#support efforts to save the amazon basin and indigenous peoples

[warpedwings]

[orbemnews]

There’s a Global Plan to Conserve Nature. Indigenous People Could Lead the Way. With a million species at risk of extinction, dozens of countries are pushing to protect at least 30 percent of the planet’s land and water by 2030. Their goal is to hammer out a global agreement at negotiations to be held in China later this year, designed to keep intact natural areas like old growth forests and wetlands that nurture biodiversity, store carbon and filter water. But many people who have been protecting nature successfully for generations won’t be deciding on the deal: Indigenous communities and others who have kept room for animals, plants and their habitats, not by fencing off nature, but by making a small living from it. The key to their success, research shows, is not extracting too much. In the Brazilian Amazon, Indigenous people put their bodies on the line to protect native lands threatened by loggers and ranchers. In Canada, a First Nations group created a huge park to block mining. In Papua New Guinea, fishing communities have set up no-fishing zones. And in Guatemala, people living in a sprawling nature reserve are harvesting high-value timber in small amounts. In fact, some of those logs could end up as new bike lanes on the Brooklyn Bridge. “If you’re going to save only the insects and the animals and not the Indigenous people, there’s a big contradiction,” said José Gregorio Díaz Mirabal, who leads an umbrella group, the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin. “We’re one ecosystem.” Nature is healthier on the more than quarter of the word’s lands that Indigenous people manage or own, according to several scientific studies. Indigenous-managed lands in Brazil, Canada and Australia have as much or more biodiversity than lands set aside for conservation by federal and other governments, researchers have found. That is in stark contrast from the history of conservation, which has a troubled record of forcing people off their land. So, it is with a mixture of hope and worry that many Indigenous leaders view this latest global goal, known as 30×30, led by Britain, Costa Rica and France. Some want a higher target — more than 50 percent, according to Mr. Díaz Mirabal’s organization — while others fear that they may once again be pushed out in the name of conservation. Defending Land, Protecting Vital Forests In the Brazilian Amazon, Awapu Uru Eu Wau Wau puts his life on the line to protect the riches of his ancestral lands: jaguars, endangered brown woolly monkeys, and natural springs from which 17 important rivers flow. His people, the Indigenous Uru Eu Wau Wau, have legal right to the land, but must constantly defend it from armed intruders. Just beyond their 7,000-square mile territory, cattle ranchers and soy planters have razed much of the forest. Their land is among the last protected forests and savanna left in the Brazilian state of Rondônia. Illegal loggers often encroach. So Mr. Uru Eu Wau Wau, who uses his community’s name as his surname, patrols the forest with poison-tipped arrows. Others in his community keep watch with drones, GPS equipment and video cameras. He prepares his daughter and son, 11 and 13 years old, to defend it in the years ahead. “No one knows what’s going to happen to us, and I’m not going to live forever,” Mr. Uru Eu Wau Wau said. “We need to leave it to our children to get on with things.” The risks are high. Mr. Uru Eu Wau Wau’s cousin, Ari Uru Eu Wau Wau, was murdered last April, part of a chilling pattern among land defenders across the Amazon. In 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, at least 46 were murdered across Latin America. Many were Indigenous. The community’s efforts have outsized benefits for the world’s 7.75 billion people: The Amazon, which accounts for half the remaining tropical rainforest in the world, helps to regulate Earth’s climate and nurtures invaluable genetic diversity. Research shows Indigenous property rights are crucial to reducing illegal deforestation in the Amazon. A Collapse of Nature Nature is under assault because humans gobble up land to grow food, harvest timber and dig for minerals, while also overfishing the oceans. Making matters worse, the combustion of fossil fuels is warming up the planet and making it harder for animals and plants to survive. At fault, some scholars say, are the same historical forces that have extracted natural resources for hundreds of years, at the expense of Indigenous people. “What we’re seeing now with the biodiversity collapse and with climate change is the final stage of the effects of colonialism,” said Paige West, an anthropologist at Columbia University. There is now broad recognition that reversing the loss of biodiversity is urgent not only for food security and a stable climate, it’s also critical to reducing the risk of new diseases spilling over from wild animals, like the coronavirus. Enter 30×30. The goal to protect at least 30 percent of the Earth’s land and water, long pushed by conservationists, has been taken up by a coalition