Breaching Barriers: The Fight for Indigenous Participation in Water Governance

Climate change and COVID-19: Assessing the vulnerability and resilience of U.S. Indigenous communities to syndemic crises

The rapid emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the insidiously evolving climate crisis represent two of the most pressing public health threats to Indigenous Peoples in the United States. Understanding the ways in which these syndemics uniquely impact Indigenous Peoples, given the existing health disparities for such communities, is essential if we are to address modifiable root causes of health vulnerability and devise effective and equitable strategies to protect and improve health in the evolving climate landscape. We explore the compounding burden of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change on Indigenous Peoples' health, and present several case studies which outline novel Indigenous approaches and perspectives that address climate change, COVID-19 and future health threats.

Values-Based Scenarios of Water Security: Rights to Water, Rights of Waters, and Commercial Water Rights

Although a wide body of scholarly research recognizes multiple kinds of values for water, water security assessments typically employ just some of them. In the present article, we integrate value scenarios into a planetary water security model to incorporate multiple water-related social values and illustrate trade-offs among them. Specifically, we incorporate cultural values for environmental flows needed to sustain ecosystem function (rights of waters), the water requirements of a human right to food (rights to water), and the economic value of water to commercial enterprise (commercial water rights). Pairing quantitative hydrological modeling with qualitative systems of valuing, we suggest how to depict the available water for realizing various combinations of the values underlying those rights. We account for population growth and dietary choices associated with different socioeconomic pathways. This pluralist approach incorporates multiple kinds of values into a water security framework, to better recognize and work with diversity in cultural valuation of water.

Natural Gas Gathering and Transmission Pipelines and Social Vulnerability in the United States

Midstream oil and gas infrastructure comprises vast networks of gathering and transmission pipelines that connect upstream extraction to downstream consumption. In the United States (US), public policies and corporate decisions have prompted a wave of proposals for new gathering and transmission pipelines in recent years, raising the question: Who bears the burdens associated with the existing pipeline infrastructure in the US? With this in mind, we examined the density of natural gas gathering and transmission pipelines in the US, together with county-level data on social vulnerability. For the 2,261 US counties containing natural gas pipelines, we found a positive correlation between county-level pipeline density and an index of social vulnerability. In general, counties with more socially vulnerable populations have significantly higher pipeline densities than counties with less socially vulnerable populations. In particular, counties in the top quartile of social vulnerability tend to have pipeline densities that are much higher than pipeline densities for counties in the bottom quartile of social vulnerability. The difference grows larger for counties at the upper extremes of pipeline density within each group. We discuss some of the implications for the indigenous communities and others affected by recent expansions of oil and gas infrastructure. We offer recommendations aimed at improving ways in which decision-makers identify and address the societal impacts and environmental justice implications of midstream pipeline infrastructure.