily exploited. Many fail to do basic research or ask tough questions about a source’s tribal ties for fear of causing offense or because they are rushing to meet a deadline, said Sunnie Clahchischiligi, who is Diné and president of the Indigenous Journalists Association. “I think it’s just carelessness and laziness,” she said.

That can create an echo chamber because, as the Indigenous Journalists Association warns, “once a fraudulent claim is published in one news article, especially in Indigenous-led media, other media tend to follow without verification.” 

That echo chamber has benefited Mancias and the Carrizo/Commecrudo Tribe, which have appeared in more than 70 stories, blogs, and press releases since 2016. They have received frequent coverage from outlets ranging from ICT and Inside Climate News to PBS, The Guardian, and The Texas Tribune. 

Inside Climate news and ICT were among the most prolific outlets covering Mancias and the tribe. Grist presented the findings of this investigation to them and asked about their editorial policies for covering unrecognized groups and whether reporters examined primary documents to corroborate Mancias’ claims. Both outlets provided statements but did not answer the questions or explain their fact-checking protocols or policies covering unrecognized Indigenous groups.

“The issues you raise about identity are ones [the reporter] included with nuance in his reporting on displaced and marginalized people seeking justice,” the executive editor at Inside Climate News told Grist in an email.

ICT also declined to discuss its vetting process or its publication of the unverified 1871 Spanish railroad document. Citing an organizational restructuring that occurred in 2021, the president of IndiJ Public Media, which runs ICT, said she “can’t speak to decisions made in the past” but added that the outlet “is committed to integrity and the highest journalistic standards.”

The Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe operated on a tight budget for years after incorporating as a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 1999. The IRS repeatedly revoked and restored that status, and tax filings show the tribe reported less than $50,000 in annual revenue between 2012 and 2018. In 2016, a GoFundMe campaign raised just $3,000 to support a monthslong pipeline protest encampment.

Everything changed in 2019. 

As Mancias’ celebrity grew on the heels of his 2017 Paris trip, the tribe began attracting philanthropic support. The Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe has raised more than $5 million since 2019, largely from environmental and social justice funders like the Schmidt Family Foundation, First Nations Development Institute, Rockefeller Family Fund, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

First Nations Development Institute, the Rockefeller Family Fund, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation did not respond to detailed requests for comment. The Schmidt Family Foundation defended its funding and said identity verification is beyond its philanthropic mandate. 

“While we resource many movements run by, and in service of, historically excluded demographics, we do not fund based on identity,” said Joseph Sciortino, executive director of the Schmidt Family Foundation. “Furthermore, it is not our place to interrogate the identity of those we support. Federal tribal recognition and matters of cultural legitimacy are incredibly complex and important subjects with significant social, cultural, and political implications. Our job as a philanthropy is to support important work, not to serve as the arbiters of who does and doesn’t get to be Indigenous.”

Philanthropic support helped the tribe in many successful campaigns. The tribe pushed French and Japanese banks to divest from LNG, disrupting financing for projects worth billions. It joined German activists to blockade European imports of fracked gas. It engaged in direct action to stop construction of the border wall and challenged Elon Musk’s plans to expand SpaceX operations in South Texas. As an accredited nongovernmental organization at the United Nations, the Carrizo/Comecrudo have weighed in on international negotiations, including a global plastics treaty.

Tori Cress, who is Beausoleil and a member of the Society of Native Nations, and Juan Mancias attend the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Plastics in Busan, South Korea, in 2024. Kiara Worth / IISD / ENB

Mancias said the tribe is now working to protect threatened peyote habitats in South Texas, one of the few places in the U.S. where the psychoactive cactus, used as a sacrament in the Native American Church, grows wild. A spokesperson for the Native American Church declined to comment on this story.

It has accomplished all of this, Mancias said, with just five full-time employees, including his daughter. He also said much of the tribe’s money has gone toward buying land and paying taxes on it, a financial burden stemming from the tribe’s unrecognized status.

The Sierra Club has been one of the tribe’s most important allies. It has provided nearly $200,000 in grants and ongoing legal support, most recently in a lawsuit targeting SpaceX. The suit, filed by the environmental group SaveRGV in 2021 and later joined by the Sierra Club and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe, challenged the closures of Boca Chica Beach on the Gulf Coast. The shutdowns can last as long as 12 hours and are meant to safeguard the public from any falling debris from the rocket company’s launches. The plaintiffs argued the closures violated the Texas Constitution’s guarantee of access to public beaches.

In June, the Texas Supreme Court unanimously ruled against them, holding that private parties do not have the right to sue to enforce public beach access.

Mancias has argued publicly that the closures infringe on rights protected under the federal American Indian Religious Freedom Act — but that law applies to citizens of federally recognized tribes.

“The Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe are the original people of the Boca Chica Beach region,” Mancias has claimed. “The river is sacred to us. When we call for the rains, we go to the river because that’s where the rains come from. And we’ve been stopped, prevented from giving our prayers at Boca Chica beach by a billionaire’s pet project and the police.” 

But the litigation wasn’t fought on that ground. The suit rested on Texas beach-access law, not federal Indian law, and the tribe appeared in the case not as a sovereign nation but as an incorporated nonprofit organization. 

The Sierra Club did not respond to a detailed request for comment.

As an unrecognized group, the Carrizo/Comecrudo lack the legal standing to compel developers or governments to consult with them on projects impacting their claimed ancestral lands. Instead, Mancias has turned to international frameworks, specifically invoking the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, and the legal principle of free, prior, and informed consent, or FPIC. By leveraging these standards, the tribe has forged an effective strategy to legitimize its identity claims on the world stage, pressure international financial institutions, and attract philanthropic support.