of countries. It will be part of diplomatic negotiations to be held in Kunming, China, this fall, under the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity. The United States is the only country, apart from the Vatican, that has not joined the convention, though President Biden has ordered up a plan to protect 30 percent of American waters and lands. Indigenous communities are not recognized as parties to the international agreement. They can come as observers to the talks, but can’t vote on the outcome. Practically though, success is impossible without their support. They already protect much of the world’s land and water, as David Cooper, deputy executive secretary of the United Nations agency for biodiversity, pointed out. “People live in these places,” he said. “They need to be engaged and their rights respected.” A coalition of Indigenous groups and local communities has called for the agreement to protect at least half of the planet. Scientific research backs them up, finding that saving a third of the planet is simply not enough to preserve biodiversity and to store enough planet-warming carbon dioxide to slow down global warming. Creating a New Kind of Park A half century ago, where boreal forest meets tundra in Canada’s Northwest Territories, the Łutsël K’é’ Dene, one of the area’s Indigenous groups, opposed Canada’s efforts to set up a national park in and around its homeland. “At that time, Canada’s national parks policies were very negative to Indigenous people’s ways of life,” said Steven Nitah, a former tribal chief. “They used to create national parks — fortress parks, I call it — and they kicked people out.” But in the 1990s, the Łutsël K’é’ Dene faced a new threat: Diamonds were found nearby. They feared their lands would be gutted by mining companies. So they went back to the Canadian government to revisit the idea of a national park — one that enshrined their rights to manage the land, hunt and fish. “To protect that heart of our homeland from industrial activities, this is what we used,” said Mr. Nitah, who served as his people’s chief negotiator with the Canadian government. The park opened in 2019. Its name, Thaidene Nëné, means “Land of the Ancestors.” Collaboration among conservationists, Indigenous nations and governments holds a key to protecting biodiversity, according to research. Let Us Help You Understand Climate Change Without local support, creating protected areas can be useless. They often fail to conserve animals and plants, becoming so-called “paper parks.” Making a Living From Nature Researchers have found that biodiversity protection often works best when local communities have a stake. On islands in Papua New Guinea, for example, where fish is a staple, stocks had dwindled in recent decades. Fishers ventured farther from shore and spent more time at sea, but came back with smaller catches. So they partnered with local and international nonprofit groups to try something new. They changed their nets to let smaller fish escape. They reduced their use of a poison that brings fish to the surface. Most critically, they closed some waters to fishing altogether. Meksen Darius, the head of one of the clans using these measures, said people were open to the idea because they hoped it would improve their livelihoods. It did. “The volume, the kinds of species of fish and other marine life, they’ve multiplied,” Mr. Darius, a retired lawyer, said. Recent research from around the world shows that marine protected areas increase fish stocks, ultimately allowing fishing communities to catch more fish on the edges of the reserves. To Iliana Monterroso, an environmental scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research in Lima, Peru, what matters is that people who live in areas of high biodiversity have a right to manage those areas. She pointed to the example of the Mayan Biosphere Reserve, a territory of two million hectares in Guatemala, where local communities have managed the forest for 30 years. Under temporary contracts with the national government, they began harvesting limited quantities of timber and allspice, selling ornamental palms and running tourism agencies. They had an investment to protect. “The forest became the source of livelihood,” Dr. Monterroso said. “They were able to gain tangible benefits.” Jaguars, spider monkeys and 535 species of butterflies thrive there. So does the white-lipped peccary, a shy pig that tends to disappear quickly when there’s hunting pressure. Community-managed forests have fewer forest fires, and there is almost zero rate of deforestation, according to researchers. Erwin Maas is among the hundreds of Guatemalans who live there, too. He and his neighbors run a community-owned business in the village of Uaxactún. Mahogany is plentiful, but they can take only so much. Often, it’s one or two trees per hectare per year, Mr. Maas said. Seed-producing trees are left alone. “Our goal is to sustain ourselves with a small amount and always take care of the forest,” he said. Nic Wirtz contributed reporting. Source link Orbem News #conserve #Global #Indigenous #lead #Nature #People #Plan

