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[Climate Decoded theme music starts, sparse and slightly reverberant, anticipatory]

APLICIO SANCHEZ ORTIZ (in Spanish with English voiceover)

We live in the Amazon biome, the lungs of the world, here in the Colombian Amazon. We have conserved, we have lived for millenia according to what our ancestors left us in the land. We have conserved our environment, we have conserved our cultural heritage, under the responsibility and the mandate of our ancestors.

CHANTAL COUGH-SCHULZE

That's Aplicio Sanchez Ortiz. We talked with him over WhatsApp earlier this year. He leads the Association of Traditional Indigenous Captains of Vaupés in Colombia, in the Amazon rainforest.

APLICIO (in Spanish with English voiceover)

I've been working for our collective wellbeing and the rights of our land, according to our system, our vision for our lives, our purpose and custom as Indigenous people. We have taken good care of our sacred places. We have fortified, we have our guards, so no one can enter and damage our sacred places, our gold, so people can't illegally mine. The big multinational companies, the big rich folks, that’s who’s hurting us. We’re taking care of them, and they’re not helping. It makes it hard for us.

CHANTAL

The people who work on the frontlines of climate change go by many titles. But collectively, they’re often referred to as environmental defenders. We talked about this title with Jose Artiga. He’s an environmental and immigrant rights advocate in the U.S. and Central America. Since 1995, he has been the executive director of The Share Foundation, an organisation that works on social justice and sustainable development in El Salvador and Honduras.

JOSE ARTIGA

So when you, when you mentioned the word defenders, Reynaldo’s face comes to mind.

CHANTAL

He’s talking about Reynaldo Domínguez, a 58-year-old environmental defender from Honduras. Reynaldo has dedicated his life to protecting the rivers in Honduras near his community. The rivers are the water supply for Reynaldo’s community and since 2018 they have been contaminated by iron oxide mining. His brothers, Aly and Oquelí Domínguez were also defenders of the rivers. They were murdered in 2023 in connection with their work.

JOSE

Reynaldo is one of the leaders willing to put their life on the line to prevent the mining company from poisoning the river. And he has a very simple way of explaining it. When he says, I want you and you and you to drink clean water, I will also would like the baby's bottle to be prepared with clean water. And I would like the owner of the company, or the owner of the mining company, to drink clean water. So everybody should be able to drink clean water. So that's what comes to me, people willing to give their lives to save the river.

[Theme music opens up a bit and plays on]

CHANTAL

You’re listening to Climate Decoded, the podcast where we decipher climate change communication. We untangle how different narratives illuminate or obscure pathways to climate justice. I'm Chantal Cough-Schulze –

GREG DAVIES-JONES

And I’m Greg Davies-Jones. Today, we’re talking about environmental defenders – the people who are putting everything on the line to protect their communities and the lands they guard. Those lands are vital to their survival. And in a time of a climate crisis and biodiversity loss, the lands are vital for everybody. In a sense, environmental defenders are the caretakers of our future. 

CHANTAL

They’re working on lots of different issues, and that all comes with threats – of death, and of arrest; from governments and corporations, and more. And the way the world talks and thinks about environmental defenders affects their work and safety.

[Theme music plays on again for five seconds]

CHAPTER 1

GREG

Environmental defenders are all over the world. They’re working on many fronts. Defenders like Reynaldo Domínguez are protecting rivers from mining contamination. Elsewhere, defenders are fighting oil and gas extraction in Siberia and organising against overfishing in Turkey.

CHANTAL

This raises the question of, like, who is actually responsible here? Who causes these devastating environmental problems? We put that question to a Cambodian environmental defender, Mivann. You’re probably not going to be surprised by her answer.

MIVANN

Well, it's so complicated, and it is a very critical question, you know.

CHANTAL

There are so many different players tangled together in every situation. You’ve got governments approving permits and grabbing land, corporations bulldozing forests and drilling for oil. And then there’s everyone else down the supply chain who casts a blind eye at where resources come from.

GREG

Yeah, and I guess that’s all the way down to the consumer, like you and me.

CHANTAL

Exactly. 

GREG

Okay. So Mivann, the environmental defender we just heard from – where does she fit into the spectrum of environmental defenders’ work?

CHANTAL

Mivann is an environmental scientist. She’s using a pseudonym because of the risks involved in her work. She works in a Cambodian wildlife sanctuary that’s supposed to be a protected forest. But the forest is rife with illegal logging. According to Global Forest Watch, the forest where she works has lost over 350 square kilometres of tree cover since 2000, and that’s likely an underestimate. Some of the trees are endangered and vulnerable species. The illegal logging has been connected to companies that sell plywood, along with neighbouring sugar and rubber plantations. According to Global Initiative, as much as 90% of Cambodian timber is harvested illegally.

