Is 30 percent land converted to protected areas the biggest land grab in history?
Three hundred million people stand to lose their land and livelihood, most of them tribal and indigenous peoples, according to Survival International
World leaders and global conservation organizations are expected to discuss a proposal under the Post 2020 Global Biodiversity Framework to convert 30% of the planet into a protected zone at President Biden’s Leaders’ Summit on Climate from April 22-23, which is subsequently planned to be agreed at the COP15 summit in China in October.
But Survival International has warned that it would constitute “the biggest land grab in history.” Three hundred million people stand to lose their land and livelihood, most of them tribal and indigenous peoples.
Survival International has labelled the plan the #BigGreenLie.
Fiore Longo, head of Survival’s conservation campaign, said “It is a plan without scientific basis, that will do nothing to combat climate change or the loss of biodiversity, but will increase human suffering and the destruction of nature. It is a deadly distraction from what is urgently needed to secure human diversity and all biodiversity and the recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights to their land.”
Among the Action Targets of the Framework, Target 2 states that: By 2030, protect and conserve through well connected and effective system of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures at least 30 per cent of the planet with the focus on areas particularly important for biodiversity.
Campaign launched against the landgrab
More than 230 organizations and experts have signed a letter addressing Boris Johnson expressing concerns over the 30% target. The letter stated that evidence shows that when tribal and indigenous peoples’ rights to their ancestral territories are guaranteed, they are the best guardians of nature, yet the current plan does not provide any guarantee for the rights of tribal and indigenous peoples or for local communities. Their territorial rights and their rights to self determination and to free, prior and informed consent, which are enshrined in international law, must be guaranteed and respected.
Main Concerns to the 30% protected areas proposal
Among the key objections raised by Survival, and other NGOs like Rainforest Foundation and Minority Rights Group International to the plan include:
- Land-grabbing: if the plan goes ahead, 300 million people stand to lose their lands, which will be turned into Protected Areas. The creation of almost every Protected Area in Africa and Asia has involved the theft of people’s land without their Free, Prior and Informed Consent. Dozens more stand to be created if 30×30 goes ahead.
- Abuses: Tribal and indigenous peoples whose lands have already been turned into Protected Areas have been the subject of appalling abuses going back decades, including rape, torture and murder. Most of these abuses have been committed by rangers backed and funded by big conservation organizations including WWF and WCS.
- A false “wilderness” solution: The 30×30 plan is just the latest plan produced by Western conservationists that erroneously sees tribal peoples’ lands as “wilderness” to be preserved for the common good, rather than as land they have managed and protected over time. Tribal peoples stand to be evicted and dispossessed to provide the comforting – but false – illusion of a solution to a problem they didn’t create.
Longo added, “This is a critical moment. If world leaders discuss business as usual, the outcome will be more false, unscientific, racist and colonial proposals, such as the 30% project and nature-based solutions.
What is happening in current Protected areas
In many parts of the world a Protected Area is where the local people who called the land home for generations are no longer allowed to live or use the natural environment to feed their families, gather medicinal plants or visit their sacred sites. It is estimated that indigenous peoples and local communities number 2.5 billion people who customarily manage over 50 percent of the global land mass. They legally own just 10 percent.
This protected areas concept follows the model of the United States’ nineteenth century creation of the world’s first national parks on lands stolen from Native Americans. Many US national parks forced the peoples who had created the wildlife-rich “wilderness” landscapes into landlessness and poverty.
This is still happening to indigenous peoples and other communities in Africa and parts of Asia. Local people are pushed out by force, coercion or bribery. They are beaten, tortured and abused by park rangers when they try to hunt to feed their families or just to access their ancestral lands. The best guardians of the land, once self-sufficient and with the lowest carbon footprint of any of us, are reduced to landless impoverishment and often end up adding to urban overcrowding. Once the locals are gone, tourists, extractive industries and others are welcomed in. For these reasons, local opposition to Protected Areas is growing.
The campaigners state that outside the corridors of power, criticism is building. More and more people agree that this will be a catastrophe from a human rights perspective, especially for indigenous and other local people in the Global South and will pay the price for environmental destruction they didn’t cause. From an environmental perspective, it simply won’t work: kicking indigenous people off their land to create Protected Areas won’t help the climate. On the contrary, indigenous peoples are the best guardians of the natural world and an essential part of human diversity that is a key to protecting biodiversity.
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