Minority and Indigenous Trends 2019
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Minority and Indigenous Trends 2019 | 2019 Trends Minority and Indigenous 1 Focus on climate justice Focus on climate Minority and Indigenous Trends 2019 Focus on climate justice Editor’s preface: minorities, indigenous peoples and the right to culture to minorities, indigenous peoples and the right preface: Editor’s 3 Minority and Indigenous Trends 2019 Focus on climate justice Cover: Martha Akal, a Turkana mother of three children, herds her goats in the village of Kache Imeri, Northern Kenya, in the midst of a severe drought. In the absence of safe drinking water and food, pastoralists are extremely vulnerable to disease and famine. Panos / Frederic Courbet. Inside front cover: An elderly Tibetan nomad tends to her yak. Panos / Kieran Dodds Inside back cover: Portrait of a local elderly Amazigh man at Assaiss market in Taliouine, Morocco. Alamy / Chris Griffiths Acknowledgements Support our work Minority Rights Group International Donate at (MRG) gratefully acknowledges the www.minorityrights.org/donate support of all organizations and MRG relies on the generous support individuals who gave financial and other of institutions and individuals to help assistance to this publication, including us secure the rights of minorities the European Union. and indigenous peoples around the world. All donations received © Minority Rights Group International, contribute directly to our projects with June 2019. All rights reserved. minorities and indigenous peoples. Material from this publication may be Read more of our reports at reproduced for teaching or other non- www.minorityrights.org/publications commercial purposes. No part of it may Our publications offer a compelling be reproduced in any form for commercial analysis of minority and indigenous purposes without the prior express issues and original research. permission of the copyright holders. We also offer specialist training materials and guides on international For further information please contact human rights instruments and MRG. A CIP catalogue record of this accessing international bodies. publication is available from the British Library. Learn more about minority and indigenous communities ISBN 978-1-912938-15-5 at www.minorityrights.org/directory Visit our online directory for country Published: June 2019 profiles of minorities and indigenous communities around the world. Lead reviewer: Carl Soderbergh Production: Samrawit Gougsa Follow us: Copy editing: Sophie Richmond @minorityrights Proof reading: Jacqui Lewis Design: Lucia Rusinakova @minorityrights With thanks to Tero Mustonen @minorityrightsgroup (Snowchange) for his review of the final report. All responsibility for the content of the publication rests with MRG. Minority Rights Group International 54 Commercial Street London E1 6LT, United Kingdom. This publication is funded by the Tel: +44 (0)20 7422 4200 European Union. This content is the Fax: +44 (0)20 7422 4201 sole responsibility of Minority Rights Group International and can under no Email: [email protected] circumstances be regarded as reflecting Website: www.minorityrights.org the position of the European Union. 5 Minority and Indigenous Trends 2019 Focus on climate justice Edited by Peter Grant Minority Rights Group International Table of Contents 08 Foreword 10 Executive summary 18 Thematic Chapters 19 Minorities and Indigenous Peoples in an Age of Climate Change 37 Case study from Tuvalu: ‘We have a right to stay in our God-given islands.’ 39 Indigenous Knowledge and Resistance to Climate Change 51 Case study from Canada: ‘Everything is interconnected – if you remove one element the others topple over.’ 53 Climate Change, Minorities, Indigenous Peoples and Mobility 67 Case study from Kenya: ‘There has been no life for us since we were moved out of the forest.’ 72 Africa 74 Chad: As deserts spread south, pastoralists face scarcity and drought 78 Kenya: For Turkana pastoralists, oil offers no easy solutions to poverty and drought 81 Kenya: ‘The impact of climate change is worsening the situation of child marriage among the Maasai.’ 84 Namibia: Sharing local ecological knowledge through digital tools among the Ju|’hoansi 90 Americas 93 Canada: ‘Some people say it’s going to be indigenous peoples to stop climate change, but it will take every single person, not just indigenous people.’ 97 Ecuador: Indigenous communities lead the fight against climate change and oil extraction on their land 100 Panama: The devastating cost of ‘green’ development for the indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé community 103 Peru: Hunger and malnutrition among Shawi communities in the Amazon 107 United States: Hurricane Katrina hit minorities in New Orleans hardest – and without effective intervention the next disaster will do so again 7 112 Asia and Oceania 115 Australia: As the Great Barrier Reef shrinks, Torres Strait Islanders have everything to lose 118 Thailand: For Thepa’s Pattani Bay community, a coal-fired power plant could bring an entire way of life to an end – and in the process accelerate climate change across the planet 122 Tibet: Nomads caught between climate change and government ‘conservation’ 126 Vanuatu: Indigenous language loss and the multiplying effects of climate change 132 Europe 134 Bulgaria: The Roma community that got trapped in a coal pit 140 Finland: ‘Instability and abnormality are the new normal. Weather can change in an instant.’ 