GREG

So I assume the illegal logging is what Mivann is working against.

CHANTAL

Yup. And because she’s an environmental scientist, that often means collecting and analysing illegal logging data. She and the organisation she’s part of do that work alongside local community members, most of whom are Indigenous. To collect the data, they go out on forest patrols, travelling on tractors built for the forest’s uneven terrain.

MIVANN

Sometimes we fly a drone to see which block is cutting the tree, and we listening to the chainsaw noise – you know, when we go to the forest, we can hear the chainsaws that they are cutting.

CHANTAL

They’re out collecting data for several days at a time. Mivann said that during her nights in the forest, she rarely hears animals. Instead, she hears chainsaws.

MIVANN

I work around 6 or 7 years, I think. And I rarely hear the sounds of the wild animals. But I only hear the chainsaw sounds, like louder in the forest.

CHANTAL

When the morning comes, the community members pinpoint where the previous night’s logging sounds came from.

MIVANN

When we hear the sounds of the machines, the community members can identify the block by the sounds – they know the sound well, so they can estimate where the cutting is. So in the morning, we take the tractor to that place to see.

CHANTAL

Mivann’s role on the patrols is to document everything. She takes photos and records GPS coordinates, tracking where new logging routes develop, what sites are like, and where the most cutting is happening. When the patrol returns to the village, they share patrol information with community members on a community Facebook page. Mivann then uses the accumulated data to create maps of the illegal logging. The maps go into reports given to Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment. The goal is to push the governments to establish stronger policies.

GREG

Yeah, in many ways, the work Mivann is doing sounds like the standard building blocks of good science: collecting data, analysing data, sharing analysis. 

CHANTAL

It is! But in her case – and in the case of many environmental defenders – doing that work comes with danger. So Mivann tries to keep her work behind the scenes, because as an only child, she said she can’t afford the risks.

MIVANN

Another reason is also because my family, I am the only child so I cannot imagine if I face any trouble. My mom, like, yes – it's the reason. I only help my team with what I can.

GREG

So what elevates that work to something riskier?

CHANTAL

There are three main factors. First, there’s the kind of data that’s being collected –

GREG

Right – it’s data on an illegal activity.

CHANTAL

Second, there’s the people who don’t want that data collected. And third, there are the immediate risks from collecting that data –

GREG

which are harassment, arrest, and worse. 

CHANTAL

Mivann knows people who have received threatening phone calls and online harassment after talking with the media. That risk of arrest is always looming. Ministry of Environment rangers can catch and arrest community patrollers in the forest. The rangers could technically also arrest the illegal loggers, but community members say the rangers instead get money from the loggers. And beyond the danger of arrest, there’s also just the danger of the illegal loggers themselves. She worries about running into them, especially at night.

MIVANN

Like even we sleep, we don't know if they do anything to us. Because they have a gun. I don't feel safe, but we go with a lot of community, around 7-10 people, so sometimes I feel safe. But sometimes also not feeling safe when we face like – we meet the illegal logger face to face, like at night, I don't feel safe.

GREG

These kinds of threats – of harassment, arrest, and violence – are very real for environmental defenders across the world. According to a report by Global Witness, the most prominent kind of attack against human rights defenders, which includes environmental defenders, is criminalization. Those are things like arrest, detention, and legal action. 

CHANTAL

And threats of violence don’t stay as just threats.

GREG

Global Witness has been tracking the murders of environmental and human rights defenders since 2012. The annual reports they produce were actually first motivated by the 2012 murder of Cambodian environmental defender Chut Wutty. Between 2012 and the end of 2022, at least 1,910 defenders were murdered. 

CHANTAL

One of those was beloved Honduran defender, Berta Cáceres. She led the campaign against the construction of a hydroelectric dam on a river sacred to the Indigenous Lenca people. She actually won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for that work back in 2015. But less than a year later, she was shot dead in her home by hired hitmen. Roberto David Castillo, former president of the dam company, was found guilty of orchestrating her murder. And in 2022, indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and Guardian journalist Dom Phillips were murdered in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. They were returning from a trip to investigate illegal fishing in the remote Javari Valley. Both men worked to protect the resources of the Amazon and the survival of its Indigenous populations.