Representatives of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe have argued that because companies like SpaceX haven’t consulted tribal leaders, they are violating UNDRIP. As part of its legal tactics, the tribe has demanded federal agencies obtain its free and informed consent before launching oil and gas projects. It has used similar arguments to pressure investors in France and Japan, contending banks are violating that standard by failing to consult with the tribe.

Although UNDRIP is universal in scope, its practical significance is greatest where Indigenous Peoples lack meaningful domestic protections, legal recognition, or recourse against state violence. In much of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, weak protection of Indigenous land rights — compounded by extractive pressure, organized crime, and impunity — has made defending Indigenous territory deadly. Indigenous people make up roughly 6 percent of the world’s population but account for nearly a third of the environmental defenders attacked in 2024. 

The U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, Albert K. Barume, has tied that violence directly to the absence of secure land rights. “There is a crisis Indigenous people are currently experiencing, and it’s because many Indigenous Peoples are killed, many are under arrest, many live in hiding,” he told the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2026. “This is because Indigenous Peoples’ land and territory are often not protected enough.” 

Critics argue the framework was never intended to legitimize identity in the United States, where a system for establishing and recognizing tribal sovereignty already exists.

“They are literally using an argument that people in the world, that are being killed right now, actually need,” said Whyte.

The tribe’s closest ally in its international work has been the Society of Native Nations, or SNN, a Texas nonprofit founded in 2016 to combat historical erasure and promote the idea that “Indigenous peoples are still here in Texas.” It represents unrecognized tribes that receive no federal funding or support, including the Tap Pilam Coahulitecan Nation, Lipan Apache, Chichimeca, Tobotolobal, Mexica, and Purepecha. 

The society started with help from Mancias. 

For more than a decade, Mancias led the Central Texas chapter of the American Indian Movement, or AIM, a historic and controversial Native American grassroots civil rights organization. During that time he recruited Frankie Orona, an information technology entrepreneur from California who identifies as Tongva, Chumash, and Borrado, and is an enrolled member and environmental liaison for the San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians, which does not hold federal recognition status. 

“Frankie became a member because he met me,” said Mancias.

Frankie Orona, who leads the Society of Native Nations and is co-chair of the Major Groups Facilitating Committee, is shown here at a committee forum in Nairobi, Kenya, on December 7, 2025. Anastasia Rodopoulou / IISD / ENB

In early 2016, Orona filed the paperwork required to incorporate their chapter, the American Indian Movement Of Central Texas, as a nonprofit. Riding the momentum of Standing Rock, the chapter mobilized against the Trans-Pecos Pipeline in West Texas. Later that year, AIM Central Texas members, including Mancias, protested at a resort owned by the CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the Dakota Access and Trans-Pecos pipelines. Two weeks later, on October 20, Orona renamed the organization the Society of Native Nations because, he said, AIM’s radical history made it “very, very difficult” to work with other organizations.

In a written response to an email outlining our findings, Orona said the “AIM Central Texas chapter was not renamed or replaced by SNN,” the organization still exists, and it “remains entirely separate from SNN.” 

That claim does not align with legal filings available through the IRS and the Texas Secretary of State. Those documents show that AIM Central Texas and the Society of Native Nations share the same incorporation date, state file number, and federal tax identification number. SNN’s own governing documents reveal a shared origin: SNN’s by-laws — including its entire preamble, structural goals, and mission statements — are drawn almost verbatim from bylaws the Des Moines, Iowa chapter of AIM used in the 1970s, many of which are found in contemporary AIM materials. 

The bylaws of the American Indian Movement of Des Moines, left, as printed in the record of a 1976 U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing, are shown alongside the bylaws adopted by the Society of Native Nations in November 2016. Highlights indicate passages the two documents share, including the organizations’ purposes and both lists of objectives. U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary; Society of Native Nations

Orona also insisted that “Juan Mancias was not part of creating SNN.”

The society’s financial growth has mirrored the rise of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe. After filing rudimentary tax returns for several years, the organization’s fortunes changed dramatically in 2019 when it began securing climate-action grants, including funding to “address threats of fossil fuel infrastructure and border wall construction on ancestral lands of the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe.” By 2024, its reported annual revenue had reached nearly $777,000 with money coming from many of the same philanthropic funders supporting the Carrizo/Commecrudo Tribe.

A review of the organization’s tax filings reveals a history of reporting inconsistencies and revisions. The society has on three occasions between 2018 and 2024 reported different revenue for the same tax periods, and later filings reported substantially higher revenue for earlier tax years. In 2024, the society’s tax forms misattributed historical revenues to the wrong years and left the current year’s income column blank.

In his written response to Grist, Orona said SNN is aware of the discrepancies and is working with a new accountant to review its filings for the past three years. “This corrective process began before we learned of your investigation,” he said. “We acknowledge that the public filings contain reporting inconsistencies that need to be corrected. However, the placement of figures in incorrect year columns or inconsistent presentation across returns should not, without further evidence, be characterized as intentional misconduct or as proof that funds were missing, improperly received, or misused.” 

Asked to speak in general about the structural risks of funding unverified organizations rather than sovereign nations, Whyte noted that such groups frequently lack the infrastructure to handle large grants. “When a group comes in that has no potential for self-governance, they often lie about who their members are,” he said. “It might be a few figureheads, usually one person that’s the point person for everything, and a few other followers, and if they do get money, they often don’t have the capacity to manage those funds, and the entire thing gets wasted.”

Ongoing financial support helped propel the Society of Native Nations onto the global stage alongside the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe. Both organizations gained accredited nongovernmental status within the United Nations, allowing them to participate in global conversations, forums, and negotiations.

