Dear Community,

As we close the first month of a new year, we are sending solidarity, love and care to each of you as communities around the world experience the ongoing seismic impacts of colliding climate, economic, and social eruptions and harms. We also see the incredible strength and connection of people organizing globally, and calling forth courage, accountability, kindness, mutual aid, and a path forward for a healthy and just world.

In the recent US context, the killings and detentions in our communities and the attacks against the rule of law have been outrageous and heartbreaking. They are deeply unacceptable and weigh very heavily on our hearts, as we know they have been for you. There is no climate justice or care for the Earth without justice and liberation for all. In this moment, we need to continue standing strong together.

Osprey Orielle Lake, WECAN Executive Director, shares some words with our community: 



"The United States is living inside a self-made nightmare that has been building within a colonial-capitalistic, supremacist framework for many decades. With increasing dangerous vigor, laws are being bent or collapsed depending on who is harmed and who is protected. Indigenous, Black, and Brown neighbors already know about this all too well.

What makes this moment particularly unbearable is not only the massive cruelty, but the insistence that we accept it and adapt to it. We are pushed to normalize what should horrify us, to call endurance resilience, to treat survival as a substitute for justice. We are expected to keep moving, keep producing, keep scrolling, keep working as if all is as it should be. Well, that is simply not going to happen. One of the great violences in this moment is this pressure to accept the unacceptable without breaking. But we are breaking, we are breaking open. And our numbers peacefully present in the streets and in the courtrooms are growing every day.

Hope, as it is often expressed, cannot survive here. The thin hope of progress narratives, the hope of inevitable correction, the hope that the arc bends on its own is not working. These kinds of hopes are far too fragile in the face of escalating violence to our communities, our bodies, and the land. To offer that kind of hope is false, and people can feel the emptiness of it in their bones.

But there is another form of hope that doesn’t require belief in national innocence or historical momentum or that the pendulum will eventually swing back (back to where?). It has its strength in refusal. Refusal to forget what is happening or to look away. Refusal to allow goodness to be emptied of meaning. Refusal to let despair win the day. It is hope that has credibility by taking action and by speaking out.

Hope can look like attention. It looks like saying the names of harms or people or places violated accurately and repeatedly, even if nothing changes immediately afterward. It looks like choosing solidarity when isolation seems easier and safer. It looks like expressing our outrage and grief. It looks like staying aligned with human dignity in a system organized to erode it.

In this country, right now, hope is staying true to our values without guarantees. It is the practice of care in a culture that is rewarding cruelty. It is the insistence that what is happening at the highest level of government does not get to define what love, responsibility, joy, care, or courage mean.

Hope lives in personal spaces like people protecting each other in neighborhoods, telling the truth at the potential of personal cost, refusing to trade our conscience to allow harms that are seemingly not near us. Hope lives in the streets when we stand together. It lives in endlessly calling elected officials, making our demands known. It lives in memory, in holding onto what this country has tried to bury, from stolen land to stolen lives, and insisting that memory itself is a form of resistance.  

This hope does not promise that things will quickly turn out well. It promises that we will not become what is destroying us. It is a hope grounded in dignity for all rather than some victory based on what once was, and it means that we are answerable to one another. It is hope that resides deep inside of us, knowing that sunrises and rivers, trees and mountains are far more powerful than human exploits, and that these forces of nature are places of healing, renewal, and direction.

This hope may not glow in the dismal shadows of this moment, but it is sturdy. It depends on the ongoing choice to stay human and brave in a time that is trying to make that feel naive, dangerous, or impossible. We will never give up fighting for people and planet.”

Hope in action is one of our most powerful resources right now, and we are sending gratitude for each of you as a part of the WECAN community and all that you do in your communities. 

Please continue on for WECAN updates and announcements. 

Please join us during Women’s History Month in March for the “Women’s Momentum Assembly for a Just Fossil Fuel Phaseout,” a virtual global assembly with women and gender-diverse leaders in the lead up to the International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels in Colombia.

