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Maddie Williams
INST 4003
Dr. Phillips
6 April 2017
Fighting a Land Battle
The First Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1990
noted that the greatest single impact of climate change might be on human migration. Yet, in
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general, conservation refugees are left out of the discussion of human rights protection. Climate
change can have diverse consequences on multiple human rights, particularly on economic,
social and cultural rights. Environmental problems that generate this migration could effect a
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variety of human rights, such as the rights to life, health and food, dignity along with partially
recognized rights, such as the rights to a healthy environment and to development. Within this
context, migration may also challenge the rights to housing, property, security and non-
discrimination, as people are displaced and put into completely new environments. Ecological
resettlement is a relatively recent development that is used in China and the Central Asian
highlands, its main purpose being the protection of natural resources that are considered to be
ecologically fragile combined with a developmental goal to help residents in remote areas to
Shamsuddoha , Md, and Rezaul Karim Chowdhury . “Climate Change Induced Forced
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Migrants: in Need of Dignified Recognition under a New Protocol .” Climate Change Induced
Forced Migrants: in Need of Dignified Recognition under a New Protocol, Apr. 2009,
www.glogov.org/images/doc/equitybd.pdf. Accessed 6 Mar. 2017.
The Position of Aliens under the Covenant, General Comment 15 (1986),
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http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/gencomm/hrcom15.htm.
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escape poverty. However, environmental migration has had adverse social and developmental
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impacts on the indigenous populations of the Asian highlands as a result of the lack of protection
of their human and legal rights. Conservation refugees, by most accounts, live far more difficult
lives than they once did, banished from lands they thrived on in ways that even some
conservationists who looked aside while evictions took place have since admitted were
sustainable. As Charles Geisler says, conservation refugees are invisible because visibility
drastically raises the price of conservation.
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In the field of the international protection of human rights, specific standards have been
adopted in several ways. There has been a trend towards the clarification of generally applicable
rights, or the definition of new rights, with regard to third generation rights. Another trend, which
is of greater applicability here, is towards the definition of the rights of specific categories of
individuals, from women to migrant workers and from indigenous peoples to children. This
allows for a more targeted system of policy analysis and solution for marginalized groups such as
these, while simultaneously holding states more accountable for human rights violations against
these communities. Sixteen group-specific protection instruments were adopted well before the
adoption of general instruments such as the UDHR, aiming in particular at the protection of
Foggin, Marc, and Gongho Tashi. Resettlement as Development and Progress? Eight Years On:
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Review of Emerging Social and Development Impacts of an ‘Ecological Resettlement’ Project in
Tibet. 2012.
Dowie, Mark. Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global
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Conservation and Native Peoples. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. pp 52.
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national minorities and refugees since the 19th Century. Yet, the adoption of general protection
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implementations has not put an end to specific protective tools, they are largely universal and are
therefore harder to define within minority groups. Major pre-existing specifics have remained
relevant, such as the general protection and definition of refugees defined by the 1951
Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Moreover, recently, new mechanisms for group-
specific protection have been adopted following the implementation of general protective
measures. In the same way, proposals for the protection of environmental or ‘climate’ migrants
would also be a form of group-specific protection that is vital for the protection of the rights of
these communities.
Western China in particular is home to many ethnic minority groups-such as the Kazakh,
Tibetan, Mongolian and other people who, through their traditional pastoral production practices,
have played a crucial role in the formation and maintenance of the vast grassland environments.
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China has established several nature reserves over the past several decades, relocating the
herders and groups of people who lived on those grasslands in order to balance economic
development and environmental concerns. The problem is that this kind of scientific resource
management, despite all of its power, seems unable to halt the depletion of resources and the
degradation of the environment. This is because utilitarian science practices operate extractively
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“Are Refugee Rights Human Rights? An Unorthodox Questioning of the Relations between
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Refugee Law and Human Rights Law.” Oxford Scholarship, 25 Nov. 2016,
www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198701170.001.0001/
acprof-9780198701170-chapter-2. Accessed 9 Mar. 2017.
Foggin: Pastoralists and wildlife conservation in western China: collaborative management
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within protected areas on the Tibetan Plateau. Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice 2:19.
Berkes, Fikret. Sacred ecology. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. pp
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266.
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as if resources are limitless, proving difficult to sustainably maintain social and economic needs.
Monolithic resource management, as seen by many developed countries, lacks an intimacy and
understanding of nature that is at the heart of many indigenous cultures. Traditional Ecological
Knowledge (TEK) is a situated process in the context of a particular place, that is, a knowledge
system characterized by embeddedness of knowledge in the local culture milieu; boundedness of
local knowledge in space and time; the importance of community; lack of separation between
nature and culture, and between subject and object; commitment or attachment to the local
environment as a unique and irreplaceable place; and a non instrumental approach to nature.