[frankkjonestx]

How much space does nature need? 30 percent of the planet may not be enough

For millions of years, giants graced the murky depths of China’s Yangtze River. The Chinese Paddlefish (Psephurus gladius), which could reach 7 meters in length, used its swordlike snout to sense the electrical perturbations made by smaller prey, snatching them in the dark. But no more.

The fish was declared extinct in 2019, a victim of overfishing and habitat loss.

Its story is being played out across the world. From winding rivers to the windswept tundra to the dense tropical forests of Borneo, nature is in trouble.

Plants and animals are increasingly threatened by human activities and habitat encroachment. One study estimates a million species face extinction within decades (SN: 5/8/19). That’s 1 million distinct, idiosyncratic answers to the basic question of how to make a living on planet Earth, gone.

The scale of this potential loss has many countries worried. Aside from its inherent value, the natural world makes the planet livable through processes like cleaning the air, filtering water, cycling carbon dioxide and pollinating crops. So to stem this biodiversity loss, governments are now working to draft ambitious plans to set aside more space for natural habitats. Nature, after all, needs room to flourish.

A global plan under negotiation envisions designating 30 percent of land and sea as protected by 2030 — and 50 percent by 2050 — in order to revive ecosystems and safeguard the diversity of species on Earth, according to a draft text of the agreement under the U.N. Convention on Biodiversity.

But is 30 percent, or even 50 percent, enough? And enough for what exactly — to slow extinction rates, or to protect everything that’s possible to protect, or something else entirely?

One basic goal is to preserve what’s left. Humans have altered more than three-fourths of Earth’s surface, and of the 14 terrestrial biomes — such as tropical rainforest, tundra or desert — eight have less than 10 percent of undeveloped wilderness remaining, researchers report in a 2016 study in Current Biology. Many species have already vanished, such as the Chinese Paddlefish and the brilliantly blue Spix’s Macaw, not seen in Brazil’s forests since 2000.

Spix’s Macaw, pictured here in a German zoo, is considered extinct in the wild by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The brilliant blue birds once thrived in the forests of northeastern Brazil, but vanished because of habitat loss and poaching.dpa picture alliance/Alamy Stock Photo

At least for marine ecosystems, there’s research to support the 30 percent target as a starting point. There’s less firm evidence for land. But “the scientific consensus is telling us that we need [even] more ambitious targets,” says Oscar Venter, a conservation scientist at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George. Targeting 30 percent of Earth’s terrestrial regions for protection by 2030, he says, is “more a reflection of what’s politically feasible, rather than what the best science says.”

Eyeing ambitious targets

An idea like this is not unprecedented. In 2011, more than 190 countries agreed to 20 conservation goals, collectively referred to as the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, as part of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity. Those targets include efforts such as increasing awareness of biodiversity and incorporating the traditional knowledge of indigenous groups into conservation plans. More directly, governments agreed under the convention to each set aside 17 percent of their land and, for coastal countries, 10 percent of their seas, as protected areas by 2020. (The United States is the only country that has not ratified the agreement.)

The Aichi Targets acknowledged two key reasons for preserving the planet. “We have a responsibility to be stewards of the planet, because nature is important in and of itself,” says Jane Lubchenco, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis and a former director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “But also because people benefit directly from healthy, productive and resilient ecosystems and abundant biodiversity.”

