- Global biodiversity hotspots, which cover only 2.4% of the Earth’s land, have witnessed more than 80% of armed conflicts between 1950 and 2000, some of which continue even today.
- Armed conflicts, driven by various factors, result in big losses for biodiversity and impact Indigenous ways of life.
- A new study finds four-fifths of these armed conflicts in biodiversity hotspots occur on Indigenous peoples’ lands — yet these areas remain in better shape ecologically than conflict-affected non-Indigenous lands.
- The study underlines the role Indigenous peoples play in environmental conservation, and highlights Indigenous self-determination as key to conservation and prevention of armed conflicts.
- For nearly 2,000 years, the Indigenous Karen people of southeast Myanmar have led a relatively tranquil life in the hilly forests that are part of the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot. But in the last seven decades, Karen civilians have found themselves entangled in the world’s longest armed conflict, between the Karen National Union and the Myanmar military regime—a battle over self-determination that’s been a part of the wider Myanmar civil war.
For them, the forests their ancestors once stewarded are also shelter to retreat to as they flee from the repeated deadly airstrikes by the military regime on their villages, schools and hospitals.
“It’s because they’ve been protecting the forest and maintaining biodiversity that they have these safe places to escape to whenever the Burmese army have come in the past,” says Casper Palmano, program adviser at the nonprofit Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN), based in neighboring Thailand.
Armed conflicts in a biodiversity hotspot, like those faced by the Karen people, aren’t just a problem in Myanmar, the country formerly known as Burma. Between 1950 and 2000, nine out of 10 major armed conflicts have occurred in countries with areas brimming with biodiversity. More than 80% of these conflicts in the hotspots have led to wide-scale biodiversity loss, deforestation and other environmental impacts.
And in the last 70 years, a disproportionately higher number of such armed conflicts, about four-fifths, have also occurred on Indigenous peoples’ lands inside a biodiversity hotspot, according to a recent study published in the journal Biological Conservation. Indigenous peoples face indiscriminate killings, forced displacement and cultural breakdown as their societies and economies irrevocably change.
Despite the conflicts, these lands faced less environmental damage and fewer human impacts than other lands subject to the same external pressures but not designated as Indigenous lands.
The study found that a quarter, 25%, of areas on conflict-affected Indigenous lands within biodiversity hotspots were “natural lands” — areas not modified by humans and likely to support biodiversity. In comparison, only 10% of other lands facing armed conflicts were “natural lands.”