Protecting Tribal Public Health from Climate Change Impacts

The COVID-19 pandemic brought national attention to challenges that tribal communities have been facing for decades, such as limited health services and lack of water access. Although the end to the pandemic seems to be in sight, climate change will continue to threaten the public health and survival of tribal communities. Since time immemorial, Native Americans have recognized the sanctity of water. Water is life. However, climate change impacts are shifting the landscape across the country and many tribes lack the necessary infrastructure to protect their communities. For example, located in the Southwest, approximately 30-40 percent of homes on the Navajo Nation lack plumbing and drinking water access. These households must haul water long distances from wells and other community point sources. Due to climate change, the region is experiencing prolonged droughts in the region and groundwater supplies are drying up. As a result, residents must increasingly compete for limited water resources to fulfill all of the community’s needs—from agricultural to domestic. The lack of infrastructure in Indian country is the direct result of federal policies. Stemming from treaty obligations, the federal government is responsible for providing health services to Native Americans. Recognizing the intrinsic connection between access to clean water and public health, the Indian Health Service (IHS) Sanitation Facilities Construction Program was established in 1959 to support drinking water and sanitation projects in tribal communities. However, IHS (including the sanitation program) has been historically underfunded and understaffed, hindering the federal agency’s ability to fulfill its mission to raise the physical, mental, social and spiritual health of Native Americans to the highest level. Climate change presents another challenge that must be addressed in efforts that seek to promote tribal public health. With a special emphasis on water, this article identifies climate-change related health threats to tribal communities and analyzes the federal government’s treaty and trust responsibility to protect Native Americans from those threats. It also explores how the federal government can better support tribes in exercising self determination to the fullest to be drivers of their own future

Incidencia del clima en los destinos turisticos de Argentina

En Argentina son escasos los estudios en los que se vincula al clima con la actividad turística. Sin embargo, es conocida la sensibilidad del turismo a la influencia del clima, por lo tanto se cree que las diferencias climáticas del país pueden influir en la planificación estratégica y gestión del turismo.Área: Ciencias Sociales y Humanas

Securing a Permanent Homeland: The Federal Government’s Responsibility to Provide Clean Water Access to Tribal Communities

Water is life—critical to the health, socioeconomic, and cultural needs of any community. Every household in the United States needs and deserves access to clean, reliable, and a ordable drinking water. Yet, tribal communities face high rates of water insecurity. More than a half million people—nearly 48 percent of tribal homes in Native communities across the United States—do not have access to reliable water sources, clean drinking water, or basic sanitation. In comparison, as a whole, less than 1 percent of households in the United States lack these facilities. This persistent problem became a matter of life or death during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the lack of running water increased the risk of transmission of the virus.  is article addresses the lack of clean water access experienced in Indian Country today. Various challenges to water access are highlighted, followed by a discussion of the federal government’s responsibility to ensure clean water access for tribes. The article concludes by identifying federal actions to ful ll this responsibility, including the recent commitment of unprecedented funds to support tribal water infrastructure

Compact Monothetic Semirings

In this article we present a brief history and some applications of semirings,  the structure of compact monothetic semirings. The classification of these semirings be based on known description of discrete cyclic semirings and compact monothetic semigroups

Utility maximization with ratchet and drawdown constraints on consumption in incomplete semimartingale markets

In this paper, we study expected utility maximization under ratchet and drawdown constraints on consumption in a general incomplete semimartingale market using duality methods. The optimization is considered with respect to two parameters: the initial wealth and the essential lower bound on consumption process. In order to state the problem and define the primal domains, we introduce a natural extension of the notion of running maximum to arbitrary non-negative optional processes and study its properties. The dual domains for optimization are characterized in terms of solidity with respect to an ordering that is introduced on the set of non-negative optional processes. The abstract duality result we obtain for the optimization problem is used in order to derive a more detailed characterization of solutions in the complete market case