Within the United Nations system, legitimate tribal governments can, and do, participate as sovereign nations in specific Indigenous-focused spaces, such as the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. However, at the highest levels of global diplomacy — including the U.N. General Assembly, Human Rights Council, and Economic and Social Council — the U.N. remains exclusively for recognized Member States. 

Frankie Orona is shown here attending a meeting of an International Institute for Sustainable Development working group in Geneva on June 20, 2024. Mike Muzurakis / IISD / ENB

Because the U.N. excludes Indigenous governments from participating as sovereign nations in these broader arenas, Indigenous Peoples have fought for years for “enhanced participation” — the ability for tribal governments to hold a dignified, permanent status to negotiate on global policies that directly affect them. Until that happens, the system forces a workaround: To gain access to high-level bodies and specialized agencies, Indigenous Peoples must participate through nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. 

Both the society and the Carrizo/Comecrudo have used this loophole to gain a level of international power and influence they could not exert in the United States. The society secured accreditation with UNESCO — the U.N. body protecting cultural heritage — in 2024 by highlighting its partnership with the Carrizo/Comecrudo. It also won recognition from the U.N. Environment Programme, or UNEP, where Orona now co-chairs the Indigenous Peoples Major Group, a position that helps shape high-level negotiations like the global plastics treaty that represent the interests of Indigenous Peoples worldwide.

Just 24 Indigenous-focused organizations are accredited observers to the United Nations Environment Assembly, the world’s highest decision-making body for environmental matters. Only four are from the U.S. One is the International Indian Treaty Council, which is among the oldest and most established Indigenous NGOs at the U.N. The others are the Society of Native Nations, Humanculture, and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas.

The society holds similar standing at UNESCO. Of the 10 NGOs from the United States with accreditation, only three focus on Indigenous issues: the Pacific Traditions Society, Cultural Survival, and the Society of Native Nations. 

As accredited observers, NGOs cannot negotiate as sovereign governments. But groups like the Society of Native Nations and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe receive a wide range of institutional privileges. Among other things, they can provide oral and written contributions to draft resolutions, access internal documents unavailable to the public, and interact directly with government delegations. 

“The U.S., when they come with a delegation, you have members from the [Department of Justice] there sometimes, or [Health and Human Services],” said Orona. “You speak to states and you are able to influence policy that can impact generations and generations and generations yet to come.”

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Yet despite granting this high-level diplomatic access, the U.N. does not verify whether these organizations actually represent historical Indigenous communities. In an emailed statement to Grist, a UNEP spokesperson confirmed that the agency “respects the principle of self-identification” and relies purely on standard nonprofit eligibility requirements for accreditation.

“UNEP, like other U.N. mechanisms, does not conduct determinations regarding the sovereign status, federal recognition, historical continuity, ancestry, or genealogical claims of organizations or individuals,” the spokesperson wrote, adding that accreditation “does not constitute endorsement or validation of such claims.”

That policy creates a structural conflict of interest for anyone looking to challenge a group’s credentials. Indigenous participation at UNEP is managed through the Indigenous Peoples Major Group. Because Orona currently serves as its co-chair, internal guidelines recommend that any official complaints or clarifications be brought to “one or both” co-chairs privately before being elevated to the broader group. A UNEP representative confirmed there is no specific conflict-of-interest procedure for this scenario, but did say that such a case wouldn’t be required to pass through a co-chair’s hands. Instead, concerns could be raised with the other co-chair or bypass the internal governance entirely by consulting UNEP’s Civil Society Unit.

Orona has become a fixture at U.N. summits, attending more than a dozen international events since 2024 in places like Geneva; Nairobi, Kenya; and Busan, South Korea. Mancias has also traveled internationally on behalf of the tribe and has, among other events, attended global conferences on fossil fuels and plastics in Kenya and Uruguay. He also participated in the 2024 plastics treaty negotiations in South Korea. 

For Indigenous delegates, the presence of individuals and groups with unverified claims exercising this level of influence has been a longstanding source of frustration. Because the U.N. system relies heavily on NGO credentials and self-identification, it inadvertently creates a pathway to undeserved international legitimacy.

“This has been an issue of concern throughout the U.N. system regarding the representation of Indigenous Peoples, and it is really hard to know how to deal with it,” said Andrea Carmen, executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council. “None of us know everybody, and definitely we don’t know Indigenous Peoples’ from every region. We don’t want to exclude anyone unfairly, but we do hear these concerns expressed.”

The Right of ‘Peoples,’ Not Groups

International law and identity: Under Article 33 of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, Indigenous Peoples can determine their own identity or membership. This is a direct application of the broader right of self-determination that asserts Indigenous Peoples can “freely determine their political status.”

These rights are recognized for Indigenous Peoples specifically, not as a right for any individual to self-identify as Indigenous.

Defining “Indigenous Peoples”: The U.N. has relied on a definition drawn from Special Rapporteur José Martínez Cobo’s landmark study. As the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations drafted UNDRIP, it adopted his central criteria: “historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories.”

This is generally understood to include ongoing occupation of ancestral lands, clearly recognized descent from precolonial occupants, cultural continuity through spiritual customs and traditional livelihoods, and use of a common Indigenous language.

Illegitimate claims: These criteria have been used to reject spurious claims. One of the clearest examples came after the end of apartheid, when a self-defined delegation of South African Boers sought recognition as an Indigenous people whose culture was under threat. But as the descendants of Dutch settlers, experts quickly decided it could not satisfy the framework’s central requirement of historical continuity with precolonial societies.

Indigenous identity is a matter of representation, not racial descent or blood quantum. It also does not require state recognition. When someone claims to speak on behalf of, or represent, an Indigenous people, an institution, or organization, it’s important for them to clarify the specific Indigenous people that authorized that representation. The same goes for state delegates.

