On the second day of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, experts called attention to the ways Indigenous health is deeply tied to nature and highlighted how health inequalities are compounded by environmental degradation, extractive activities and climate change.
The forum’s focus on Indigenous health comes as a new study by former permanent forum member Geoffrey Roth, who is a Standing Rock Sioux descendent, argues that U.N. agencies’ fragmented approach — addressing health, environment, and land rights through separate mandates — has “consistently failed Indigenous Peoples.” The study, presented as the forum opened its 25th session, positions environmental degradation, climate change, and biodiversity loss not as external pressures but as “direct manifestations of injury” to Indigenous wellbeing.
“For Indigenous Peoples, health is deeply tied to the health of the land,” said Roth. “It’s not just about access to clinics or medicine – it’s about clean water, healthy forests, traditional foods, and the ability to maintain cultural practices. When the environment is damaged – whether from mining, deforestation, pollution, or climate change – it directly affects people’s health.”
At the forum, many Indigenous leaders spoke out about how the growing environmental crises increase the urgency to address their impacts on Indigenous health. “Climate change is also another threat to our health,” said Minnie Grey, former executive director of the Nunavik Regional Board of Health and Social Services in northern Canada. “We are people of the Arctic: we need the ice, we need the snow and we need the wildlife that depend on it. Our hunters and people rely on these animals that sustain our food systems and nutrition.”
A second study, also presented at the forum by former permanent forum members Hanieh Moghani, Hannah McGlade and Geoffrey Roth, examines how armed conflicts disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples, as they are frequently driven by competition over natural resources. This leads to the displacement of Indigenous peoples from ancestral lands and territories, the erosion of social and cultural cohesion, resource exploitation and disruptions to agricultural livelihoods, leading to intergenerational health crises.
“These impacts add to existing inequalities, which is why Indigenous communities are often hit hardest,” he explained. “In that sense, environmental damage isn’t separate from health — it’s a major driver of it.”
By focusing on Indigenous health as separate from territories, waters, food systems and culture, Roth said global health efforts have failed to address the structural drivers of health problems Indigenous peoples face, such as land dispossession, environmental degradation, cultural disruption and the erosion of Indigenous governance.
Geoffrey Roth speaks at UNPFII Carrie Johnson / Grist
The study emphasizes that climate change functions as a severe “risk multiplier” that intensifies pressures across biological, ecological, and social systems, with disproportionate impacts on Indigenous populations. Extreme weather events, such as droughts and flooding, degrade water quality and availability, which raises the risk of waterborne diseases and undermines hygiene. Furthermore, the climate crisis is driving severe mental health consequences in Indigenous communities. Evidence links climate-related disasters and environmental loss to increased rates of depression, substance abuse, and emerging diagnoses like “ecological grief” and “climate anxiety,” particularly among Indigenous youth who are watching their ancestral ecosystems change.
In Alaska, for example, severe storm events like Typhoon Halong have devastated coastal villages, resulting in the forced climate relocation of thousands of Indigenous people. These relocations, driven by coastal erosion and thawing permafrost, cut communities off from their traditional food harvesting and weather forecasting systems, compounding their health vulnerabilities.
Biodiversity degradation, for instance, can impact food availability and therefore cause nutritional inequalities, chronic disease and mental distress. In the Munduruku territory in Brazil, which is one of the lands that has been hardest hit by illegal mining in the country, the Indigenous Munduruku people face many health issues, even after a government-led operation to halt illegal mining in the territory.
Community members have reported a wide range of diseases linked to mercury pollution and ecological destruction caused by mining, including diarrhoea, itchiness, flu, fever, childhood paralysis and brain problems.
“The situation is even more serious for Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation and Initial Contact,” said Ginny Alba Medina, an Indigenous leader and lawyer from OPIAC, the national organization for Colombia’s Amazon peoples. “For them, the right to health begins with absolute respect for the principle of no contact. Any external intrusion can trigger lethal epidemics against which they have no immune defenses. Allowing extractive activities, armed presence or territorial pressure in their territories poses an immediate threat to their physical and cultural survival.”
“What’s been missing is a more connected approach — one that includes land, culture, and self-determination as central to health,” Roth said. “Moving forward, U.N. agencies need to reduce fragmentation and work in a more coordinated way. You cannot improve Indigenous health in isolation. It requires aligning efforts across sectors and supporting Indigenous leadership within these systems.”
Just weeks before the forum kicked off at the U.N. headquarters in New York, Indigenous Batwa women and children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, suffered fresh attacks by a group of armed men believed to belong to the Alliance Fleuve Congo and March 23 movement rebel groups. These cases, which took place on March 5 in the country’s South Kivu province, are linked to a larger pattern of targeted violence against the Batwa people to gain control over their land and natural resources.
Conflicts in Indigenous territories are inherently an environmental and health crisis. As armed conflicts are frequently driven by competition over natural resources, Indigenous lands become strategic battlegrounds.
Analysts have pointed out that this escalating armed conflict in the DRC has had a significant and often overlooked impact on the environment. They highlight a sharp increase in deforestation since it broke out in late 2021, with an estimated 3,019 acres of tree cover lost in 2023. Between 2019 and 2022, the yearly average forest loss was 1,410 acres.
Advocates at the conference discussed how conflict can restrict Indigenous peoples’ access to their lands, as they often must flee violence to protect themselves. But without access to their lands, similar to biodiversity degradation, which is sometimes also generated by conflict, Indigenous communities may struggle to obtain access to nutritional foods, leading to health impacts and the weakening of social and spiritual cohesion, as Roth’s study on Indigenous health pointed out.
“These conflicts have immediate and long-term health impacts,” Roth said. “Communities are displaced from their lands, access to healthcare is disrupted, and people face lasting trauma and stress. At the same time, the environment is damaged or destroyed — polluted water, deforestation, loss of food systems — which further undermines health.”
This is the situation Ngāti Tīpā peoples of Waikato Tainui Tribal Confederation in Tauranganui Marae, New Zealand, are facing.
“My great, great grandmother said all the waters surrounding our community were once clean,” said Em-Haley Kūkūtai Walker, who is Ngāti Tīpā and an artist from the community. “We didn’t receive many floods and our fisheries were healthy. Now, because of sea level rise into our river that is increasing salinity levels, fish are dying and moving elsewhere.”
Indigenous leaders at the forum, such as Wilton Littlechild, a Cree chief and lawyer defending treaty rights, argued that legal recognition for their territories is a foundational prerequisite to protect biodiversity and Indigenous health.
“Indigenous people have these treaties [and there is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] which are tools to protect their health,” said Littlechild.
This call was echoed by the WHO in its draft Global Plan of Action, or GPA, on the health of Indigenous people, which called for supporting “Indigenous-led ecosystem stewardship and nature-based approaches that safeguard health.” On Feb. 5, the WHO’s Executive Board decided to delay consideration of the GPA draft to 2027 to allow more time for consultation.
According to advocates, Indigenous health is completely inseparable from land tenure, biodiversity, food sovereignty and self-determination, and this must be recognized by bodies such as the UN and the WHO.
Leaders warn that global climate and biodiversity goals cannot be met without Indigenous peoples. In a session about tying national obligations under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, to health, Ruth Mercredi, an elder and a traditional healer in Yellowknife, Canada, said governments need to start prioritizing Indigenous health.
“Today, we are getting sick of the water, of the food, of the air,” said Mercredi. “Whatever we are putting in our bodies. We have to now be mindful of that when we didn’t have to before.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous health can’t be separated from environmental health, leaders tell UN on Apr 22, 2026.
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