Native Peoples Out in Cold at Warming Meet

UNITED NATIONS - Global efforts to
combat climate change will lead nowhere as long as the indigenous
peoples' representatives have no say in discussions to lay out future
plans, say activists who are attending the international conference on
climate change being held in the Polish city of Poznan this week.

"Indigenous
peoples have for centuries adapted to changing environments and would
be able to contribute substantially to adaptation strategies the U.N.
is trying to include in a new climate change treaty," said Mark
Lattimer of the London-based Minority Rights Group International (MRG).

Ahead of the conference on climate change, which started
Monday, MRG researchers released a new study concluding that a new
climate change deal would be "seriously compromised" if governments
continued to shut out the voices of those most affected by global
warming.

According to the U.N., about 8,000 delegates from around the
world are participating in the Poznan conference, which will last until
Dec. 12. The meeting is likely to decide what more could be done to
fight climate change and how to fund it. Last week, officials at the
U.N. described the meeting as "a milestone on the road to success", for
the negotiation process launched at the past conferences.

But indigenous rights activists seem highly sceptical about
such claims. "The U.N. process is flawed as communities that have
first-hand experience of dealing with climate change are not allowed to
participate," said Lattimer. "It is incomprehensible how governments
agree targets without the input of those who face the impacts of
climate change."

The Poznan conference is expected to set targets on carbon
emissions from deforestation, but leaders of the indigenous communities
that live in the forests complain they are not being genuinely
consulted in discussions on future plans and strategies.

"We are suffering the worst impacts of climate change without
having contributed to its creation," Ben Powless, an indigenous rights
activist from Canada, told IPS in an email from Poland, where he is
watching the proceeding from the sidelines of the conference.

In his view, the official strategies and schemes for mitigation are nothing but "false solutions to the problem".

"They threaten our rights and our very existence," he said, noting that
numerous mitigation and land conversion projects for agro-fuel
implemented by governments and the private sector are carried out
"without the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous peoples."

Activists like Lattimer and Powless note that most development
projects in the forests are actually aimed at stealing the resources of
indigenous peoples for commercial gains rather than helping them
sustain their resources and environmental preservation. In recent
years, numerous studies have shown that most of the world's 370 million
indigenous peoples live in ecologically diverse areas and that they
rely heavily on natural resources.

But due to climate change, they are losing their sources of
livelihood. "There has been a lot of attention paid to the damage
climate change is doing to the environment and the loss of certain
plant or animal species, but we aren't sufficiently recognising the
impact on people," said Farah Mihlar, who wrote the MRG report.

The indigenous representatives say the so-called "'scientific'
mitigation and adaptation solutions, methodologies and technologies
being discussed by the policymakers do not reflect their vision and
ancestral knowledge."

"[They] violate or threaten our human rights," said Ben
Powless. "We may also need to discuss at some point of time the
ecological debt that especially industrialised countries have with
[us]. Consultations with us often only take the form of simply
informing our communities."

The MRG research shows that indigenous peoples throughout the
world are often among the poorest and most marginalised communities and
are most likely to face discrimination when climate-driven disasters
occur.

"There are entire communities that could be lost," Mihlar
added in a statement. "Cultures, traditions, and languages could be
wiped off the Earth."

At the climate change conference held in Bali, Indonesia last
December, indigenous rights activists held a series of demonstrations
against their exclusion from the official talks.

Among them, many had come from the communities living in the
tropical forests of the world. At the conference, they expressed grave
concerns about plans by governments and international financial
institutions to control forest degradation. At the conference, they
particularly expressed their worries about the World Bank's Carbon
Partnership Facility, which is likely to provide large-scale incentives
for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

The tropical and subtropical forest, the subject of the
Facility, is home to 160 million indigenous people who are seen by many
scientists as custodians and managers of forest biodiversity.

"While the Facility can be a good thing, we are very
apprehensive of how this will work," said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz,
chairperson of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, "because
of our negative historical and present experiences with similar
initiatives."

The U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
recognises native groups' right to control their lands and resources,
including forests, but many governments and corporations continue to
abuse the rights of forest communities.

"We remain in a very vulnerable situation," said Tauli-Corpuz,
"because most states do not recognise our rights to these forests and
resources found therein."

Last year, a report released by an international advocacy
group raised similar concerns about the role of governments and
corporations. In its report, London-based Survival International named
and shamed countries where the violations of tribal peoples' rights are
most egregious, including Botswana, Brazil, New Zealand, Malaysia,
Paraguay, Peru, and the United States.

In contrast to the U.N. negotiation process on climate change
issues, indigenous communities enjoy a relatively greater role in
discussions on preserving biodiversity. The secretariat of the U.N.
treaty on biodiversity has established a working group to ensure this.
MRG said it gathered a series of testimonies from the world's
indigenous leaders in which they express "deep frustration" at their
exclusion from the negotiations on climate change.

In a statement, the group called for the U.N. to establish a
mechanism, similar to that of the treaty on biological diversity, so
that indigenous communities can have their voices heard at the
international level. The indigenous representatives attending the
Poznan conference say they want the U.N. to engage all the indigenous
communities affected by climate change in the negotiation process to
advance an agenda on mitigation efforts.

"We are rights-holders in the discussions, not stakeholders,"
said Powless. "We demand full participation in the implementation of
all areas of work concerning climate change and forests."