As nations develop strategies to combat climate change, they're beginning to turn to solutions from the indigenous communities that have been on the front lines of the efforts to protect the planet.

A 2021 report from the indigenous rights organization, the ICCA, details just how much the rest of the world depends on indigenous communities for preserving planetary health.

"In Latin America and the Caribbean, Indigenous and tribal peoples manage between 330 and 380 million hectares of forest," the ICCA report said. "Those forests store more than one-eighth of all the carbon in the world’s tropical forests and house a large portion of the world’s endangered animal and plant species. Almost half (45 per cent) of the large ‘wilderness’ areas in the Amazon Basin are in Indigenous territories and several studies have found that Indigenous peoples’ territories have lower rates of deforestation and lower risk of wildfires than state protected areas."

Digital Arts editorial with Stefan Sagmeister and Design Lab Director Don Norman on designing for sixty-somethings.

Beginning in May, Alive Ventures launched a series of ongoing panels titled “Old People are Cool, Design for Them Sucks”, aiming to open up a discussion with the design community on how to better design for older adults. John Zapolski, founder of Alive Ventures, and design thought leader Ayse Birsel of Birsel + Seck, hosted the series of discussions, with guests including design luminaries such as Stefan Sagmeister and Don Norman.

“When I would visit him in retirement homes, I would see people who needed walkers and wouldn’t use them because it was a stigma,” said Norman. “They were so ugly and it sort of shouts out to the world, ‘Hey I’m old and crippled and therefore probably feeble minded as well,’ right? Well no, it’s wrong. And so I noticed that, but I didn’t pay much attention until I myself reached my eighties and started looking at my friends and other things and realised that, yes, people shunned a lot of things that are being made to help them because they don’t like to admit publicly they have problems.” - Don Norman