GREG

In 2021 and 2022, environmental defenders were killed at an average rate of every other day. Latin America accounted for 88% of environmental defender killings in 2022. That’s the most recent Global Witness data as of when we’re recording this episode. Colombia tops the list of defender deaths per country, with 60 murders in 2022 – almost double the number in 2021. Brazil, Mexico, Honduras, and the Philippines are the next ones down the list. Global Witness said that in general, there’s a clear link to a country’s degree of civic freedom – attacks are much more frequent in restricted societies. Of the defenders murdered in 2022, more than a third were Indigenous peoples, and nearly a quarter were small-scale farmers. Others were state officials, demonstrators, park rangers, lawyers, and journalists. 

CHANTAL

Identifying the exact drivers behind killings is difficult, but Global Witness was able to clearly link some killings with the agribusiness, mining, and logging industries.

[Very light reverberatory music begins]

CHANTAL

Regardless of what environmental defenders work on, their work is often painted as a threat to governments or development.

MIVANN

Like even we advocate for justice, even we advocate for accountability, transparency, they don't value the activists' work.

[Very light reverberatory music plays out for a few seconds]

CHAPTER 2

CHANTAL

So like we said at the top, environmental defenders work on the frontline of climate change. And that also means they work on the frontlines of communication.

GREG

There are four major ways that communication shows up in environmental defenders’ work. The first way is the clearest one: a huge part of their work just is communication.

CHANTAL

Right – like challenging the governments and corporations responsible for environmental problems, mapping out and sharing the scope of a problem with each other, or even just advocating about the problems. So the community Facebook page Mivann mentioned is an example of that, as is her team’s report to the Cambodian government. Okay. So that’s the first. Walk me through the other three ways communications shows up.

GREG

Okay, the three other ways communications shows up are a little more complicated. There’s the fact that there can be pretty major roadblocks to environmental defenders getting their messages out. And then there’s the actual language used to describe environmental defenders. The way people talk about defenders changes how they are perceived. And then the last way is the heaviest. For environmental defenders, communication can literally be a matter of life and death, or at least freedom and arrest. If you can get killed for communicating, that’s the gravest communications problem you can have.

We met with a couple people to talk more about these things. The first is Aplicio, who we heard from at the top. He leads an Indigenous organisation in Vaupés, Colombia. The population density of Vaupés is about 2 people per square mile. The only ways to get in and out of Vaupés are by air or by river, and those are both expensive and logistically complicated. This makes it hard to get information in and out.

APLICIO (in Spanish with English voiceover)

The communications piece is tough for us, being in the Amazon region. We don't have communications, we don't have roadways. These are remote places, it’s a jungle, where the government’s reach isn’t strong enough to control how we communicate.

GREG

That has real consequences for their ability to share their knowledge and contribute to decision-making. Take the upcoming UN biodiversity conference, for example. It’s going to be starting at the end of October in Cali, Colombia. But when asked whether his organisation could attend the conference, this is what he said.

APLICIO (in Spanish with English voiceover)

I don't think so, we would have to pay for tickets, travel, hotels, and right now I don't have the resources to make it happen. There will be many Indigenous peoples from Colombia, from across the Amazon Basin. We’ll have to catch up to the news and learn about it afterwards.

CHANTAL

Gah, learning about the communications afterwards. When you should be on stage giving the main talk!

GREG

Yeah. I talked to someone else about this too, earlier this summer.

MARY MENTON

I am Mary Menton, and I am connecting from Scotland. Essentially most of my work is around environmental justice, climate justice, and violence against human rights and environmental defenders.

GREG

Mary said Aplicio’s experience of not being able to access decision-making spaces is not uncommon.

MARY

And sometimes that's about actually just knowing that an event is happening, knowing that you can participate. And sometimes it is that people live a few days' boat ride away, or they're trying to climb to the nearest hill where they can climb on top of a tower where they might get internet reception. You know, it's really difficult to get connections, to get internet access, to get phone lines, and that's not – and that's where you actually have freedom to do that! In some countries, those things are repressed, and the state apparatus of surveillance and repression is very much active and is squashing any attempts at activism. So we really are looking at very different realities in terms of how possible, or impossible, it is to even begin to communicate about the issues that you're trying to fight for or against.

GREG

Technological improvements, especially with mobile phones, have improved people’s ability to share and access information.

MARY

Because even though they can't necessarily get internet signals and make the phone call right away, they can be filming things on their phones, they can be taking the photographs, they can be collecting evidence that they then later bring to communicate to the wider world. 

