Newly armed with voting rights, Aborigines have come to the world’s leading conservation congress meeting in the French city of Marseille both hopeful and wary. They have demands, and do not plan to go quietly, their representatives say.
“It makes no sense for consultants and companies to come to teach us how to protect what we have always successfully protected,” said Jose Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, leader of the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin, which represents more than 2 million Aborigines across nine Amazon nations.
Its boldest proposal is for a measure to ensure that 80 percent of the Amazon is declared a protected area by 2025.
The reasoning is simple.
“Half of [tropical] forests, and 80 percent of biodiversity” in the world are found in Aboriginal territories, said Peter Seligmann, a veteran conservationist who set up the non-governmental organization Our Land, run in part by Aboriginal leaders.
Walter Quertehuari is a leader of the Wachiperi people in southeastern Peru. His commune in the Amarakaeri reserve is recognized on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Green List for its work in protecting biodiversity.
Unable to attend the IUCN in person due to COVID-19 restrictions, Quertehuari reminded participants by video link that his people have safeguarded more than 400,000 hectares of forest for more than 15 years.
By staving off the deforestation taking place around them, he said, his people have not only protected a crucial biodiversity hotspot, but prevented planet-warming CO2 from leaching into the atmosphere. Now it is time for a payday.
“We are talking about how carbon credits from the reserve can be sold,” he told the IUCN’s first Indigenous Summit.
Paying to restore or maintain healthy forests to fight climate change is not a new idea, and has been embedded in the UN climate convention for many years.
However, such initiatives have been plagued with accounting and oversight problems, and some environmentalists say the concept is fundamentally flawed.
“There are indigenous communities that say: ‘As soon as you put a monetary value on a tree, someone is going to want to cut it down, because that’s the story of our relationship with Westerners,’” Seligmann said.
The full integration of Aborigines into the IUCN has been a lengthy and tortured process, sources within and outside the organization acknowledge.
“We have long been invited to attend, but indigenous peoples do not see themselves as conservation organizations,” said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, a former UN special rapporteur from the Philippines.
“We are nations, we are peoples,” she said. “Besides, membership is so expensive. Where do they think indigenous peoples can find the money?”
IUCN members — about 1,400 government ministries, research institutes and non-governmental organizations large and small — pay anywhere from 300 to 20,000 Swiss francs (about US$330 to US$21,800), depending on their size and resources.
“Since the 1980s there have been indigenous group members,” said Enrique Lahmann, director of the World Conservation Congress. “Inuits were among the first.”
However, none of these groups had the right to vote on important measures that have often served as the backbone for UN treaties or conventions. It was agreed that Aborigines would have a classification of their own.
“This is the first time that the IUCN has made changes within its categories,” Lahmann said.
Due do COVID-19, there are far fewer Aboriginal representatives than in the past at the congress, which usually attracts upward of 10,000 participants.
However, Aboriginal representatives can now participate fully in all deliberations, and when it comes time to vote, they will have the same status as NGOs.
In 2012, Relmu Namku, from the Mapuche people in Argentina, was charged with attempted murder after blocking the entrance to an oil field. At the end of a harrowing trial, she was acquitted in 2015.
She came to Marseille with a clear objective.
“We are very critical of the way conservation has been managed all these years,” she said.
“Historically, protected areas have been created through the usurpation of the territories of indigenous communities,” she said.
Being part of the IUCN, with voice and vote, “can serve to put pressure on our governments,” she added.
Not all Aborigines are on the same page. Navajos in the US, for example, bought coal mines on their land and now operate them for profit.
There are other hurdles ahead. Even with good intentions, there remains misunderstanding or mistrust across between science-based and traditional conservation.
“Some [traditional] communities are reluctant to share their knowledge,” said Aissatou Dicko, an Aboriginal representative from Burkina Faso. “There’s a hesitancy on the part of scientists because they don’t know how to measure the reliability” of what Aborigines tell them.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was