Georgina Gustin writes:

For thousands of years Indigenous people have survived by hunting, fishing, foraging and harvesting in ways that sustain them while maintaining an equilibrium with nature.

But a major report from the United Nations warns that this balance is being severely tested by climate change and by incursions into Indigenous lands—many of them illegal. And as these food systems come under threat, the world risks losing not only the tribes, but their service as crucial protectors of biodiversity and key allies in the fight to slow global warming.

“The Indigenous food systems that have proved themselves to be resilient for hundreds of years are facing pressures. One is climate change, which is reducing wild plants, water and biodiversity,” said Yon Fernandez de Larrinoa, chief of the Indigenous Peoples Unit at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. “The other is anthropocentric pressure from agriculture and mining.”

In the report, published Friday by FAO, the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, researchers add to a plentitude of recent academic evidence showing how critical Indigenous people are to the wellbeing of the planet.

Nearly half a billion people are members of Indigenous groups, living across 90 countries and occupying more than a third of Earth’s protected land. Their residence across these territories preserves an astonishing 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity.

But as the resources and lands Indigenous people rely on for food are either taken from them for agriculture, mining or other resource extractions, or as climate change alters their landscapes—reducing available water or forcing shifts in animal migrations, for example—their survival and tenure on the land becomes less likely. [Continue reading…]