GREG

Getting to communicate more with the wider world means environmental defenders can get more visibility, more media coverage. We talked to another professor about this too.

CHANTAL

Diogo Lopes de Oliveira teaches social communication at the University of Campina Grande. I actually learned about his work through a paper he wrote, which explores the role of science journalism, science communications, and NGOs in socio-environmental conflicts. He and Mary both said getting that increased visibility can be really useful – both for having an impact and for safety.

DIOGO LOPES DE OLIVEIRA

When media goes to a social, environmental conflict area, the violence reduces. This is one of the things that we found in our paper during our research. For a certain time, while the media is covering the social environmental conflict, the violence reduces considerably. 

MARY

Sometimes, the visibility can act as a certain protective – like a layer of protection, because the perpetrators – if the defender is visible enough, the perpetrators will know that, and they will know that people are watching. And I do think that that can sometimes put a pause, or make them stop before they would carry out killings, for example

GREG

But, it’s not that simple. Visibility is a tradeoff.

MARY

On the flipside of that, I think it’s important to mention that visibility is not always – it is not always protective. And sometimes you end up with certain individuals who become figureheads, who are the leaders of a movement, who end up being assassinated because they are very clearly the leader, the public figure, and so they can become easily targeted. And so communications in the sense of appearing on the news, getting global recognition, etcetera, can be – can be good, and it can be really helpful, but it's not always a clear-cut protection.

GREG

Yeah. I mean, horrifyingly, the increased visibility played a part in the killings of the people we talked about earlier – Berta Cáceres, Bruno Pereira, and Dom Phillips. They were visibly making a difference, and they were murdered for it.

CHANTAL

And those killings didn’t just come out of thin air. They’re part of a pattern related to how people talk about environmental defenders. Perpetrators of violence use environmental defenders’ work and identities to excuse that violence. They weaponize communications against environmental defenders.

DIOGO

One of the frames that we found in our paper, is that perpetrators use the argument of they don't want progress. If you are not on their side, you are not on the side of progress, of civilization – so that's one of the, one of the arguments they use.

MARY

And if you look at, increasingly, the use of smear campaigns and hate speech and often even dehumanising language to describe environmental defenders, and particularly indigenous communities and defenders. It’s a very frequent phenomenon of very racist, sometimes misogynistic, you know, depending on who is being attacked, which activist is being attacked, and what their particular identity is. Their identities are often used against them.

CHANTAL

In the end, the violence itself is communication too, of a sort – a one-way form, which can be deadly.

DIOGO

Intimidation is the most used tool.The way perpetrators talk, it's using violence. In environmental conflicts, they use violence. It's the language they use, the language of violence, unfortunately.

[Same very light reverberatory music starts again and plays out, allowing for reflection]

CHAPTER 3

CHANTAL

The work environmental defenders are doing is so important – but there are so many roadblocks, from being in remote areas to the threat of violence. What’s being done to protect and support environmental defenders?

GREG

So there’s a range of things being done. On the immediate level – imagine you’ve just done a national TV interview about the issue you’re working on. And then the death threats start rolling in. 

MARY

So there has to be an emergency plan in place and a strategy to deal with those risks that come as that flipside of the increased visibility, that you now suddenly, you know, you're poking the hornet's nest aren't you, you're really making, if you make enough noise you can make the bigger people a angry and it can be quite dangerous.

GREG

Mary Menton works with the organisation Not1More. They’re an environmental campaign group that supports defenders and investigates environmental conflicts. One of the things they do is bring defenders from around the world together to share their experiences and receive security and legal training. So that’s things like how to check if your phone is bugged, how to go into hiding, and what to do if you’re arrested.

MARY

So it really is about understanding where the risk is coming from, who the perpetrators might be, are they the state, are they the police, are they private companies, are they landowners – you know, what types of, where are the attacks and threats coming from?

CHANTAL

So those are ways to deal with immediate threats. But – okay, this might be stating the obvious. It shouldn’t just be up to environmental defenders to protect themselves from murderous governments or corporations. What’s being done on the larger scale to stop these threats from happening?

GREG

One of the big problems is that governments and corporations are often operating with impunity – in terms of both attacks on environmental defenders and the environmental crimes to begin with, like land grabs and polluting rivers. The balance of power is really stacked against defenders.

CHANTAL

On rare occasions,people are brought to court for killing defenders. But even then, that’s usually the people who held the gun – not the ones pulling the strings behind it all. The legal architecture for holding perpetrators accountable has been sorely lacking.