These questions can be difficult to raise, but they’re necessary to prevent abuses and misrepresentation that could undermine the movement’s collective work at the U.N.

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The U.N. has no formal mechanism to verify if participants, tribes, or organizations are who they say they are. But having illegitimate actors in the system takes diplomatic oxygen and means from legitimate Indigenous Peoples.

“It is concerning when you hear about entities whose claims to being Indigenous aren’t substantiated, that may be taking funding, time, representation, and resources away from Indigenous Peoples’ and their organizations that are really struggling to participate,” said Carmen. “If some are truly not bona fide, they should not be speaking as Indigenous Peoples.”

Orona and Mancias have known each other for more than a decade. “We do a lot of ceremony together, we spend a lot of time up in South Dakota together, we Sun Dance together,” Orona said in an interview with Grist earlier this year. Later, Orona said in an email that their collaboration has been largely a professional relationship before later saying it was largely a ceremonial one.

“My association with a person through environmental and Indigenous rights advocacy should not be presented as proof that I authenticated every historical or genealogical claim made by that person,” he wrote. “Participation in SNN does not confer Tribal citizenship, federal recognition, sovereign status, or validation of a person’s genealogy. Likewise, SNN membership should not be portrayed as evidence that the organization has formally authenticated every identity claim made by every member or affiliated individual.” 

Mancias’ ability to garner headlines and funding has required sharing the spotlight. Just up the Gulf Coast near Galveston, the unrecognized Karankawa Tribe of Texas has also been focused on environmental justice and protecting ancestral lands and artifacts from the petrochemical industry. This work has been led primarily by Sandra Love Sanchez, who claims Karankawa and Lipan Apache descent and is the tribe’s environmental liaison. She has cited Standing Rock as the catalyst for the tribe’s work. 

The Karankawa are well documented in Texas history and once controlled nearly 300 miles of coast from Corpus Christi Bay to Galveston Bay. Yet for more than a century, history books and roadside historical markers deemed them “extinct,” like the Carrizo/Comecrudo. That narrative held until 2009, when retired U.S. Army veteran Enrique Gonzalez came forward and claimed to be Karankawa. 

According to Gonzalez, rather than being wiped out in the mid-1800s, a band of Karankawa retreated to the Rio Grande Valley and secretly preserved the tribe’s culture. Gonzalez’s account marked a turning point. Since then, a growing network of people identifying as Karankawa Kadla — Kadla meaning “culturally mixed” to encompass other bloodlines, including non-Indigenous ones — has begun connecting online and with local historians.

“For many centuries we have been in hiding,” the tribe’s website declares. “We are hiding no longer.”

‘I think if you’re going to be doing these kinds of things, you have to be honest about who or what you are.’

Juan Mancias

The Karankawa have found common cause with the Carrizo/Comecrudo in a fight to save Donnel Point, a 2,300-year-old shell midden rediscovered along the La Quinta Ship Channel after having been assumed destroyed by dredging in the 1950s. When a local geologist stumbled across the intact site in 2025, organizers realized it was in immediate danger of development. The Karankawa and Carrizo/Comecrudo enlisted attorneys at Earthjustice to challenge the federal permitting process.

“By stopping this project, that would be protecting the land,” said Love Sanchez in an interview.

Earthjustice responded to a detailed list of questions about its vetting protocol with a statement reading, “At Earthjustice, we represent impacted communities across Texas to defend their health and significant places. We will continue to fight in the courts for our clients’ legal rights to protect their longstanding, generational legacy of stewardship.”

But Mancias has dismissed the Karankawa as fakes and latecomers riding the wave that followed Standing Rock. “If you follow the paperwork, they just got together, like, what, three or four years ago,” he said. “It became a fad after NODAPL. A lot of people got into the environmental stuff.” 

Mancias claims that he too is Karankawa, and that the word comes from the Carrizo/Comecrudo language. “I know that we’re Karankawa for a fact,” he said. “The documentation is there. I think it’s just poor research, and people are just trying to fight and justify their Indigeneity.” 

The Karankawa are not alone in facing Mancias’ skepticism. He has questioned the historical presence and true identity of the Lipan Apache in South Texas, an unrecognized tribe also heavily engaged in climate and environmental work at the domestic and international level. He claims that historical records provide no evidence the Lipan Apache ever lived in South Texas, and he attributes the name “Apache” to the Spanish word mapache: “A racoon,” said Mancias. “Everybody sees the racoon as a mischievous little thief and that’s what they would call a lot of the Native groups that had already started losing their identity.” 

Mancias has also dismissed the legitimacy of the Miakan-Garza Tribe, arguing that the unrecognized group based in San Antonio is not a distinct nation but a Carrizo/Comecrudo clan. He claims it was formed by “old men” who emerged from the Chicano movement, discovered they were Indigenous, and sought to identify with a tribe. “If you know anything about the Garzas, it’s not really a tribe,” he said.

“I’m not going to fight anybody that claims to be Native because we got bigger fights to fight,” Mancias added. “But I think if you’re going to be doing these kinds of things, you have to be honest about who or what you are.”

A landmark study in the journal Science found that Indigenous nations in the United States have lost 98.9 percent of their land, the result of centuries of violence, unratified or broken treaties, and racist federal policy. The Dawes Act of 1887 alone stripped tribes of roughly 90 million acres, of which only 8 percent has been reacquired. Today, 42 percent of tribal nations have no land base at all, and those that do hold, on average, less than 3 percent of their historic territory.

