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Activist Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim wins Pritzker Award for young environmental innovators

November 15, 2019/in Box 2 /by administrator

Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim reacts to the award announcement as UCLA professor Magali Delmas (left) looks on. Photo: Jonathan Young/UCLA

The UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability presented the 2019 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award to Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, a member of Chad’s Mbororo indigenous semi-nomadic community.

Ibrahim promotes environmental protections for indigenous groups through work with international organizations, including as a member of the United Nations Indigenous Peoples Partnership’s policy board. She also leads a community-based environmental coalition in the region surrounding Lake Chad, a critical water source that has shrunk 90% since 1980 — in part because temperatures in the area rose 1.5 degrees Celsius over the past century. Violent conflict has occasionally broken out among groups competing for the vital resource.

The annual award carries a prize of $100,000, which is funded through a portion of a $20 million gift to UCLA from the Anthony and Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation. It is the field’s first major honor specifically for innovators under the age of 40 — those whose work stands to benefit most from the prize money and the prestige it conveys.

Ibrahim said the award, which was presented Nov. 7 at UCLA’s Hershey Hall, will help amplify the voices of 370 million indigenous people around the world.

“The voices of indigenous people are being heard here — through me, through all of you and through this prize,” Ibrahim said. “We are all together. We will win this battle, I am so confident.”

University researchers, Pentagon experts and others have found that rapid climate change — driven largely by human-caused carbon emissions — have contributed to a growing number of armed conflicts. The phenomenon is expected to particularly affect regions that are already unstable.

To prevent and reduce conflict in the Lake Chad basin, Ibrahim developed a program that gathers information on natural resources from farmers, fisherman and herders in more than a dozen African ethnic groups, and then produces 3D maps of those natural resources that their communities can share. The effort is intended to reduce the chance for conflict among the groups.

“It’s amazing to see women and men who have never been to school working jointly to build 3D maps that share critical knowledge, like where fresh water can be found even in the worst days of a drought,” Ibrahim wrote in her award application. “But the most interesting aspect of this project is that it helps to reduce conflict and tension between communities.”

Hindou is an official adviser to the UN Secretary General in advance of a major climate summit taking place in Glasgow in September 2020. She also advocates for indigenous peoples’ rights, women’s rights and environmental justice in high-profile global forums, including as a National Geographic Explorer and a senior indigenous fellow for Conservation International.

Shawn Escoffery, executive director of the Roy and Patricia Disney Foundation, with the 2019 Pritzker Award finalists, May Boeve, Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim and Varshini Prakash. Photo: Jonathan Young/UCLA

The Pritzker Award is open to anyone working to solve environmental challenges through any lens — from science to advocacy and entrepreneurism. But all three finalists for this year’s award were activists, which may reflect the global trend of young people taking a more vigorous role in fighting against climate change. In addition to Ibrahim, the finalists were May Boeve, executive director of 350.org, and Varshini Prakash, founder of the Sunrise Movement. Finalists were selected by a panel of UCLA faculty from 20 candidates who were nominated by an international group of environmental leaders.

Ibrahim was chosen as winner by five distinguished judges: Shawn Escoffery, executive director of the Roy and Patricia Disney Foundation; sustainability and marketing expert Geof Rochester; philanthropists Wendy Schmidt and Nicolas Berggruen; and Kathryn Sullivan, former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the first American woman to walk in space.

Peter Kareiva, director of UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, said the Pritzker Award’s biggest value is that it brings together a community of candidates, past winners, UCLA faculty and the environmental leaders who serve as judges and nominators.

“We’re way beyond the time where a single innovation is going to do it, a single policy is going to do it. We’re way beyond that,” Kareiva said.

After receiving the award from Tony Pritzker, Ibrahim echoed that sentiment and called the other finalists up to the podium.

“We need action, and this action can only happen if we all join hands,” Ibrahim said. “We will make it all together.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

California ‘browning’ more in the south during droughts

April 2, 2019/in Featured Stories /by administrator

Vegetation density in California, 2011 versus 2014, when the state was in the midst of a drought that had especially severe effects in the southern part of the state.

Like a climate chameleon, California turned brown during the 2012–16 drought, as vegetation dried or died off.

But the change wasn’t uniform. According to research from UCLA and Columbia University, large areas of the northern part of the state were not severely affected, while Southern California became much browner than usual.

“Southern California is more prone than the northern part of the state to getting severe droughts,” said UCLA climate scientist Glen MacDonald, one of the paper’s authors. “But that difference seems to be increasing.”

That means additional stress will be placed on wildlife ecosystems and resources that the approximately 24 million people living in Southern California need to survive, including energy, food and water supply.

The problem isn’t just a lack of precipitation. Hotter temperatures due to global warming — which accelerate evaporation and make drought effects worse — are playing play a major role in many locations, including Southern California and some parts of the Sierra Nevada.

One band of low-to-middle elevation forest in the western Sierra was hit particularly hard and showed drastic browning, MacDonald said. That area of the Sierra Nevada experienced a high concentration of tree deaths, which contributed to California’s overall loss of more than 129 million trees since 2010.

In contrast, some parts of California became greener — mostly at high elevations and in the far northwestern part of the state, where it’s cooler and moister.

The researchers examined satellite images dating back to 2000 and historical records dating to 1895. They combined that data with information about drought severity and vegetation indexes — which analyze imagery to determine how densely green a patch of land is.

The research was partially funded by UCLA’s Sustainable LA Grand Challenge, which seeks to develop informed strategies to transition L.A. County to 100 percent renewable energy, 100 percent local water and enhanced ecosystem health by 2050.

Lead author Chunyu Dong, who worked on the project as a UCLA postdoctoral researcher, said the findings reveal a century-long trend in Southern California toward a drier climate that won’t affect only plants, but also the lives of millions of people.

“The Southern California water shortage will be more severe in the coming decades, especially when we consider the population here is increasing quickly,” Dong said.

The changes also have implications for wildfires, he added. Additional dry vegetation and hotter, windy weather could lead to more large fires that are difficult to control.

That lines up with 2017 research by MacDonald, who used the natural climate record contained in ancient tree rings to understand how climate variability and droughts have changed over hundreds of years. That paper found that California is in an unprecedented scenario in which the climate has warmed at the same time that variations in temperature and precipitation have been magnified, supporting rapid plant growth in wet years and then drying in hot summers, which provides more fuel for wildfires.

The 2019 rainy season made California drought-free for the first time since 2011, greening the state and causing wildflower superblooms, even in deserts. But MacDonald said the relief could be short-lived.

“The one thing that seems to keep coming up is that we’ll have more swings in precipitation,” he said. “We’re going to have our seasonally dry summer and that fine fuel is going to dry out. If it’s a hot summer, conditions are ripe for wildfire. The worst thing we can possibly do is say we don’t have to worry about this anymore.”

How climate change and drought will reshape the state’s vegetation in the long term remains to be seen. Some coastal sage scrub and chaparral could be replaced by grasslands, and low-elevation shrubland and woodland might even replace some coniferous forest, MacDonald said, but more study is needed.