GREG

And that’s changing – some. We talked about this over WhatsApp with Daniel Gutiérrez Patiño, who runs an NGO in Colombia called Saving the Amazon. Full disclosure here, Daniel and I studied environmental policy at the University of Oxford together. Daniel said that for holding perpetrators accountable, some kinds of changes have more potential than others.

DANIEL GUTIÉRREZ PATIÑO (in Spanish with English voiceover)

One of the best things is regulations, so there is not as much need for a defender to have to stop their work, despite these death threats just for trying to defend their territory. The politicians and national governments should find a way to push forward opportunities that truly reinforce the social fabric in these territories.

GREG

Two of the biggest examples of this are the Aarhus Convention and the Escazú Agreement. The Aarhus Convention was adopted over 20 years ago. It allows people to submit complaints when there’s been a violation of their right to access and participate in environmental decision-making. And plenty of complaints have come in over the years. But the Compliance Committee that handles complaints has had serious funding issues. That means there’s a backlog in investigating complaints. The Escazú Agreement, meanwhile, is a regional initiative. It’s an environmental treaty between 16 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. It’s actually the only international environmental agreement with direct participation from elected representatives of the public. But most of the Amazonian countries haven’t ratified the treaty yet – so there’s still a long way to go. 

CHANTAL

Part of the reason this is such a vast thing to tackle is because it’s not just governments at play here – it’s also companies, and each company’s entire supply chain.

GREG

Yeah, I mean, companies can often be even more dangerous than states. Profits are prioritised over human rights and the environment. Daniel talked about this in the Amazon.

DANIEL (in Spanish with English voiceover)

There are many interest groups that try to govern these rural territories in the Amazon, and they are often external, not from the community there. This includes legal and illegal economies. Everything revolves around money.

CHANTAL

That means companies can be complicit in oppression of environmental defenders even if they’re nowhere near them. Like, say an international company profits from natural resource extraction in a particular country. And those resources were extracted in a way that infringed on people’s rights and led to violence. The company is complicit in the violence, even if they’re selling resource-derived products continents away. The violence is baked into the supply chain.

GREG

So companies have an ethical responsibility to understand their supply chains.

CHANTAL

And if they don’t shoulder that responsibility, there’s a new law in the EU that should help! It’s called the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, and it just entered into force in July. It requires that large companies operating in the EU conduct due diligence. That basically means companies have to investigate whether their operations negatively impact land rights, human rights, and the environment. And they have to address any negative impacts they find. On the flip side, if companies directly harm communities, the law also allows those communities to take the companies to court in the EU.

GREG

Seeing legislation like this gives me some hope! All of these things move us in the right direction – even if it’s slow.

[Delicate, melodic music starts]

CHAPTER 4

CHANTAL

We’ve covered so much. The importance of environmental defenders’ work, the horror of the violence they face, the variety of ways to protect them, and how those protection mechanisms are still just… so not enough. You know, that’s something I was hit by over and over again while reporting for this episode – it’s not enough, there’s never enough being done.

GREG

Yeah, I mean, we really need to protect those protecting our Earth. Daniel also emphasised this.

DANIEL (in Spanish with English voiceover)

It is of utmost importance to defend those seeking to care for nature. It's not fair in any way that they continue living in danger. In that sense, all of us should protect those caring for our planet, so they're cared for as well. 

CHANTAL

There’s a limit on how much can be accomplished by policy changes, lawsuits, and having an emergency response plan. Environmental conflicts are embedded in global political and socioeconomic power structures.

GREG

And they’re embedded in a system that requires continuous extraction of resources.

CHANTAL

Exactly, so 'defending the defenders' is tied to cutting extractive practices - stopping the problem at the source. I think one of my big takeaways is that on some level, this all comes back to communication, getting the story out – you know, how we talk and think about environmental defenders and their work. Governments, companies, and others try to stop environmental defenders by stopping the truth of environmental harm from getting out – and it’s often done violently. So one of the ways to push back against those perpetrators is to ensure there are more ways to get the story out, and change who gets to set the narrative.

GREG

Earlier, we talked about how environmental defenders shouldn’t be shouldering the burden of stopping perpetrators from attacking them. This is the same kind of thing – the task of changing the narrative shouldn’t rest entirely on environmental defenders. Diogo and Mary both talked about how researchers, NGOs, journalists, and the general public all have a role to play in bridging different fields and locations to widen the conversation.

