Conservation itself is a social and political and not a biological process, according to Alcorn (1994). One social aspect related to biodiversity and its management is the world’s indigenous peoples. They occupy and inhabit territories of high levels of biodiversity in which, their culture is associated with the maintenance of the natural ecosystem. These indigenous people are frequently categorized as impoverished and are treated as unseen.
Indigenous people play a key role in climate change mitigation and adaptation by making reference to a climate change agenda with the full involvement of indigenous peoples rather than involving only the government and private sectors. Indigenous peoples have the knowledge to many solutions. For instance, over years, indigenous peoples have developed landscape designs that can counterattack the negative effects of climate change as well as, they have developed several genetic varieties of medicinal and useful plants and animal varieties that is resistant to climate change and ecological variability. Indigenous values and beliefs have brought about livelihood strategies to provide essential input into understanding low carbon development schemes which are used and how they can be endorsed.
Over centuries the relationship between indigenous people and the environment have degraded because of forced removal of their traditional and sacred lands. This removal of indigenous people is caused by many challenges of social and economic wants from forestry activities, mining and development programs. For example, commercial plant varieties have replaced locally adapted varieties used in traditional farming systems thus leading to an increase in industrialized farming methods. These activities have cause severe environmental damage of flora and fauna species in which some have become extinct. They also face discrimination in terms of culture, language, religious beliefs and rights to land ownership where they lived for hundreds of years and thus has never been high on the list of priority by the global community.
Another is, economic challenges over their traditional knowledge. For example, many commercial products such as medicines which are derived from traditional knowledge have been developed and patented by big companies for commercial use in order to gain hefty economic earnings. Unfortunately, there is such no economical benefits for the indigenous peoples who have been developing and using the same products.
It has often been discussed that indigenous knowledge and their culture cannot survive this ever changing environment unless the government wants and has the political will to protect them, both locally and globally. Government along with private sectors need to work in cooperation to integrate indigenous persons and knowledge into policies to protect the current existing biodiversity . This will not only improve accountability and authority of approaches taken but also strengthen capacity building and managing of natural resources and the ecosystem.
Excellent read!
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