144 Poland: The role of environmental factors in shaping migration from Maghreb countries to Europe 148 Russia: A way of life under threat for Nenets as oil drilling and ice melt take their toll 154 Middle East and North Africa 156 Iraq: ‘Women are the backbone of the Marsh Arab community – as the effects of climate change are becoming more visible, it is becoming clearer that women are the first to suffer.’ 161 Morocco: Rising tensions between nomadic pastoralists and sedentary communities over land and water 163 Palestine: ‘Climate change is not just a natural phenomenon but a political one.’ 167 Yemen: as the civil war rages on, the island of Socotra battles with climate change More than half The northern section of the Great Barrier Reef had already lost more than half of its coral cover since 2016. 90% 24% Lake Chad has shrunk The proportion of all carbon stored by an estimated 90 per aboveground in rainforests being cent since the 1960s, managed by indigenous and disrupting the routes local communities – amounting to and grazing patterns of some 54,546 million metric tonnes livestock farmers from the of carbon (MtC). countries around the lake. Rights and Resources Initiative, Toward a Global Baseline of Carbon Storage in Collective Lands, 2016 Twice as fast The Arctic is warming twice as fast as anywhere else on earth. 33x higher The chance of being displaced by wildfires for people living in First Nations reserves over the last 30 years, compared to people living off-reserve. Todd Kuiack, the Emergency Management Director of Indigenous Services Canada, in Yumagulova, L., ‘Community resilience: connecting emergency management, education, infrastructure and economic development’, Haznet 10(1), 2018. 425 teragrams 9 The amount of carbon that forest areas in South America, Africa and Asia are now releasing every year due to logging and degradation – more than the total emissions from traffic in the United States. Baccini, A. et al, ‘Tropical forests are a net carbon source based on aboveground measurements of gain and loss’, Science 358(6360), October 2017. 100+ 2x The number of languages Illegal land seizures reached spoken in Vanuatu, amounting 12 square km in the first to the highest per capita of three months of 2019 – any country in the world. This double the area taken over precious heritage could be the same period in 2018. threatened by climate change. Data from indigenous NGO Imazon in Pará, Brazil, cited by Amnesty International. 56% and 63% higher The average levels of exposure to PM2.5 pollution among African Americans and Hispanics in the United States, compared to 17 per cent less among non-Hispanic white populations. Tessum, C. et al., ‘Inequity in consumption of goods and services adds to racial–ethnic disparities in air pollution exposure’, PNAS 116(13), March 2019. Foreword Joshua Castellino, Executive Director of Minority Rights Group International For many climate change is a terrifying prospect in the near future, a threat that could soon bring incalculable catastrophe to our lives. For others, however, this disaster has already begun. From melting ice in the Arctic to rising sea levels in the Pacific, from droughts in the Sahel to shrinking coral reefs in Australia, minorities and indigenous peoples are on the front line of environmental collapse. The cost to humanity could prove immense: the devastation of entire communities and their way of life. This new report by Minority Rights Group International is a timely reminder of how much we all stand to lose if we choose not to act. 11 The challenges, of course, go beyond the immediate environmental issues, overwhelming though these may be, and reflect the wider social, political and economic realities of our world today. As we know, disasters discriminate. Minorities, indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups such as women, children and persons with disabilities are all typically the worst affected. Besides being more exposed to shocks such as storms and flooding, they may also lack the necessary resources to recover - particularly when authorities themselves may be guilty of discriminating against them when delivering post-disaster emergency relief. Too often, discussion around climate change overlooks this dimension of discrimination. We certainly need to invest significantly in the right infrastructure and technologies, including renewable energy, to help us transition to a more sustainable future. But if human rights are not at the heart of this process, we are doomed to fail. As documented in this report, indigenous communities such as Kenya’s Sengwer have suffered brutal evictions in the name of adaptation and conservation. In these instances, minority and indigenous communities which have sustainably stewarded forests, lakes and rivers for generations have been left even more vulnerable to climate change and other pressures.