The targets, while useful in motivating conservation efforts, still were “not sufficient,” Lubchenco says. Setting targets “often doesn’t translate into actually achieving those targets,” she says, thanks to uneven coordination between scientists, government officials and other key actors like farms or the fishing industry. And while the agreement required that countries publish action plans, it did not demand reports on actual progress toward achieving the Aichi Targets.

As the decade draws to a close, many targets remain unmet. Currently, about 15 percent of land and 7.4 percent of seas are in some way protected, or in line for protection, according to the U.N. Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre. Even so, current extinction rates are estimated to be 1,000 times higher than historical levels. Even common animals, such as American sparrows, have seen their numbers drop in recent decades (SN: 9/19/19).

That’s led scientists and governments to conclude that the 2011 targets didn’t go far enough.  

Safe spaces

As of April 2020, nearly 15 percent of land (green) and about 7 percent of the seas (blue) were under some level of protection, according to the United Nations Environment Program and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Areas under some form of protection in 2020

www.protectedplanet.net/UNEP-WCMC, 2020

www.protectedplanet.net/UNEP-WCMC, 2020

How much is enough?

Deciding how much of nature should be protected depends on the goal, whether that’s keeping a specific animal from going extinct, preserving a unique ecosystem or ensuring the future of commercial fishing stocks. Different goals necessitate different kinds of protected areas.

The size of a protected area “is important, but it’s not the only thing that matters,” says Samantha Murray, an ocean law and policy expert at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

When trying to prevent a specific animal from going extinct, biologists first try to figure out the minimum amount of habitat the species needs to persist. Wide-ranging species like North American caribou need about 10 percent of their natural range to be protected. Rarer species in microhabitats like a single valley or a specific island “typically need much more,” Venter says, “potentially all the way up to 100” percent of their range. Figuring out those numbers is tricky, especially for understudied species. Additionally, it can be difficult to design a protected area that meets the diverse range requirements of all the species within it.

Another conservation approach focuses on protecting the rare slices of land and sea brimming with exceptional numbers of species. These so-called biodiversity hot spots include Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon River Basin and parts of the U.S. Great Smoky Mountains. Protecting these areas means protecting many different animals and plants all at once.

Finally, some conservation biologists argue for preserving vast tracts of wilderness not yet altered by human activity. The expansive boreal forests of Canada and Russia don’t harbor as many species as the Amazon, but they do hold up to a third of the globe’s terrestrial carbon and so are a key part of the Earth process of pulling climate-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Protecting these areas, along with other large tracts of wild land, are crucial for solving both the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis, says Eric Dinerstein, a conservation biologist at RESOLVE, a conservation nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.

Dinerstein and others argue that the situation is now so dire that all approaches are needed to save what’s left. “There are no immutable laws of conservation biology, nothing that says this paradigm for saving nature is better than that paradigm. We need to do it all.”

That same urgency is reflected in the recent flurry proposals and analyses by scientists. Biologist E.O. Wilson says in his 2016 book Half-Earth that 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity can be saved by protecting half of the planet. Dinerstein and colleagues also laid out a plan in the June 2017 BioScience for preserving half the planet in a way that covers a diversity of ecosystems.

Venter and colleagues estimate targeting a little less than that — about 44 percent — can safeguard biodiversity. The team arrived at that number, in a study posted at bioRxiv.org in November 2019, by tweaking boundaries around existing protected areas. The result is a global patchwork of protected areas with enough space for the 28,594 species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, dragonflies and crustaceans the researchers had data for, and includes some of the world’s richest areas of biodiversity.

Mapping a way forward

One recent analysis by a team of conservation biologists finds that 44 percent of land must be protected or soundly managed to stem the biodiversity crisis. This map shows existing protected areas (light blue), key biodiversity areas (purple) and wilderness (dark blue), while new conservation priorities identified by the researchers’ analysis are in green. The Venn Diagram shows the degree of overlap between each category.

