‘Grandmothers are our weather app’: new maps and local knowledge power Chad’s climate fightback

Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim speaking in France last year. At 15, she founded the Association for Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad and she has been a chair for Indigenous peoples’ activities at the last four UN climate summits. Photograph: Courtesy of IISB

It’s a simple idea: where land and river boundaries are disputed, make a map. Putting it into practice, using the unwritten knowledge and oral histories of farmers, nomads and of grandmothers who read bird migration patterns to forecast rain, is a little harder.

But Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim says she is a fighter. “If you’re born as an Indigenous person, you’re born an activist, because you’re born with the problems surrounding your community,” she says.