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Land is more than the physical landscape but includes the living environment. Moreover, the
landscape itself is more than a repository for ecological knowledge, it serves as a way of
remembering past events, and thus an extensive mnemonic delineation of one’s society and
relationships therein. For oral cultures, memory is the most important intellectual resource, and
the ritual of remembrance is practiced in and through the land. Understanding TEK in this
manner raises problems for conservation initiatives promoting relocation of indigenous peoples,
as a holistic view of TEK shows not only as a vast expanse of valuable ecological knowledge,
but also as the home to the entirety of people groups’ cultures. Therefore, a removal of
indigenous group from their ancestral lands results in a complete loss of TEK, and a destruction
of their entire culture, violating a host of human rights and (almost always) failing to reverse or
alleviate the adverse effects of climate change.
Similarly, a peoples’ cosmology and world-making is inextricably tied to landscape.
One’s conception and understanding of the structured world-its origin, order, meaning, language,
Ibid. pp 10-11.
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and destiny-is connected to one’s land. As said above, land, in this non-western definition, refers
to more than just the landscape. In Tibet, mountains are often looked on as the place where sky
and earth meet, a central point, and the land itself is a living being. Land houses the entirety of
the living and nonliving environment. In the land, one finds blurred boundaries of the social and
spiritual which Westerners are unable to comprehend. Questions are raised as to who has the
legitimacy to displace people, under what conditions displacement is justified, whether rights can
be extinguished against the will of those who possess them, and whether they can be
extinguished through monetary transactions. The discourse of rights is fundamentally centered
around human dignity, the exercise of power, and a prior context of histories of marginalization.
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The political ecology of power relations is a narrative in which indigenous peoples always lose,
making their discourse one without dignity, without power, and with constant marginalization. In
the human rights world, sometimes a legacy of rights or policy is more important than the rights
in that immediate moment. In this context, indigenous peoples are unable to have a legacy
because their world is centered upon the land from which they are being removed as deemed
necessary by other powers. Not only is land the foundation of world-making, it acts as a mediator
through which indigenous people groups connect with the holy, expressing identity through
embodied ideologies. Their land is a source of collective effervescence, wherein the community
comes together and simultaneously communicates the same thought and participates in the same
action. For indigenous peoples, land provides the emotional condition of a collective sacred
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identification. In some cases, the land is both the holy and that which bridges the gap between
Brosius, J.Peter. “Reflections on Conservation, Displacement and Exclusion”.WCS Working
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Paper 29. pp 110.
Bielo, James S. Anthropology of Religion: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2015. pp 55.
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the sacred and the profane. With either situation, land is central to spiritual practice. The removal
of people from their land makes it difficult for the continuation of sacred rituals and traditions,
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and strips and entire people group of the central aspect of their identity. When one perceives
humanity to be something separate from nature it becomes easier to regard landscapes in their
‘natural state’ as landscapes without human interaction and aspire to preserve wilderness by
encouraging the existence and survival in landscape of as many species as possible, minus one-
humans.
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Displacement and migration related to the adverse impacts of climate change and climate
change actions are already a harsh reality whose effects are seen in different parts of the Asian
highlands, and one that will become more acute as the consequences of climate change steadily
increase. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put it, climate change is a “threat
multiplier”. Since 2008, an average of 21.5 million people have been displaced from their
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homes each year by the impact of rapid-onset climate related hazards and the frequency and
intensity of such events is expected to increase with time. Climate change increases pressure on
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already exposed and vulnerable communities by contributing to multiple drivers of migration and
displacement. These include the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events,
if not damn near impossible
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Berkes, Fikret. Sacred ecology. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. pp
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21.
Powers, Jon. “Climate Change Is ‘Mother of All Risks’ to National Security.” Time, Time, 6
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Nov. 2015, time.com/4101903/climate-change-national-security/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2017.
IDMC, Global Report on Internal Displacement 2016, May 2016. pp 20-21. http://
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www.internaldisplacement.org/assets/publications/2016/2016-global-report-internal-
displacement-IDMC.pdf
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such as floods, drought; sea level rise; the spread of diseases; ecosystem damage; poverty; food;
water and livelihood insecurity. Development projects undertaken to adapt to and mitigate
climate change can also be a driver of significant displacement. These adaptation projects, such
as large-scale government planned community relocations or conservation projects, have also led
to the displacement of former residents, without full respect for their basic human rights. Climate
justice requires the respect and protection of the human rights of people displaced or who face
the risk of becoming so within the context of climate change. This includes ensuring that the
responses to climate change are participatory, transparent and accountable, and pay particular
attention to the specific needs for protection among persons who may be disproportionately
impacted by climate change. Additionally, individuals displaced across state borders by the
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impacts of climate change can easily fall through legal gaps, as currently there is no specific
international, legal governance of climate or conservational displacement.
