UNESCO: Pastoralists are custodians of knowledge that sustains livelihoods, protects biodiversity and helps communities adapt to a changing climate

UNESCO

@UNESCO

 

Pastoralists are custodians of knowledge that sustains livelihoods, protects biodiversity and helps communities adapt to a changing climate. 

 

As #COP17 takes place in Mongolia, discover how  @UNESCO works with pastoralist communities to safeguard living knowledge and strengthen resilience. Read more: https://unes.co/rj83a5 

 

#ForThePeople

 

https://x.com/UNESCO/status/2089351549499887754 

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https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unescos-work-pastoralists-highlights-lessons-cop17 

Across the world — in the Andes, the Sahara, the Alps, and the Arctic tundra — communities have spent centuries mastering how to live with the land, not against it. This is pastoralism — raising livestock across environments too extreme for farming, guided by knowledge refined over generations. As COP17 on desertification opens in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (17–28 August 2026), UNESCO shows how pastoralist knowledge, as well as integrated solutions, can address soil degradation, drought, and climate change. 

Working with communities, not just for them

Continuously moving their herds across vast territories is a practice known as transhumance. Several UN agencies work with pastoralist communities on climate and land issues. UNESCO's mandate is distinctive as it encompasses protecting indigenous knowledge systems, safeguarding cultural heritage, and conserving biodiversity through its natural sciences work. Combined with a network of over 2,000 designated sites, this means UNESCO works directly with pastoralists in World Heritage properties, Biosphere Reserves, and Geoparks, where they have a role in land management not just recording their knowledge. 

Roughly 200 of those sites actively partner with pastoralist communities today. Safeguarding knowledge and putting it to use are two different steps, and UNESCO's role is to hold both. 

Knowledge at risk

Pastoralist knowledge survives in songs, recitation, and objects passed between generations, which means it depends entirely on that chain continuing. Among the Tuareg of the central Sahara, ecological and geographic knowledge is carried through poetry and encoded into jewellery, such as silver crosses marking desert locations, pendants mapping the night sky for navigation. If that chain of transmission breaks for even one generation, this precise, functional knowledge can be lost outright — unlike a written record. 

Documenting knowledge before it's lost

For six years, UNESCO supported a research programme with indigenous pastoralists across West Africa, the Horn of Africa, and East Africa, documenting what they know about the changing climate and how. Where conventional climate assessments rely on a handful of measurements that include sea surface temperature and wind speed, pastoralists offered thousands of distinct indicators for reading their environment. The case study of the Mbororo Fulani of Chad shows how transhumance sustains both livelihoods and biodiversity.

Safeguarding makes the practice durable

Protection under the Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention works on the same logic as site partnerships: knowledge only stays usable if it survives. In 2023, UNESCO inscribed transhumance and the seasonal droving of livestock across the Mediterranean and the Alps on the list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, recognizing it as a living practice, not a relic.  

UNESCO connects what pastoralist communities know with what policymakers need: safeguarding knowledge so it survives, and giving communities a role in applying it. As COP17 turns to desertification, pastoralism shows both steps working. 

 https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unescos-work-pastoralists-highlights-lessons-cop17

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"What’s “extremist” about Ben Gvir is that he says out loud what Israel’s mainstream political establishment prefers to do quietly under the false pretense of “fighting terrorism.” At the height of the genocide, Israel was murdering a far greater daily number of children " Omar Baddar

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Jewish Voice for Peace

@jvplive

Ben-Gvir has been making genocidal threats for years. And, as the Israeli National Security Minister and part of Netanyahu’s government, he’s been able to act on them. 

 

 The Israeli government has always worked towards the same goal—maximum land with minimum Palestinians. And now Israeli officials are saying all the quiet parts out loud. The question is, when will our elected officials actually do something?

https://x.com/jvplive/status/2089403921391349950

Omar Baddar عمر بدّار

@OmarBaddar

·

Aug 16

What’s “extremist” about Ben Gvir is that he says out loud what Israel’s mainstream political establishment prefers to do quietly under the false pretense of “fighting terrorism.” 

 

At the height of the genocide, Israel was murdering a far greater daily number of children 

 

https://x.com/OmarBaddar/status/2089085650410553584

 

https://x.com/jvplive/status/2089403921391349950 

 
 

*  Jewish Voice for Peace

@jvplive

·

Over the weekend, Itamar Ben-Gvir said the Israeli military should “kill 30 or 40” people in Gaza every night.”⁣ He also called for the targeted killing of Palestinians, declaring, “Not just those who pose an immediate threat. There are people there who don’t deserve to live… They are not even people.” This is genocidal speech, dehumanizing hate speech. But for Ben-Gvir, it’s just another day advocating mass death and suffering.

