To what extent do extractive and industrial development pressures affect Indigenous Peoples’ lifeways, lands, and rights globally? We analyze 3081 environmental conflicts over development projects to quantify Indigenous Peoples’ exposure to 11 reported social-environmental impacts jeopardizing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous Peoples are affected in at least 34% of all documented environmental conflicts worldwide. More than three-fourths of these conflicts are caused by mining, fossil fuels, dam projects, and the agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and livestock (AFFL) sector. Landscape loss (56% of cases), livelihood loss (52%), and land dispossession (50%) are reported to occur globally most often and are significantly more frequent in the AFFL sector. The resulting burdens jeopardize Indigenous rights and impede the realization of global environmental justice.

In the last two decades conflicts due to biodiversity conservation projects have been rising all over the world. This is due to the interest at the global level towards environmental protection, which is often implemented at the expense of communities living within and around important biodiversity spots. The study analyses the violent process of relocation and displacement from the protected areas of India with the purpose of documenting the illegal relocation of indigenous communities and forest dwellers from the protected forest areas. It examines the specific laws and regulations that legalize their relocation from their ancestral land in contravention of legal recognition of the community’s forest rights under the Forest Rights Act (FRA). The article concludes how these conflicts are the results of no recognition of tenure rights, and mirrors the contradictions embedded in the environmental protection policies not only in India but at the global level as well.

The protection of the Earth's remaining biodiversity continues to be a debate of global importance as well as a source of contestation. In this context, the Indian government started with its post-colonial forest conservation from the 1970s, by ushering in the Wildlife Protection Act in 1972. It has since reinforced its conservation policies, over the last 15 years giving particular focus to the protection of tigers, considered a keystone and endangered species. In 2004, a Tiger Task Force was set up to protect the tiger, followed by the establishment of protected habitats for tiger conservation, which in turn reinforced the idea of a human-wildlife binary and legitimized the control of these spaces through armed policing. These changes in environmental governance have altered the relationship between local communities and forest guards, in many cases aggravating already conflictual interactions. This article discusses the political ecology of emerging conflicts around protected areas (national parks, tiger reserves and wildlife sanctuaries) in India through an analysis of 26 conflicts documented in the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas), and informed by field research conducted within and around protected areas of India. Specifically, the article analyzes the interplay between conservation policies and the rights of the commons recognized under the Forest Rights Act, 2006, as well as the socio-economic impacts of conservation policies in terms of dispossession, violence and the increase of "green militarization." The article also highlights the social resistance movements developed against these trends, which are framed as part of the growing environmental justice movement. The article concludes with how this struggle may be essential to achieving an ecologically sustainable society in the future and to shape a new conservation model.

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