INDIGENOUS PEOPLES' GRACIOUS SUFFERINGS... S

It is truly painful, whichever way you look at it, to suffer because of lack of care and irresponsibility of another person. The pain is worsened when you cannot help yourself out or even the helpers not  really being able to  help you out of your situation.

Sadly, this the position many indigenous people of the world are in, or staring into in the near future, courtesy of Climate Change. 

Polar melting, sea level rise, coastal erosion and salt water intrusion, ocean acidification, droughts and the all common occurence of floods are the direct effects of these changes to our climate. These effects mercilessly unleash their wrath on unsuspecting indigenous populations whom in most cases lack the legal framework to protest and demand to be heard, at the same time being  least prepared to tackle these eventualities. This condition is magnified by their full dependence on land resources.

These are a part of the revelations of the yet to be launched book titled "Climate Change and Indigenous

 Peoples" co-authored by Prof. Randall S. Abate, an associate professor of law at Florida A & M University in the US. Prof Abate was speaking during a public lecture at the University of Nairobi recently.

Closer home, the Maasai community are a typical example of original inhabitants of traditional land and have tried to a large extent to maintain their value and culture but, they unceasingly face the unforgiving effects of climate change despite their negligible contribution of greenhouse gases given their lifestyle . This community in addition to many other pastoral communities in Kenya are being forced to abandon their cultural ways of life, pastoralism, for farming due to unsustainable, sporadic rainfall patterns.

In the book, Prof Randall points out numerous litigation suits against the government of US and some multinational companies such as Oil and Gas company ExxonMobil that unfortuantely never got to offer justice to the indigenous people. However, the greatest benefit of  the legal petitions, though doomed to fail, was that they created the much needed publicity that essentially instilled fear on perpetrators of environmental pollution. These, however, need to go over merely creating  publicity, and give  substantive rulings that would form a basis of future litigations in a bid to protect the indigenous peoples of the world. 

Economic pursuit should take an equal position as Climate Change mitigation policies and their implementation because truly speaking, money cannot buy a clean and safe environment, but with a clean and safe environment money flows  in uninterrupted.

A crucial issue raised in the publication as well is the irony of Climate Change mitigation measures which negatively impacts the indigenous peoples. A good example is a governments decision to put up a hydroelectric generation plant but essentially displace original inhabitants of the area. Other ironies include, Biofuel production and REDD's  reafforestation campaign.

An agreeable role of free, prior and informed consent from the Indigenous populations before  the climate change mitigation processes ought to be carried out by the powers that be, in order to protect these populations.

Climate change is therefore a double-edged sword to the indigenous people, only favorable laws especially for compensation for  damages caused  at the national and international level,  will serve to protect these  indigenous peoples of the world.