Regaining stolen land is a long process. Tribes can often wait decades to see even the smallest parcel placed into trust — the legal step that turns public or private property into sovereign territory. Records obtained from the Bureau of Indian Affairs show the Ely Shoshone Tribe’s 1995 application to put land into trust was approved in 2024. The Pala Reservation’s 2003 filing was completed in 2023; the same year saw a 2006 submission from the Wind River Reservation approved. 

The Carrizo/Comecrudo haven’t had to wait that long. Between 2022 and 2024, the tribe bought four properties in Cameron County, Texas, totaling 22.61 acres along the route of a proposed Enbridge pipeline. The deals were funded by grants from the Hive Fund for Climate & Gender Justice, Equation Campaign, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and NDN Collective. 

“We selected these grantees for the demonstrated effectiveness of their organizing against fossil fuel expansion and related harms in South Texas and elsewhere,” Katie Redford, executive director of the Equation Campaign, said in an emailed statement. “That record, not a claim to Indigenous identity, is why we funded them.

“We do not adjudicate who is or is not Indigenous, and we would not consider it legitimate to try,” Redford said. “We find the premise of these questions — that a funder should be auditing a person’s bloodline — offensive. A tribe’s determination of its own membership is a core attribute of its sovereignty, and federal acknowledgment under 25 C.F.R. Part 83 is a political and administrative process, not a genealogical one. There is no single accepted standard a funder could apply, and any standard we invented would be our own imposition — which is the reason philanthropy has no business in this.”

Melanie Allen, CEO of Hive Fund, said in an emailed response that the organization’s grantmaking is focused on the transition to clean energy in the South. “We fund the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas as part of a broader ecosystem of grantee partners in South Texas working to protect the health and safety of communities by opposing fossil fuel buildout,” Allen said. “Specifically, we have funded the Tribe to contest the construction of several liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals in the Rio Grande Valley. We evaluate prospective grantee partners for charitable status, legal compliance, financial management, organizational capacity, and alignment with our mission, not Indigenous status.”

NDN Collective did not respond to requests for comment.

A $1.2 million check from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was supposed to underwrite the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe’s plan to acquire 170 acres in Laredo for a community center and land trust. That deal fell through, according to Mancias, and most of that grant was rescinded, but a purported 3,400-acre donation in Sierra Blanca to restore the tribe’s traditional land base remains a work in progress. That land, he said, has been willed to the tribe, but the required paperwork is still being completed; around 700 acres of the donation is currently being leased, though Mancias would not say by whom. 

Mancias hopes these acquisitions will make the tribe more “self-determining.” To that end, he said he is founding “the first Native American university in Texas,” which conceivably would teach future generations of Carrizo/Comecrudo to be financially and academically independent. “We want to say, ‘You can’t tell us what to teach anymore, we don’t accept your ideas of invasion and colonization because we’re not a conquered people,’” he said.

Mancias said he’ll work with Rice University or the University of Houston to obtain accreditation, and claims to have been in contact with the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, a nonprofit composed of the presidents of the nation’s 37 tribal colleges. The University of Houston said it was unaware of the project and is not an accrediting agency. The consortium declined to comment, and Rice University did not respond.

Still, Mancias’ efforts have attracted support from global institutions. For decades, Garcia Pasture — a sprawling, pre-Columbian village site and burial ground near Brownsville — has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But as plans for a massive oil and gas export terminal advanced on the site, international advocates took notice. In 2022, the World Monuments Fund designated Garcia Pasture an irreplaceable cultural site and “traditional territory of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas threatened by natural resource extraction” that “requires formal legal recognition to ensure its future.” The organization accompanied its announcement with a sprawling online exhibit supporting the tribe’s history and pledged to support its quest for federal recognition, citing “overwhelming historical evidence” that proves its connection to South Texas.

According to Frankie Orona, the Society of Native Nations plans to leverage its UNESCO accreditation to one day see Garcia Pasture formally recognized. 

“We have had conversations about how we can help to support the tribe in doing that,” said Orona. “To acknowledge Garcia Pasture as a sacred site and try to help to recommend it to be seen and recognized as a UNESCO heritage site.”

In his written response, Orona said that statement was not a commitment to pursue a UNESCO nomination, only a reflection of “SNN’s general practice of looking for appropriate ways to support issues affecting Indigenous Peoples and culturally significant places.” He also said the society had not authenticated the historical or genealogical documents the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe cited.

The World Monuments Fund declined to comment on the findings of this investigation, and UNESCO did not respond. 

Taken together, the tribe’s acquisitions are, relatively speaking, significant. A few tribes have managed to see vast tracts placed in trust — nearly 60,000 acres for the Santa Ana Pueblo in New Mexico, for example, and almost 39,000 for the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. But BIA data show nearly 70 percent of applications filed between 1995 and 2014 were for less than 50 acres. Many sought tiny slivers of land. The Puyallup Tribe, in what’s currently Washington state, filed paperwork for just 0.57 acres, and applications filed by the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community in Minnesota included parcels as small as 0.684 acres.

“Rampant land dispossession has not been addressed with actual tribes,” said Whyte. “That’s well documented. It’s clear. I think the remedies are clear. Yet somebody that spins this narrative is then receiving resources and having a public profile, but there’s nothing behind it.”

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Mancias’ side-stepping of the process that recognized tribes must endure limits how that land is protected. A community land trust, like the one the Mellon Foundation initially supported, can offer limited protection from fossil fuel and other development. Land placed into trust, however, is placed under the jurisdiction of a federally recognized tribe. It is no longer subject to state and local taxes, zoning laws, or eminent domain, and officially becomes “Indian Country,” allowing a tribe to exercise its inherent sovereign powers, manage land and resources as it sees fit, and deploy traditional ecological practices.