From April 28-29, Colombia and the Netherlands will host the first International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels—coordinating governments to institutionalize global cooperation for a managed, equitable phaseout. This is a breakthrough opportunity to convene committed countries after the failure to include a transition away from fossil fuels in the final outcome documents of the UNFCCC COP30 at the end of last year. 

Aligned with the 2025 International Court of Justice’s ruling that nations have a legal duty to address fossil fuel production, licensing, and subsidies, the Colombian conference will reinforce the Paris Agreement and mark a critical step toward a just and equitable global transition away from fossil fuels.

While the conference is specifically organized by and for governments, civil society and other stakeholders have been invited to engage. WECAN serves on the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Steering Committee and is honored to participate in organizing events and advocacy in the lead-up to and during the conference.

In support of this vital gathering, on March 31, 2026, WECAN is hosting global women leaders at a virtual pre-conference assembly to strategize and generate momentum for action on a fossil fuel phaseout and a Just Transition. During the “Women’s Momentum Assembly for a Just Fossil Fuel Phaseout,” policymakers, frontline leaders, global advocates, and parliamentarians will discuss the challenges to ending the era of fossil fuels as well as successful policies, campaigns, and solutions to ensure a just and equitable phaseout. 

Everyone is welcome to the virtual assembly as we collectively build momentum for the conference in Colombia and call for government action to stop fossil fuels and build a healthy and just future for all generations!

Women’s Momentum Assembly for a Just Fossil Fuel Phaseout

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

1:00 - 5:00 PM EDT New York Time

Interpretation in Spanish, Portuguese, French, English

On January 7, the U.S. Administration announced that the United States will withdraw from over 60 international forums and agreements related to climate, gender, peace, and democracy. This sweeping departure marks a dangerous escalation in this Administration’s campaign to dismantle multilateral relations and action at every level. Pulling out of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is a deliberate rejection of science, solidarity, and shared survival.

This month, the Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed that the last three years from 2023 - 2025 marked the first time the planet has exceeded the 1.5 °C guardrail for planetary warming, but importantly also stating that it is possible to decrease from this guardrail breach. Every day, communities are bearing the brunt of floods, fires, extreme heat and cold, and weather disasters made worse by the climate crisis. The United States is the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gas emissions, driving the climate crisis. WECAN is working to hold the government accountable as we continue the fight to keep the 1.5 °C guardrail, and to demand justice for the communities across the world who are facing the worsening impacts of climate chaos. 

In response to the wide sweeping withdrawal, WECAN released and circulated this statement: 

“At a time when the planet is hotter than at any point in human civilization, the withdrawal by the Administration from bedrock climate and environmental forums and agreements abandons frontline communities across the planet who are already bearing the brunt of floods, fires, heat, and displacement. Climate justice demands accountability from the biggest historical polluters, not retreat. Walking away from global agreements shifts responsibility onto vulnerable countries and people while shielding powerful industries from scrutiny.

This decision is profoundly reckless. Climate chaos is no longer abstract, it is taking lives across the United States and globally, devastating significant ecosystems, straining public budgets, destabilizing insurance markets, and wiping out homes and livelihoods. International agreements are not ‘progressive ideology,’ they are frameworks that protect people, guide investment, and reduce collective risk in a deeply interconnected world. By ceding climate diplomacy and undermining scientific infrastructure, the Administration is trading long-term safety and economic resilience for short-term political theater and fossil fuel greed. This is not leadership— it is surrender to corporate interests at the expense of public health, global stability, and future generations. The climate crisis will not wait because the U.S. opts out. There are many of us here in the United States, who will continue to fight for climate justice and the right of all living beings to a healthy planet.”

Ecuador Upholds the Constitutional Rights of the Jambato Harlequin Toad

A powerful Rights of Nature ruling has protected the Jambato Harlequin Toad, a critically endangered species found only in Ecuador’s Cotopaxi province, from an ecosystem-disrupting highway. The construction of the highway would have disturbed and dumped debris in local streams, threatening the habitat that the toads rely on to lay eggs and raise tadpoles. The ruling declared that the construction would impinge on the species’ right to exist and would violate the Jambato Harlequin Toad’s Constitutional Rights.