 

Ben-Gvir isn’t a random individual—he’s a senior Israeli minister openly calling for the daily killing of Palestinians. He controls Israel’s police and prison services, giving him jurisdiction over Palestinian detainees in the occupied West Bank. He spearheaded legislation imposing the mandatory death penalty by hanging on Palestinians, which the Knesset approved earlier this year. Ben Gvir is also a follower of Kahanism, an extremist Jewish political ideology stemming from Zionism; Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Palestinians at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in 1994, was also a Kahanist.

 

Ben-Gvir’s words are grounded in Jewish supremacy and Zionism, the intertwined ideologies that are the foundation for the Israeli state, and used to justify an apartheid regime run on land stolen from massacred and forcibly exiled Palestinians. 

 

Instead of being held to account for its countless war crimes, the US government continues to provide support, weapons and funds to the Israeli government. We demand a complete end to US backing to Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Join us: Call Congress today and tell them to stop arming Israel

 

Tell Congress: Vote NO to funding war.

https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resource/tell-congress-vote-no-to-funding-war/

AMERICAN DOCTOR: ‘Can we accept what we have done or not done?’: harrowing film follows doctors in Gaza. American Doctor follows three volunteer doctors as they try to save lives on the frontline and then return to the US to become advocates in congress

"... But the moral weight of American Doctor lies not just in its depiction of Gaza but its unflinching examination of the political and media machinery that enables it." 

Feroze Sidhwa in American Doctor.

Photograph: Watermelon Pictures

When she wanted to confront Americans about the consequences of their actions – or inactions – in Gaza, Poh Si Teng reached for a genre with mass popular appeal: the medical drama.

“Whether it’s The Pitt, Grey’s Anatomy, House, ER, even a comedy like Scrubs, you name it,” the documentary film-maker says via Zoom from her New York apartment. “I thought to myself, there’s something about medical dramas and doctors and human mortality in this space so let’s make The Pitt. The difference is it’s real and it’s set in Gaza and maybe this is the way to bring Palestine back to the United States.”

The result is American Doctor, a 93-minute film directed by Teng and co-produced with Kirstine Barfod and Reem Haddad, which premiered at the Sundance film festival and is out now in US cinemas.

The documentary follows three doctors from different cultural and religious backgrounds – Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American emergency doctor; Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina; and Feroze Sidhwa, a Zoroastrian trauma surgeon based in California – as they volunteer on the frontlines of Gaza’s collapsing hospital system.

They return to the US as advocates in the halls of Congress, which continues to send military aid to Israel. The film highlights the unique position of American doctors as witnesses whose professional standing makes their testimony difficult for politicians and even rightwing media to dismiss as propaganda.

The journey of Teng to making the film began in the fall of 2024, a year into the military campaign in Gaza. The Malaysian-American had spent years as a producer, documentary commissioning editor for Al Jazeera English and creative director at ABC/Disney but felt suffocated by the professional and political silence surrounding what she does not hesitate to call a genocide.

 “I was so frustrated and it felt like nothing was changing,” the 41-year-old explains. “In our journalism circles, even though we were seeing so many Gazan journalists being targeted and executed, it felt like in the western part of the world – specifically where I was situated in New York – that people were still whispering about Palestine... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/aug/17/gaza-doctor-documentary

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Iraq’s ghost villages: Islamic State drove people away – now a new enemy is preventing their return. Nearly a decade after fighting ended in northern Iraq, the climate crisis has brought extreme heat and a water shortage, making life almost impossible

Rivers in the Sinjar region have dried up as rainfall has become more erratic and temperatures have risen

The village of Faka in Sinjar was overrun by Islamic State in 2014 and retaken in 2017. All [16] photographs: Chris Huby/Le Pictorium 

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/aug/18/northern-iraq-villages-islamic-state-climate-crisis 

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By Chris Huby, in Sinjar

The first thing that strikes visitors arriving in Faka, a small village in Sinjar district, northern Iraq, is the silence. No children play in the streets. No shops are open. Roofless houses stretch across the hillside, their walls pockmarked by shellfire, while weeds and wild grasses grow through collapsed living rooms.

