Event Background In the name of tackling the climate crisis, we are witnessing a stepped up effort led by powerful corporate and state interests to designate still free-flowing stretches of rivers as new sites for hydropower dam build-out and vast areas of land as open for extraction of 'transition'/'critical' minerals. When community members and their allies raise questions and defend collective rights to ancestral lands, water, clean air and livelihood, authorities across the region have responded with force – ranging from militarization, weaponization of…