Environmental and human rights non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have warned that the UN’s drive to increase global protected areas could lead to severe human rights violation.
It is understood that the Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) is looking forward to agreeing a new target to place at least 30 percent of the earth’s surface under conservation status by 2030. This ’30 x 30′ target would double the current protected land area over the coming decade.
But a series of recent exposés has revealed that communities continue to be forcibly displaced and dispossessed to make way for protected areas and face severe human rights violation by heavily armed anti-poaching agents.
In a letter to the CBD, the group of 128 environmental experts warned that as many as 300 million people could be affected unless there are much stronger protections for the rights of indigenous peoples and other traditional land-owners and environmental stewards.
They also said that ‘fortress conservation’ found in much of the global south was failing to prevent the rapid decline in biodiversity, citing how typically heavy-handed enforcement can turn local people against conservation efforts and could actually hasten environmental destruction.
‘The call to make 30 percent of the globe into ‘protected areas’ is really a colossal land grab as big as Europe’s colonial era, and it will bring as much suffering and death’, Chief Executive Officer at Survival International, Stephen Corry, said.
‘Let us not be fooled by the hype from the conservation NGOs and their UN and government funders. This has nothing to do with climate change, protecting biodiversity, or avoiding pandemics.
‘In fact, it is more likely to make all of them worse. It’s really all about money, land and resource control, and an all-out assault on human diversity’.
Source: Relief Web
Photo Source: USAID Biodiversity and Forestry