A decade after Islamic State (IS) swept across the region, war remains visible everywhere. But according to the people who returned, another enemy has quietly taken its place.

“Today, the problem isn’t only IS,” says Rajab Mohammed, 62, the village’s mukhtar, standing above the ruins of Faka. “It’s water. It’s jobs. It’s the future.”

Across Sinjar, abandoned houses now outnumber occupied ones. The battle against IS has ended. The battle to save the villages against drought and neglect has only just begun, and time is not on its side.

Before August 2014, about 150 families lived in Faka. When IS fighters seized the Sinjar region, residents fled as frontlines advanced across north-western Iraq. In August 2014, IS launched what the UN has recognised as a genocide against the ethnic minority Yazidi community. Thousands were killed and more than 6,000 people, mostly women and children, were abducted.

While Faka and the nearby village of Qubq escaped the mass killings that devastated other nearby villages, coalition airstrikes and ground fighting left much of the area destroyed. Today, only about 20 families have returned. The rest have settled elsewhere, discouraged by the lack of reconstruction, jobs and basic services in a region where the climate crisis is making rural livelihoods such as farming increasingly precarious.

“People ask why families don’t come back. The answer is simple. Where would they live? How would they earn a living?” says Aqil Ridha from Qubq.

The UN has ranked the country the fifth most vulnerable to declining water and food availability and extreme heat. Iraqi authorities project that by 2050 the country’s average annual temperature will have risen by 2.5C, with 24 additional days a year crossing extreme heat thresholds. Temperatures in Sinjar this summer have approached 50C.

Rainfall has become increasingly erratic and summers are hotter and longer, while prolonged droughts are reducing agricultural production. The UN’s special representative for Iraq has warned that the country will be able to meet only 15% of its water needs by 2035 if current trends continue.

In rural areas, where farming remains the principal source of income, the issues of climate and migration have become inseparable. The International Organization for Migration has recorded more than 186,000 people displaced by climate-related factors across Iraq as of September 2025.

In the village of... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/aug/18/northern-iraq-villages-islamic-state-climate-crisis 

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The real refugee crisis is the failure to make peace. Refugees flee war, conflict and persecution. End the wars that force people to run for their lives.

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency

@Refugees

The real refugee crisis is the failure to make peace. Refugees flee war, conflict and persecution. End the wars that force people to run for their lives.

The first anti-AI protester to be jailed has a message for OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta: ‘Regain your humanity’: “It’s absolutely frightening and appalling that these CEOs and AI experts know the dangers and they are pursuing it anyway,” Kaufmyn said before she was imprisoned. “That to me is unconscionable and reprehensible.”

A protest against AI outside OpenAI headquarters in San Francisco, California, on 11 July. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Kaufmyn in front of her home in Berkeley, California. Photograph: Winni Wintermeyer/The Guardian

Wynd Kaufman, 69, chained and locked the front doors of OpenAI’s headquarters last year with members of StopAI

Robert Booth

Sun 16 Aug 2026 04.00 EDT

An activist who blocked the entrance to one of the world’s biggest AI companies is believed to have become the first person jailed for protesting against artificial intelligence as supporters dub her the “Rosa Parks of AI risk”.

Wynd Kaufman, 69, surrendered herself on Friday to authorities in San Francisco. She was found guilty by a jury for her role in an action last year that saw members of the group StopAI chain and lock the front doors of OpenAI’s headquarters in protest against the pursuit of artificial superintelligence.

The retired teacher from Berkeley, California, refused to move from a sit-in protest in February 2025 and pleaded not guilty to multiple misdemeanor charges. She was convicted in June of interfering with a business, trespassing with intent to interfere with a business, unlawful assembly and refusal to disburse a riot. On Friday, sheriff’s officers handcuffed her as fellow campaigners sang to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic (Glory, Glory Hallelujah): “Rise up, rise up and join us/Do not let the tech bros destroy us.”

“It’s absolutely frightening and appalling that these CEOs and AI experts know the dangers and they are pursuing it anyway,” Kaufmyn said before she was imprisoned. “That to me is unconscionable and reprehensible.”

She said she was willing to go to jail not because she was a martyr but because it was an “issue of sounding the alarm, challenging the system and hopefully trying to get the message out”... READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/16/california-openai-protester-wynd-kaufman

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*Meanwhile, more than a thousand researchers at frontier AI labs this summer signed a letter warning of “a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems”.