CIESIN News from Apr 02, 2008 - Environment and Security Cross-Cutting Initiative

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/47753/story.htm

NORWAY: April 3, 2008
OSLO - Large-scale solutions to help slow global warming often threaten the very indigenous peoples who are among those hardest hit by a changing climate, the UN University said on Wednesday.
Biofuel plantations, construction of hydropower dams and measures to protect forests, where trees soak up heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas as they grow, can create conflicts with the ancestral lands of indigenous peoples. "Biofuel production, renewable energy expansion (and) other mitigation measures (are) uprooting indigenous peoples in many regions," the UN University said in a statement on a report released at a conference in Darwin, Australia. "Indigenous people point to an increase in human rights violations, displacements and conflicts due to expropriation of ancestral lands and forests for biofuel plantations -- soya, sugar cane, jatropha, oil-palm, corn, etc," it said. It said the world's estimated 370 million indigenous peoples, from the Arctic to South Pacific islands, were already exposed on the front line of climate change to more frequent floods, droughts, desertification, disease and rising seas. The UN University study said the Ugandan Wildlife Authority had forced people to move from their homes in 2002 when 7,000 hectares (17,300 acres) of land was planted as forests to soak up greenhouse gases. Zakri said indigenous peoples' lifestyles produced none of the greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars that are blamed for stoking global warming.

CIESIN: Center for International Earth Science Information Network