DIOGO

I think science communication should embrace the knowledge from traditional communities. It's fundamental For us to understand what's happening. When we combine this kind of knowledges with the formal knowledge from universities, from different areas like agronomy or engineering or any other of course, anthropology, sociology. When we combine these two knowledges, we have a powerful tool. 

MARY

You know, if you're not communicating about what's going on, then people just don't know. So we have that ability to be a bridge and to open up doors, I think, – and sometimes I say, kick down the doors of power to make space for the people who are often not invited to the table.

[calm, quiet, reflective music starts playing]

CHANTAL

So what’s the state of environmental defenders’ work? Is it having an impact around the world?

GREG

It is! In 2022, a bunch of household names like Nestlé, Hershey, and General Mills suspended use of one of Brazil’s biggest palm oil producers. That happened after Global Witness released an investigation into the palm oil producer’s major human rights violations. And in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, activists have so far prevented Shell Oil from doing seismic blasting off the coast, and prevented an Australian company from mining for the ore that contains titanium. More generally, the research project ENVJUSTICE has found that in around 11% of global environmental conflicts, environmental defenders contributed to cancelling conflictive projects. And in even more cases, defenders affected litigation, strengthened local participation, and encouraged environmental improvements.

CHANTAL

And if perpetrators thought killing environmental defenders would silence communities, they were wrong. Jose Artiga is the Salvadoran environmental defender we spoke to at the beginning of the episode. He said that when Honduran defender Berta Cáceres was murdered, a seed was planted.

JOSE

The fight is not lost. It's never lost, you know. And the word that they use for Berta, we usually say 'they killed her,' and then they say ‘they planted her,’ which means that when you plant a seed you will see a little bit of change in the seed that is kind of evolving and parts of the seed fall apart and nare no good anymore but then there is a tiny leaf that is coming up. So in the case of Berta, you know, she was planted nine years ago, and you can see the many Bertas or the many people that she inspired.

CHANTAL

There’s still so much work ahead. So we asked the people we’ve been talking to about what they hope to see in the future. Here’s what Mivann, Aplicio, and Diogo had to say.

MIVANN

For outside people they could help us by sharing our activities to spread our news more widely. And it's a kind of support, you know, we also need finance support, legal support, digital security support – I think that can help environmental activists in Cambodia. I want the Cambodian government, like, open minds and understand our work, our purpose, and allow us to exercise our rights fully as stated in the forest protection law, environmental laws. Like we have a right to protect the forest, to protect the natural resources.

APLICIO

We need the broader world to support us with our economy, with climate change. So that the world stops making things that damage our environment. We are the ones who care for the lungs of the world, for our ecosystem. My message is that instead of causing damage, support us. Stop doing damage. If we end our world, we will all end too.

DIOGO

I would like to see in science communication the combination of traditional community, traditional communities knowledge and formal knowledge. I'd like to live in peace. I'd like to live in a place where the traditional communities rights would be respected. Bruno Pereira and Don Phillips, they knew they were at risk, but they shouldn't be. They were, they were doing their jobs. I want to live in a place, in a country where we can work safely. That's what my dream is.

CHANTAL

That’s the episode, y’all.

GREG

Yeah. Thanks for being here. 

CHANTAL

To close out the episode, I want to play you something that Diogo shared with us. It’s audio from a video of Bruno Pereira, the indigenous expert who was murdered in Brazil in 2022. In the video, he’s sitting on the ground in the rainforest, singing and laughing along with others just offscreen. Diogo said the song is about a mother macaw parrot calling her chicks to the nest to feed them.

[song plays all the way through (including the quiet ending with bugs in the background). Link to song: Vídeo mostra momento de Bruno Pereira cantando música indígena (youtube.com)]

CHANTAL

Thanks to Diego and Jamie for the voiceovers. And thanks also to the other experts we spoke to while researching for this episode.

[Theme plays to signal end of episode]

CREDITS

CHANTAL

You’ve been listening to Climate Decoded. Climated Decoded is produced by Lara Heledd Davies-Jones, Isabelle Baudish, Kim Kenny, Greg Davies-Jones, Jens Wendel-Hansen, Jamie Stark, Gracie Neher, Alex Teske and me, Chantal Cough-Schulze.

To read the transcript and see resources we mentioned in the episode, check out the link in the show notes. To keep up with the podcast, follow us on all the socials – we’re at climate_decoded on Instagram and X, and Climate Decoded Podcast on LinkedIn.

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Thanks for helping us get more people thinking about, talking about, and acting on climate change. We really appreciate you.

Talk to y’all soon. 

[Theme music plays for 25 seconds and then fades out]