Sônia Guajajara, Brazil's First Indigenous Peoples Minister, on Climate Crisis & Protecting the Amazon

Sônia Guajajara is Brazil’s first Indigenous cabinet minister and the country’s first-ever minister of Indigenous peoples. We recently sat down with Guajajara at the COP28 summit in Dubai to discuss the role of Indigenous communities in the rapidly developing climate crisis. She discussed her work within the administration of Brazilian President Lula to stop Amazon rainforest deforestation and to wrest back Indigenous governance from extractive industry. “We have little time left,” Guajajara warned. “We’ve lost more than 60% of our native plants in the forest. So climate change is not just a problem of the future. We’re experiencing the consequences right now.”