As Governments Approach the “30 x 30” Policy to Preserve More of Earth’s Resources to Mitigate Climate Change, Indigenous People Must Be At the Center.
PEJ has released a new report that for the first time documents systematic human rights abuses against Indigenous Peoples across protected areas worldwide. The report comes just one week before government representatives will meet in Nairobi to work on the draft of the 30 x 30 Global Deal for Nature - an initiative to turn 30% of the Earth’s land and water into protected areas by 2030 in order to mitigate climate change.
The report - Trapped Outside the Conservation Fortress: The Intersection of Global Conservation Efforts and Systematic Human Rights Violations - identifies trends occurring in an almost identical manner across 10 protected areas worldwide. These trends include forced displacements, losses of ancestral lands, beatings, sexual violence, looting, extrajudicial killings, and torching of property, often perpetrated by empowered, overzealous, and militarized law enforcement personnel and park rangers.
“Indigenous People have been excluded from the decisions to create these protected areas in the first place to every step of the management, intensifying their vulnerability and driving them into a cycle where their rights are constantly violated,” said Nicolás Süssmann Herrán, the report’s lead author from our Conservation and Indigenous People's Rights Project. “These crimes and violations are bound to repeat themselves at the expense of Indiçgenous People until they are extinct unless we do something differently. There is an opportunity now with the creation of the 30 x 30 policy to include Indigenous People from the start.”
Read the executive summary here or download the full report:
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