That has profound implications for biodiversity and the climate. A review of more than 600 studies shows conservation is vastly more successful when Indigenous Peoples and local communities have primary control or equal partnership over their lands. Positive outcomes have been achieved in 85 percent of the cases where that happens, compared to just 18 percent when Native peoples are treated merely as stakeholders or a community to be consulted. 

“The Indigenous climate justice movement is all about the fact that you have, across the world, thousands of groups that for generations have been self-governing,” said Whyte. “These self-governing entities, in the territories where they are self-governing or where legally they should be able to self-govern, have a tremendous impact on climate change.”

Juan Mancias addresses attendees at a climate protest in New York City on September 19, 2023. Gina M. Randazzo / ZUMA Press Wire / Shutterstock

In a warming world, Indigenous identities — warped by centuries of abuse and misuse — have become potent vehicles for capturing public attention and sympathy. This too often includes recycling of old tropes, including the ecologically minded Indian made popular by Espera Oscar de Corti. Among the most well-known pretendians, de Corti is famous for his appearance as “The Crying Indian” in a Keep America Beautiful ad that aired on Earth Day 1971. De Corti, dressed as a Plains-style Indian in buckskin and braids, paddles a canoe past ship channels filled with trash before pulling up to a debris-strewn beach. “Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country, and some people don’t,” the narrator intones as trash thrown from a passing car lands at de Corti’s feet. The camera pans up to his face, where a single tear rolls down his cheek. 

But that trope endures beyond nostalgia. Today, it appropriates and repackages genuine Indigenous scholarship, worldviews, and political struggles into simplified archetypes that can be easily consumed, circulated, and capitalized upon, from the crying Indian to the righteous water protector.

“The appropriation and use of that imagery can be attractive to NGOs entering into this space,” said Monte Mills, director of the Native American Law Center at the University of Washington. “Some of that is so deeply ingrained in the national consciousness. It’s hard to uproot.”

Members of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas gather outside the White House following President Joe Biden’s October 2021 proclamation of Indigenous Peoples Day. Andrew Harnik / AP Photo

Indigenous Peoples have long been imagined or appropriated to serve settler needs and anxieties. Phil Deloria, a Yankton-descended Harvard historian and author of Playing Indian, argues that Americans have always needed constructed images of “Indians” to define their own history and identity. From sports mascots to the Boy Scouts’ appropriation of Indigenous culture, Native iconography has been woven into narratives of national belonging. 

“In the ’70s, you’ve got this ecological Indian thing happening,” Deloria said. In the 1980s, the self-healing, New Age Indian was in vogue. And then, “In the ’90s and aughts, you’ve got the postmodern Indian, who’s sort of ironic and hip and kind of cool,” Deloria added. “So one way to think about this is that climate change is just another one of these modernist crises where people imagine certain kinds of Indian-ness.”

For Mancias, that kind of Indian-ness has meant replacing buckskin with ribbon shirts and ball caps, trash by pipelines, tears by righteous anger.

“I’m no f*cking activist,” said Mancias. “I’m protecting our land and protecting our principles and our teachings and who we are. Cuz I was told, ‘Go get our lands back.’”

In February of this year, the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe graduated from press releases, niche blogs, and climate reporting to Hollywood with the release of Gaslit. The documentary, hosted by Jane Fonda and produced by Greenpeace, chronicles her travels through Texas’ oil fields, documenting “fossil fuel profiteering, environmental racism, and the lives of everyday people.” During her journey, Fonda visits the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe, and between sweeping images of the Gulf Coast and fossil fuel infrastructure, footage of Juan Mancias and Frankie Orona carrying an American Indian Movement flag flashes across the screen. 

For viewers, there are no missing records, genealogical gaps, questionable family histories, or factual anachronisms. Instead, they see exactly what Mancias has manifested: a moral, Indigenous front line in the battle to stop climate change, with a story the world is eager to believe. 

In the film, that story is delivered by Christopher Basaldú, the co-founder of South Texas Environmental Justice Network and alleged relative of Mancias. “We have the port selling us out, not listening to the tribe when we tell them these are sacred lands and we actually do have villages and archeological sites in the area that are being destroyed,” he says. “On top of that, in comes the billionaire conman of the world, Elon Musk. He’s polluting and destroying the area where we remember our creation.”

“When Gaslit was produced and published, our editorial review surfaced no dispute over the region’s Indigenous communities and gave us no reason to doubt Mr. Mancias’ statements,” said a spokesperson for the film. “Greenpeace USA respects Indigenous sovereignty and the right to self-determination as outlined in our Indigenous Peoples Policy, and also recognizes that Indigenous identity is a complex issue due to the far-reaching effects of colonialism. Therefore, we believe decisions on claims of Indigenous identity belong to tribal nations and communities, and follow that leadership.”

The fight against Musk and his company SpaceX has become Mancias’ primary focus these days. With the Texas Supreme Court dismissing the tribe’s claims earlier this year, the tribe has opened a new front: Working with the Center for Biological Diversity, South Texas Environmental Justice Network, and SaveRGV to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The groups hope to block a land swap that would give SpaceX more than 700 acres of a national wildlife refuge.

“Our Mothman prophecies come straight out of Texas and they talk about the coming of fracking,” Mancias said of prehistoric and historic petroglyphs found in the state. “It shows horizontal fracking and it shows the actual land movers, and then there’s the other ones that show SpaceX and Blue Origin and they show the rockets there.”

Of this, as with everything, belief is the only evidence he can offer.

Correction: This story originally misstated Joseph Sciortino’s title.