Relative performance criteria of multiplicative form in complete markets

We consider existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibria in an $N$-player game of utility maximization under relative performance criteria of multiplicative form in complete semimartingale markets. For a large class of players' utility functions, a general characterization of Nash equilibria for a given initial wealth vector is provided in terms of invertibility of a map from $\mathbb{R}^N$ to $\mathbb{R}^N$. As a consequence of the general theorem, we derive existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibria for an arbitrary initial wealth vector, as well as their convergence, if either (i) players' utility functions are close to CRRA, or (ii) players' competition weights are small and relative risk aversions are bounded away from infinity

Upholding Tribal Sovereignty and Promoting Tribal Public Health Capacity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Tribes are sovereign nations with authorities and responsibilities over their land and people. This inherent sovereign authority includes the right to promote and protect the health and welfare of their communities. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought national attention to the health inequities experienced by American Indian and Alaska Native communities. The sovereign legal authority for Tribes to respond to this pandemic has received less attention. This Chapter describes some, but not all, of the urgent legal issues impacting Tribal response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It describes and identifies gaps in federal Indian health policies and highlights how Tribes have exercised their sovereignty to respond and promote resilience in the wake of COVID-19. It also provides examples of intergovernmental challenges. It highlights how ignorance of or animosity to federal Indian law has led non-Tribal governments to infringe on Tribal sovereign rights during the COVID-19 pandemic. It ends by providing a list of recommendations on how law can be better used to support Tribal responses as the pandemic unfolds.This paper was prepared as part of Assessing Legal Responses to COVID-19, a comprehensive report published by Public Health Law Watch in partnership with the de Beaumont Foundation and the American Public Health Association

Beyond the Pandemic: Historical Infrastructure, Funding, and Data Access Challenges in Indian Country

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted Tribal communities, in part, due to the historical inequities that Tribes have faced for centuries. As sovereign nations, Tribes have the authority to self-govern their people and land. However, the federal government has a special trust responsibility and treaty obligations to Tribes that it often has failed to fulfill. As a result, many Tribal communities live in inferior living conditions as compared to their non-Native counterparts. This Chapter builds on the prior report to explore the historical inequities Tribes experience and how they have been compounded by the pandemic. More specifically, it identifies persistent challenges with infrastructure in Indian Country. It also provides a legislative update on laws directly related to the pandemic as well as laws that have the potential to address some of the issues underlying the pandemic. It concludes by identifying additional recommendations to right these historic wrongs and build on the resiliency shown by Tribes during the pandemic. This paper was prepared as part of the COVID-19 Policy Playbook: Legal Recommendations for a Safer, More Equitable Future, a comprehensive report published by Public Health Law Watch in partnership with the de Beaumont Foundation and the American Public Health Association

Debunking the Myths Behind the NEPA Review Process

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires major federal actions that significantly affect the quality of the human environment to undergo an environmental review prior to federal authorization or funding. The decision to license or permit a project on federal lands is generally considered a major federal action subject to NEPA review. NEPA’s critics allege that the review process delays federal decision making, unduly impedes development, and results in excessive litigation. These claims, however, are not supported by empirical evidence. Using quantitative analyses we challenge four pervasive myths about NEPA compliance and litigation, and we argue that efforts to “streamline” NEPA are likely to have significant unintended consequences

NEPA at 50: An Empirical Analysis of NEPA in the Courts

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the groundbreaking 1970 statute that requires federal agencies to take a “hard look” at the environmental impacts of their actions, turned 50 this year. In this anniversary year, and with NEPA revision efforts a hot topic in environmental law, we begin by quantifying the burden imposed by NEPA compliance. We then look back on approximately 1,500 court decisions to quantify the rate at which NEPA decisions are challenged, assess how those cases are resolved, and compare NEPA cases to other environmental litigation. We then discuss efforts to “streamline” NEPA and why we believe those efforts are likely to have unintended consequences