Climate solutions seen harming indigenous peoples

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - 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 U.N. 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 U.N. 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.

"Indigenous people have done least to cause climate change and now the solutions ... are causing more problems for them," said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz from the Philippines, who heads the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

Tauli-Corpuz, who also represents the Igorot people, told Reuters that 500,000 indigenous people in the Philippines were suffering from an expansion of biofuel plantations.

Millions more in Malaysia and Indonesia were affected by plantations, she said in a telephone interview. And in Brazil, forests were being cleared to make way for soya and sugar cane.