CREDITS

This story was reported and written by Tristan Ahtone and edited by Chuck Squatriglia and Katherine Bagley. Story art by Marty Two Bulls Jr., with art direction by Teresa Chin. Fact-checking was conducted by Elisângela Mendonça of Mongabay through the Indigenous News Alliance, as well as Angely Mercado. The story was copyedited by Jaime Buerger and Laura Mallonnee assisted in searching Texas state archives. ​

 

DISCLOSURES

• Tristan Ahtone contributed to the IJA Indigenous Identity Reporting Guide, the UNESCO Indigenous Peoples and the Media report, and the Vermont Public Radio Series “Recognized” cited in this story. He has delivered lectures through the Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar.

• Grist included Nick Tilsen, CEO of NDN Collective in its 2019 Grist 50 list of climate innovators. Bekah Hinojosa appeared on the 2022 Grist 50 and in our Looking Forward newsletter.
• Grist receives funding from Hive Fund, the Rockefeller Family Fund, 11th Hour Project, and the Schmidt Family Foundation. Funders play no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The climate movement gave this Texas tribe millions and a global platform. No one checked its story. on Aug 13, 2026.

In 2017, Juan Mancias, the chairman of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, traveled to France to help pressure two of the country’s largest banks into divesting from oil and gas projects in South Texas. He cast the fight as a new chapter in a centuries-long struggle to protect the tribe’s sacred lands. The campaign succeeded, and helped make Mancias an international climate figure. Over the next several years, he would use that status to bring more than $5 million in philanthropic funding to the unrecognized tribe.  

An investigation by Grist found that the historical and genealogical evidence underpinning Mancias’ claim that he is the hereditary chief of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe cannot be verified. The foundational document he cites cannot be located or authenticated, and Mancias failed to provide it after multiple requests. Genealogical records trace his documented Indigenous ancestry to Mexico in the late 1700s on his maternal line, not the paternal line his claim rests on. 

Read Next The climate movement gave this Texas tribe millions and a global platform. No one checked its story. Tristan Ahtone

Mancias’ case reveals an unofficial “shadow” recognition system, one in which environmental nonprofits, journalists, and international human rights bodies support unrecognized, and unverified, individuals and groups in the fight against climate change. Although the short-term gains are real — Mancias and his allies have stymied LNG expansion in South Texas — experts said they often come at the expense of legitimate Indigenous Peoples, tribes, and organizations.

Here are five takeaways from our investigation: 

Marty Two Bulls Jr. / Grist The Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas has raised more than $5 million for climate- and environmental-related efforts since 2019 despite holding neither federal nor state recognition.

After incorporating as a nonprofit in 1999, the tribe operated on a shoestring for two decades and reported less than $50,000 in annual revenue for several years beginning in 2012. That changed soon after the protests at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, when Mancias’ campaign in France made him an international climate figure. Philanthropists gave him money, environmental nonprofits provided legal assistance, and journalists chronicled his work.

Mancias’ primary evidence supporting his claims of Indigeneity — an 1871 railroad report describing an 1801 massacre — cannot be located or authenticated, and historians doubt its plausibility.

Mancias has cited the document for two decades, including in federal court, as proof of his lineage and the tribe’s connection to South Texas, but he would not produce a physical copy. Extensive searches of repositories within the Texas State Library and Archives Commission found no evidence it exists, and Grist identified multiple anachronisms in its timeline and provenance with historians describing its existence as “improbable.”

Between 2022 and 2024, the tribe used philanthropic grants to buy four properties totaling nearly 23 acres along a proposed pipeline route in Cameron County, Texas.

The purchases allowed the tribe to purchase land it describes as ancestral territory — a claim that cannot be verified — and sidestep the arduous federal process recognized tribal nations must navigate to reacquire land. That contrast is stark. Federal policies like the Dawes Act and the Morrill Act seized and redistributed millions of acres of expropriated tribal land to settlers and state institutions — dispossessions that have been exhaustively documented and largely unremedied. But records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show that recognized nations seeking to recover even a fraction of an acre can wait decades to acquire land, while the Carrizo/Comecrudo, with philanthropic backing, bought land in a matter of months. Unlike land reacquired by recognized tribes, parcels in Cameron County remain subject to property taxes and carry only limited protection from development.

The Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas and its closest ally, the Society of Native Nations, a Texas-focused intertribal organization, hold accredited observer status at the United Nations.

Twenty-four Indigenous-focused organizations are accredited observers to the U.N. Environment Assembly, or UNEA, the world’s highest decision-making body on environmental matters. Four are based in the United States, including the Carrizo/Comecrudo and the Society of Native Nations. 

SNN also holds accreditation at UNESCO, where it is one of three U.S. nongovernmental organizations focused on Indigenous issues. It secured that status by highlighting its partnership with the Carrizo/Comecrudo. Because the U.N. bars Indigenous Peoples and governments from participating as sovereign entities in its highest bodies, NGO accreditation is a convenient workaround that carries real privileges. These organizations can submit language to draft resolutions, access documents unavailable to the public, and engage directly with government delegations, including U.S. authorities that Orona told Grist have at times included officials from the Justice Department and Health and Human Services. Such access typically is reserved for the elected officials of federally recognized tribal nations.

At the U.N., the person who would consider challenges to the legitimacy of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe or the Society of Native Nations leads the society itself.

Frankie Orona co-chairs the Indigenous Peoples Major Group at the U.N. Environment Programme, or UNEP, whose internal guidance calls for referring complaints about participants to its co-chairs. Orona is executive director of the Society of Native Nations, which he built out of an American Indian Movement chapter that Mancias recruited him into. UNEP told Grist it does not have a procedure for addressing such a conflict of interest, though it said concerns could go to the other co-chair or directly to its Civil Society Unit.