Where protections exist and where they are needed

J.R. Allen et al/bioRxiv.org 2019

J.R. Allen et al/bioRxiv.org 2019

Broad and ambitious goals, like preserving 30 percent by 2030, are important for galvanizing international action. “But ambitious targets are only good if countries are strategic in where they place protected areas,” Venter says.

Problems with big targets

Indeed, not all biologists agree that setting such targets is the best strategy. “A big single number [alone] isn’t going to help, and it misses what we need to do to protect biodiversity,” says conservation biologist Stuart Pimm at Duke University. He says it’s more important to focus on the most threatened biodiversity hot spots.

Much of Pimm’s work focuses on connecting forest fragments with natural corridors, which can functionally increase an animal’s habitat even when protecting more land area isn’t feasible. Recent research shows that connecting fragmented habitats can boost biodiversity, for both animals and plants (SN: 9/26/19).

Biodiversity also is not evenly distributed around the globe; coral reefs, for example, account for less than 1 percent of the ocean floor, but house more than 25 percent of marine life. So having all countries aiming for the same targets might be counterproductive. Some countries may need to protect more than 30 percent of their territory, others less.

“If you’re looking at the Amazon, for instance, recent research has shown that we probably need 80 to 90 percent of the Amazon intact,” Pimm says. Otherwise, the rainforest may begin a rapid transformation into drier savannah, compromising the water cycle for whole continent.

Additionally, countries rushing to meet their goals might only go for the low-hanging fruit. “Areas that are too cold, too hot or too remote” to hold any agricultural or commercial promise are easy targets, but not necessarily the areas most in need of protection, Pimm says.

The United States could get to 30 percent relatively quickly by preserving sparsely populated Western tracts of desert or high plains. Most of the country’s biodiversity, however, is in the southeast. For instance, more endemic salamander species are crawling around Appalachian streams and lakes than anywhere else in the world, yet much of their range remains unprotected. Similarly, protecting most of icy Greenland would effectively meet the European Union’s 30 percent obligation.

The mountain streams and forests of Appalachia along the East Coast are one of the United States’ most biodiverse regions, though the bulk of protected areas are in the West. Here, a stream runs through the Great Smoky Mountains.Betty4240/iStock/Getty Images Plus

“Large area targets may just encourage countries to protect areas that aren’t going to do much for biodiversity,” Pimm says. “Do we need to protect more of the planet? Of course, but we should do so in a smart, targeted way.” 

What does protection mean, anyway?

Designating a protected area is just the beginning. Protections need to be enforced through policing and prosecuting for illegal fishing, tree felling, hunting or pollution. Otherwise, protections don’t work — and conservation efforts fall flat. A 2014 report by the U.N. Environment Program found that only 24 percent of protected areas were being soundly managed.

Places designated only on paper as protected “can give the illusion of protection where none really exists,” says Murray, the Scripps ocean law and policy expert. “We could create the largest marine protected area in the world, but if we just walk away, it doesn’t do anyone any good.”

Having fully protected national parks across 30 percent of the globe is probably not feasible, conservationists say. But there are other ways of managing land and sea to meet conservation goals.

“Indigenous lands in Canada are a great example,” Venter says. These lands allow for hunting and gathering activities, but not large-scale habitat clearing. And there is evidence that such an approach works. Indigenous lands in Canada, Brazil and Australia had similar, or slightly higher, levels of vertebrate diversity than non-indigenous protected areas in the same countries, researchers reported in November 2019 in Environmental Science & Policy.

The quarter of Earth’s land now owned, used or occupied by indigenous communities holds about 80 percent of Earth’s biodiversity, according to a 2008 World Bank report. So empowering these groups to manage their lands could help countries achieve their targets, Venter suggests.

Moving toward consensus

Still, many biologists say that percentage targets, even if clumsy, do play an important role. Some “countries have taken great pride in getting close or meeting [Aichi] goals,” and that can be a sign of how well countries are preserving nature, says Hugh Possingham, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy in Brisbane, Australia. But it’s not the whole story.

