Climate change lawsuits proceeding
November 3rd, 2009
Climate change may be only the latest of many challenges facing Indian country, but it is having devastating effects in parts of the far North. At least one Native village is currently faced with inundation by melting polar ice and is suing the energy companies it says are responsible.
John Echohawk, executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, said the village of Kivalina, Alaska, located on the Chukchi Sea, is suing energy companies for contributing to the public nuisance of global warming it says is going to force the community to relocate to avoid being flooded out.
Indian Country Today reports that the Village’s case may be strengthened by a ruling Sept. 21 from the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. In that case, the federal appeals court upheld the claim by eight states and the City of New York and others in a suit against six power companies which operate fossil fuel-fired power plants in 20 states. The plaintiffs contend that the plants contribute to the damage caused by climate change.
Legal experts warn, however, that utilities in similar cases could return to the lower courts to defend against the charge they are contributing to a public nuisance in the form of global warming, or they could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Too, a district court in California on Sept. 30 dismissed a lawsuit by the Native Village of Kivalina against ExxonMobil Corp. on issues of the litigants’ standing to bring suit and the nature of the political question, according to the Constitutional Accountability Center.
Ice melt in the Arctic is already changing the migration patterns of animals that people hunt, and some parts of the Russian tundra are flooding, said panelist Alexander Arbachakov, a forestry/wildlife expert and member of the Shor tribe of Siberia. Another panelist, Samuel Nnah Ndobe, Center for Environment and Development, Cameroon, said vast forests in the Congo on which indigenous populations and their cultures depend could disappear with climate change.