This post has been updated to clarify SNN’s Texas-focused mission.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 5 takeaways from our investigation into the ‘ghost’ tribe that got millions in climate funding on Aug 13, 2026.

Researchers have found that the amount of green space and shade in a neighborhood can significantly shape temperatures. On average, neighborhoods with more trees and green space — instead of impermeable surfaces like pavement — can run anywhere from 1 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit cooler. The phenomenon, which has been well studied in major urban cities, is called the “heat island effect.” But researchers have done far less work examining how those trends play out in more rural parts of the country.

Missoula, Montana, is helping fill that gap. In 2024, Climate Smart Missoula, a local nonprofit, teamed up with the city and county of Missoula and secured federal funding for a heat mapping initiative. Last summer, teams of volunteers drove countywide transects with sensors recording second-by-second measurements of temperature and humidity. Then analysts with the climate adaptation consulting firm CAPA Strategies turned the data into a now-publicly available heat map for the county. It’s the first of its kind for the state and this region of the Rockies. (Cities in Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota also do not have heat maps.)

A humidity and heat sensor attached to a car window collect data to create Missoula County’s heat map.
Ellis Juhlin

The research is especially important because Missoula has historically had warm, dry summers. Temperatures in the western Montana county climb into the 80s, with occasional stretches in the 90s, before cooling off sharply after sunset. But that pattern has shifted in recent years, with hotter summers and warmer nights. The area is already experiencing more days with temperatures above 90 degrees F each year. The county’s average annual temperature is projected to increase by 4 to 5 degrees F by 2050. 

The change poses particular challenges for places like Missoula, where homes, buildings, and other public infrastructure were built for cooler climates. Montana has one of the lowest rates of residential air conditioning in the country. When the heat builds, Montanans don’t have the same infrastructure as Arizonans or Texans to keep cool. 

The researchers found that temperatures can vary by nearly 20 degrees across Missoula County depending on the prevalence of shade from trees and other green spaces. Susan Teitelman, with Climate Smart Missoula, said their findings mirror heat maps in other larger cities across the country. 

“What we’re seeing in Missoula mimics larger cities like New York and Boston,” she said. “You see the same thing happening everywhere: Poorer, hotter neighborhoods have fewer trees; wealthier, greener neighborhoods have lower temperatures.”

Alli Kane, the county’s climate action program coordinator, said some of the results weren’t surprising. Neighborhoods like the University District or the Rattlesnake, where large, mature trees provide shade, were significantly cooler than the Northside or Westside.

“Places where we anticipated we would have heat islands were downtown Missoula, around Southgate Mall, those areas that are more urban and more built up,” Kane said.

But there were surprises, too, including how dry, brown open lands, like an empty lot in town, acted as heat islands, according to Kane. These unmanaged and undeveloped spaces tend to be a magnet for invasive species that quickly adapt to hot and dry conditions. When they’re left unwatered and not replaced with native species, they can act as heat islands, Kane said. The research showed heavily forested places like Seeley Lake and Evaro, a rural area north of the city center with dense trees, also held on to heat overnight.

“You’ll see, especially in the morning map, they are retaining heat from the day before because of that really dense canopy, and so that effect is resulting in some of our highest-recorded morning temperatures,” Kane said.

Agencies like the National Weather Service have consistently identified heat as the most deadly weather Americans experience. Research from the University of Montana published in 2024 found that for every 1 degree Celsius temperature increase, 911 calls increased correspondingly by 1 percent. Many of those calls came from rural areas with older, retired populations that are more susceptible to extreme heat. 

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The city and county of Missoula and Climate Smart launched a campaign called Stay Cool Missoula to build community resilience for extreme heat and attempt to prevent those deaths. Teitelman with Climate Smart Missoula pointed out that it’s critical to prepare communities for what is coming. 

“Extreme heat is dangerous,” she says. “It is impacting Missoula and Montana. It’s impacting northern climates, and it’s an issue of equity.” 

Teitelman leads Climate Smart’s efforts to plant trees in lower-income neighborhoods where tree cover is sparse or nonexistent. Having access to the heat map has helped her target those planting efforts. The map has been put to use in other ways too, like conversations around the proposed data center in Bonner on the banks of the Blackfoot River. That project was ultimately canceled by the property manager. But Kane said being able to showcase just how much warmer that area is, due to the amount of land cleared for industrial use, will help inform the county on future regulations and decision-making. 

Missoula was one of 11 communities — including New Orleans, Memphis, Buffalo, and Moab, among others — that NOAA funded as part of a nationwide effort to map heat islands in 2025. But the work almost didn’t happen. 

Like many federally funded projects related to climate change, it was targeted by the Trump administration. Kane, Teitelman, and their other partners had been awarded the grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Center for Collaborative Heat Monitoring Program in 2024. The money was allocated in the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 climate law passed by Congress. The Trump administration then terminated the funding in May 2025. 

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About half of the money was spent or allocated to partners before the grant’s cancellation, but Teitelman said it was a team effort to carry out the work after funds were rescinded. Climate Smart, along with the city and county of Missoula, had the staff to continue the work, but they also relied on free assistance from CAPA Strategies and other national collaborators. 

“They’ve done all this pro bono work for our community and other communities. That’s just been a boon for us and communities across the U.S. who got to do this heat mapping in light of federal funding being revoked,” Teitelman said.

Kane said the lack of funding doesn’t change the reality of a warming world. 

“There has been so much disruption overturned because of what’s happening at the federal level,” she said. “But I do think that our local governments and our local organizations are pretty uniquely positioned to continue to work on this, and so we’re putting everything we can behind it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As Montana warms, Missoula’s first heat map reveals hidden hotspots on Aug 13, 2026.