“Relying solely on targets is a bit like relying only on blood pressure to indicate health,” Possingham says. He hopes that the eventual agreement incorporates more simple but meaningful metrics, for example, an estimate of how much a country’s biodiversity is captured by existing protected areas. “That would give a fuller picture of how well we’re doing.”

Greenland hosts the world’s largest national park, protecting nearly 1,000,000 square kilometers of its mountainous coast and icy interior (the mountains at Ofjord in Northeast Greenland National Park shown here).GRID Arendal/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Countries are still months away from finalizing a new agreement. A broad outline of the framework was released in January for months of discussions before the next U.N. Convention on Biodiversity. The timeline for those discussions has been extended due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The meeting, originally scheduled for October 15 to 29 in Kunming, China, has been delayed to sometime in 2021

Parts of the outline suggest it will address some of the failings of the Aichi Targets, says Aleksandar Rankovic, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris. “There has been a strong cooperative spirit,” he says. “Most delegations seem intent on improving the agreement.”

For example, the outline stipulates that whatever land and sea each country designates as protected, 60 percent of that should be “of particular importance for biodiversity.” What counts as a site of particular importance remains to be determined, but Rankovic says baking this kind of language into the document is a key step towards ensuring countries protect what needs protecting.

Rankovic hopes the COVID-19 pandemic serves as a wake-up call about the importance of keeping wild environments intact, as recent research links deforestation to the emergence of zoonotic diseases, like COVID-19, in humans.

“The fact that we have a biodiversity-related global pandemic that started where we’re supposed to gather to propose ways to solve the biodiversity crisis is quite powerful as a symbol,” he says. Reaching a deal “could be a big moment” in preventing a global extinction crisis. “But if we come out more divided, it will be harder to lay the groundwork for solving this crisis.”

.image-mobile { display: none; } @media (max-width: 400px) { .image-mobile { display: block; } .image-desktop { display: none; } } from Tips By Frank https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nature-will-protecting-30-percent-earth-prevent-extinction-crisis

[khalilhumam]

Averting a Coronavirus-Induced Ethnocide in Latin America

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/averting-a-coronavirus-induced-ethnocide-in-latin-america/

Averting a Coronavirus-Induced Ethnocide in Latin America

Damares Ramírez, of the Shipibo-Konibo people of the indigenous Shambo Porvenir community. An Oxfam partner in Ucayali, Peru. Photo: Leslie Searles

This year August 9th – International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples – comes at a critical moment. Far from hospitals and news cameras, indigenous people in Latin America are contracting COVID-19 and dying without access to the means needed to protect themselves. The pandemic has yet to reach its peak in the region and the virus is spreading from urban centers to rural areas at full speed. The lives of 45 million who belong to 800 indigenous peoples across all the region’s countries are at particular risk. To avert ethnocide, Oxfam is calling on the governments of Latin America to take strong measures to protect and ensure the rights of indigenous peoples. That means both addressing healthcare needs to save lives and safeguarding territorial rights to protect their way of life and environmental stewardship.

Warning signs, structural inequalities and discrimination

Leaders of COICA (Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin) warned of a possible ethnocide in April as they issued an urgent call for international aid. The situation has only worsened since then. By mid-July the coronavirus had already reached 172 of the 400 Indigenous peoples in the Amazon. The number of deaths among the indigenous population there increased nine-fold due to COVID-19 over the previous two months, twice the increase registered among the general population. The effects of the health and economic crisis caused by the pandemic are further exacerbating the structural inequalities and social exclusion long suffered by the indigenous population in Latin America. They now face the pandemic in conditions of racism and discrimination, a result of historical inequalities and extreme precariousness in basic health and social services. Indigenous women suffer triple discrimination, being female, indigenous and poor. At a time when the caregiving responsibilities generally assumed by women have both increased dramatically due to the pandemic and imply a greater risk of contracting the virus. They also tend to have less access to healthcare and information in their native languages.

