THE murder of “guardian of the forest” Paulo Paulino Guajajara by armed loggers in the Brazilian Amazon reserve he called home last month. It threw a spotlight on the contribution of indigenous communities to conserving ecosystems and biodiversity.
Too often, that contribution is overlooked and even belittled by the wider conservation movement. A default assumption is that indigenous rights conflict with the demands of conservation – an attitude sometimes enforced at the barrel of a gun.
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The past year, for example, saw evidence uncovered by Buzzfeed News , sexually assaulted and killed members of indigenous communities around wildlife parks in Asia and Africa. The human rights charity Survival International has alleged that WWF worked with Cameroon’s government in evicting Baka people from their forest home in the name of .
WWF has an independent review into its activities, the results of which are not yet known. sphere is part of a wider pattern of marginalisation. It is the result of a toxic mix of racism, discrimination, lack of political representation, struggles over land rights and ignorance and arrogance from governments and international bodies.
The planet’s 370 million indigenous people inhabit and manage lands that are home to an . The idea that they are often better stewards of that biodiversity is more than just a romantic notion of “peoples at one with nature”.
Scientists have recently woken up to the fact, for example, that the activities of nomadic pastoralists on marginal land, often blamed for land degradation and desertification, . In Australia, traditional burning practices rejuvenate lands by promoting biodiversity and reduce the risk of larger wildfires. According to this year’s landmark report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the decline in flora and fauna caused by human activities such as mining, logging, overfishing and poaching is .
There are signs that attitudes are changing. In 2017, the forest-dwelling Ogiek hunter-gatherer community in Kenya from their home, ostensibly in aid of conservation, in the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The ruling, , explicitly recognised that the Ogiek, and by extension many other indigenous peoples in Africa, have a leading part to play as guardians of local ecosystems and in conserving land and natural resources. International bodies such as IPBES and the International Union for Conservation of Nature have adopted resolutions to facilitate indigenous participation in environmental decision-making.
But true change means tackling the marginalisation of indigenous communities at its source. What is needed is clearly set out in the IPBES report: “national recognition of land tenure, access and resource rights in accordance with national legislation, the application of free, prior and informed consent, and improved collaboration, fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use, and co-management arrangements with local communities”. Respecting nature’s rights means also respecting the rights of those who live in harmony with it.
