Indigenous communities have been practicing sustainable community-based ecosystem management for centuries. These systems incorporate local knowledge and beliefs that are based on the wisdom and experience of past generations. They also contribute to the economic well being of local communities, as well as to the well being of the Indonesian nation.
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Over the past few years, private conservation has covered close to a million hectares in the South of Chile, surpassing the forest areas under regulated community land tenure, and making it comparable to the previous expansion of pine and eucalyptus plantation companies, today exceeding 2 million hectares.
The Uitoto peoples in the Araracuara region, in the mid course of the Caqueta River show some common socio-cultural characteristics, among which a production system based on the sustainable use of three spaces: the forest, the river and the “chagra” (a clearing in the forest used for poli-culture plantation).
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has been in force since 21 March 1994. For a decade, international climate change negotiators have filled meeting rooms with hot air. Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 11 per cent, according to World Resources Institute.
Yet when more than 5,000 participants descended on Milan for the ninth Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP-9) in December 2003, reducing greenhouse gas emissions was not on the agenda.
Women around the world suffer greatly. They suffer from all kinds of situations such as wars and sexual discriminations by men. Children suffer as a consequent of their sufferings. In many cultures, men look upon women as inferior and as such they are forced to do all the heavy and hard work.
Ninety percent or 4.5 million Papua New Guineans depend on the forests for their livelihoods and have done so for hundreds and even thousands of years. The forests provide food, building materials, medicine and a source of culture and spirituality for the people.
This article highlights the vulnerability of dam-affected peoples -especially women- being displaced from their homes and lands, and relocated elsewhere. Due to the need to clear forests and divert the river, dams can effectively deprive those in the way of dams of rights to their traditional resources. It highlights some dam-related issues which are apparently shared the world over. But first some examples of on-going and completed dam projects in Malaysia, to show the price tag for 'development':
The gypsy people say that when their women are standing on street-corners, offering themselves and when their old people die alone in old-peoples’ homes, the gypsy people will no longer be a people. The women in these oil zones have been cast to the street corners, punished with violence and are literally submerged in contamination.
The Sarayacu community in Ecuador would have been subdued by the oil companies long ago, if it had not been for their women. Victims and protagonists of resistance to oil, that is what the women are.
Inland aquaculture has been practiced in Asian countries, namely in Indonesia, China, India and Thailand for hundreds of years. Shrimps were traditionally cultivated in paddy fields or in ponds combined with fishes, without significantly altering the mangrove forest, which for centuries has been used communally by local people providing them a number of products such as commercial fish, shrimp, game, timber, honey, fuel, medicine. Women have played a key role in taking the advantage of mangrove resources. In Papua Island, indigenous knowledge regulates woman’s role in mangrove forest.
More than 35 % of Indonesian upland territory has been licensed as mining concessions, of which 11.4 million hectares is located within protected areas. However, the mine sector’s contribution to the Indonesian government’ s net income is only 2% -4%. The amount is unequal to the impacts caused by the sector toward local people and the environment across the Indonesian archipelago.
by Marcus Colchester, Tejaswini Apte, Michel Laforge, Alois Mandondo and Neema Pathak
Synthesis Report of the Project 'Learning Lessons from International Community Forestry Networks - CIFOR Occasional Paper No. 41
Bridging the Gap: Communities, Forests and International Networks
The workshop organized at the World Social Forum on “Displacement and Forest Communities” (1) enabled participants to better understand the essential injustice of the prevailing approach to forest conservation and at the same time to realize that it is incapable of conserving forests.
A workshop on global environmental politics (1) brought up a number of issues and actors of relevance to forests and forest peoples: protected areas, climate change, biodiversity, the World Bank.
The different “solutions” to global environmental problems (deforestation, biodiversity loss, climate change) were contextualized as part of the approach of appropriation of nature for profit, carried out through agencies such as the World Bank, the IMF and the FAO and through entirely new mechanisms supposedly created to protect the environment.