Failure to support and protect

Faced with the pandemic’s advance and government inaction, indigenous peoples have taken the initiative and established measures for self-protection. Even before confinement was declared by national governments, numerous indigenous communities closed access to their territories through quarantine boundaries to stop the spread of the virus. They developed their own response protocols, informative materials, solidarity networks for the supply of food to isolated populations and case tracking. They also continue their traditional medicine practices and production of basic foods.  But not only are governments failing to support their efforts and coordinate effectively with indigenous authorities to meet the needs of indigenous populations, they are failing to stop extractive industries or agribusiness companies, much less illegal actors engaged in similar activities, from spreading the virus to indigenous communities and remote rural areas where access to healthcare services is practically non-existent. Worse still, several governments have declared these businesses to be “essential” and have undertaken to loosen regulations and weaken social and environmental safeguards for their operations. As a result, the pandemic has brought increased violence to rural areas by those seeking to expand their control over land and territories for natural resource exploitation (for both legal and illegal activities) as well as by some police and military, as ‘states of exception’ and related actions may enable a disproportionate use of force. Latin America has long been the deadliest continent for land and environmental defenders, with indigenous peoples at disproportionally higher risk. Women carry a greater burden from this violence, as well as from the health inequities and environmental destruction.

The link between over-exploiting nature, climate change and COVID-19

Indigenous organizations have long been demanding change to the ‘extractivist’ model of development that sees nature as an inexhaustible source of resources to exploit. The way land is managed or exploited is central to the problem of climate change. This has been documented by the IPCC, which has recognized the important role of indigenous communities in stewarding and safeguarding the world’s land and forests. Indigenous peoples own, manage, use or occupy at least a quarter of global land. Areas where biodiversity and ecosystems are better protected but which are under increasing pressure. Environmental degradation increases the risk of pandemics like COVID-19 because it multiplies the possibilities of contagion from a virus crossing the barrier between species to infect humans by reducing the buffering effect of healthy ecosystems that help limit closer contact between humans and wildlife. The COVID-19 crisis is taking an alarming and disproportionate toll on indigenous peoples in Latin America. Affecting their lives, their territories and the survival of their cultures. It’s a wake-up call to change course and leave behind the ‘extractivist’ model that relies on overexploiting nature and serves to further concentrate wealth and exacerbate inequality. Accelerated deforestation, species loss, pollution and climate change are a threat not only to the survival and wellbeing of indigenous peoples, but to all people and to the planet.

What needs to be done

Urgent action is needed by governments in Latin America to coordinate with indigenous authorities to effectively provide their communities with protective equipment, diagnostic tests and ensure access to healthcare, water and food, particularly for the most vulnerable persons. Governments must respect and support quarantine boundaries established by indigenous communities in their territories, take action to stop the increased violence against them, and suspend all activities that represent a risk of contagion.   In their crisis recovery efforts, governments must adopt appropriate measures to protect the rights of indigenous peoples and provide the investment needed to mitigate the socioeconomic impact of the health crisis affecting them. That includes actions to address longstanding discrimination, reduce disparities in access to healthcare and water, and ensure their collective territorial rights. Governments must also act to transform the model of growth based on ‘extractivism’ and the overexploitation of natural resources, which has toxic effects on the wellbeing of indigenous peoples and their territories as well as on the health of the environment. For more information, read the full report Averting Ethnocide and join the Webinar on 10 August 2020 (register here) that will discuss actions needed to protect the lives and rights of indigenous peoples in the face of COVID-19 in Latin America.

Author

Stephanie Burgos

Stephanie Burgos is an Associate Director at Oxfam America, where she currently manages land rights programming while also coordinating Oxfam’s territorial rights and natural resources work in the Latin America region. She has worked at Oxfam for over 17 years on a range of land, food security, agriculture and trade issues.