In suspending the highway’s construction until further environmental studies can be conducted and a species protection plan is approved, Judge Milton Gustavo Hernández Andino noted that the government of Ecuador “must prevent and restrict activities that cause the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems or permanent alterations of natural cycles.” In 2008, Ecuador made history as the first nation to enshrine the Rights of Nature in its Constitution. Home to richly biodiverse ecosystems, including the Angamarca’s high-altitude wetlands and the Amazon rainforest, Ecuador’s constitutional recognition of the Rights of Nature has ensured the protection of countless areas in the country and also contributed to the growing Rights of Nature movement globally.

Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Pass Historic Youth-Led Rights of Nature Resolution

Longperson, the interconnected waterway stretching over 790 miles in the Great Smoky Mountains, has been granted legal personhood in a landmark Rights of Nature resolution led by an all-girl youth effort. Longperson is the longest waterway east of the Mississippi River, and the first waterway in the region to receive formal recognition of its rights. This ruling comes at a critical time, as Longperson is under severe threats of pollution, erosion, development pressures, habitat loss, and climate change. 

In a unanimous approval of the Rights of the Longperson, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) Tribal Council became one of the first nations in North America to recognize water as a legal subject with the right to exist, flourish, regenerate, and flow freely. The case made history as the first all-female-led effort and the second youth-led Rights of Nature resolution in the United States. It was met with a powerful display of public support, including overflowing council chambers and almost 10,000 live online viewers.

This ruling is only the beginning of a commitment to continued advocacy and the establishment of a Tribal Rights of Nature Task Force. As Jasmine Smith, Co-founder/Chairwoman of North American Indian Women Association Daughters (ND) shared, “I’m honored to have stood beside my ND sisters today and see healing for the waters, ourselves, and our people start with this resolution.” 

Learn more about this resolution here!

Rights of Nature as a Central Pillar of a Just Transition

WECAN has been distributing our recent report, "Rights of Nature as a Central Pillar of a Just Transition,” which examines how incorporating a Rights of Nature legal and cultural framework into a Just Transition is critical to global responses to the climate crisis.

The WECAN policy brief highlights that the Rights of Nature provides an indispensable framework for realizing the systemic shift required to achieve a true Just Transition, identifying key pathways, including reimagining transition mineral mining, advancing feminist economics, centering Indigenous leadership, and ensuring solutions are rights-based and remain within planetary boundaries. 

📑 Read the WECAN policy brief here, which was presented to government leaders at COP30!

WECAN continues to fiercely advocate for the advancement of the Rights of Nature and is honored to sit on the Executive Committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN). Learn more about WECAN’s Rights of Nature advocacy here!

This month, January 12 marked the 25th anniversary of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The Roadless Rule protects 45 million acres of national forestlands from clear-cutting and roadbuilding— but the U.S. Administration is currently seeking to repeal it, which could open forests up to destructive mining and deforestation practices. We must do everything in our power to defend the rule and the public lands it protects!

This spring, the Administration will hold a public comment period on rescinding the Roadless Rule. Please follow WECAN on social media for updates and ways to take action. We will continue to fight for the protection of U.S. Forests, including the Tongass National Forest— one of the last, largest coastal temperate rainforests in the world.

The time is now to stand up for our national forests, wildlife, and public lands. Learn more about the fight to protect the Tongass National Forest and Roadless Rule here!

WECAN has organized with Indigenous women leaders in Alaska to protect the Tongass for over 7 years through the WECAN Tongass Women for Forests Hub, and we will continue to fight for the forest and our climate! Learn more about our campaign efforts here.

Please consider supporting WECAN as we continue to uplift the leadership and solutions of women worldwide fighting for climate justice and the defense of the planet for current and future generations.