IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature

Oil and gas companies, in their search for new oil and gas reserves, are now moving into remote areas of high biodiversity and low government or civil society capacity to ensure that the companies do not damage the environment or cause human rights abuses particularly to indigenous peoples who often inhabit these remote locations. The financial and political power of many of the oil and gas corporations is far greater than that of many developing countries and their influence extends to financing and consequently influencing the civil society institutions which should be helping to control them. Important areas of biodiversity and water catchments are also being damaged by legal and illegal logging and from some mining companies operations. Down stream pollution and siltation is damaging biodiversity and critical water resources vital to provide clean water for irrigated crops, fish ponds, domestic and commercial purposes. Vital fish breeding grounds in both fresh water as well as the shallow coastal environments are being affected.

Working with the private sector is essential in order to achieve conservation and sustainable development goals. There are companies who are making serious commitments to improve their environmental footprint, and show leadership in the world of sustainability, but there are also significant legacy issues that need to be addressed (particularly with extractive industries).

Many people remain sceptical of the potential of the private sector to achieve social and environmental goals through voluntary measures. There are large amounts of data that have been gathered by independent investigators demonstrating that many of the extractive industry projects not only continue to be environmentally destructive but also continue to deprive local communities of livelihoods and, in some cases, persecute those individuals who protest their activities. In some cases, governments look the other way or even collaborate with the industries in these actions.

Many citizens are calling for an energy revolution on the scale of the Industrial revolution “that will reduce the impact of oil and gas on climate change and biodiversity” by shifting from finite fossil fuel (coal, oil, gas) driven economies, to sustainable energy sources. and to dramatic improvement in the efficiency with which society produces and uses energy.

Some efforts to produce renewable energy are themselves causing serious environmental and social problems and a classic case is biofuels particularly agro-fuels. Efforts to produce them on a commercial scale are destroying vital forests for Palm and Soya oils, causing increased green house gases, damaging critical fish breeding grounds, depriving the population of valuable agricultural land and often causing human rights abuses as farmers are deprived their livelihoods and indigenous peoples of their human rights.

• How can civil societies have a greater impact on governments and National and International developing agencies that finance extractive industries and subsidise fossil fuels rather then renewables?
• How can we achieve power sharing between industries particularly the extractive industries such as oil, gas, mining, logging, fishing and stakeholders and achieve power sharing. Can Citizens Councils help in this regard?
• How do we increase financial transparency and the driving forces of business for good social and environmental conduct and persuade the financial and insurance sectors to ensure that they only support environmentally and socially acceptable companies?

There is significant variability in this knowledge and practice around the world. As diverse peoples have developed their own ways of talking about and representing their surroundings, they have come to express, through language, the qualities of their environment in different ways. Yet each of these systems of communication contains important insights into the functioning of our natural world and how best to live with it to the benefit of all. In many ways the existence of languages rich in words that describe the natural world is an expression of the existence of rich biodiversity, but it is also an expression of a knowledge of that biodiversity that revolves around its importance in supporting livelihoods and belief systems. People know the words for the natural world because it is important to be able to talk about the natural world. And people talk about the natural world because it is important to defining who they are, what they believe and value, and how they live their lives.

We all benefit from the knowledge contained within the diverse but indivisible ways of knowing nature and the languages required to communicate that knowledge. But we know that struggles for control over resources often create conflict that acts to diminish culture and obliterate language. Histories of colonialism are rife with examples of dispossession, alienation and genocide that have obliterated knowledge of, ways of understanding, and ways of communicating the natural world that we can never regain. And, despite the recognition of the integral relation between culture and biological diversity, we continue to confront dominant conditions that contribute to the demise of cultural diversity and the consequent loss of knowledge and biodiversity. But we also encounter situations that provide hope that institutional contexts can change in ways that demonstrate an understanding of the importance of cultural diversity. Important challenges that confront us today are not simply ways of understanding the relation between culture and biodiversity but ways of grounding conservation policy and practice in a sincere respect for culture and cultural diversity and its integral relation to the ongoing protection of biological diversity.

When communities are forcibly removed from protected areas or denied access to their cultural resources, their culture and social structure suffer tremendous negative impacts and conservation-oriented knowledge and practices are often lost with serious consequences for biodiversity. How can these past wrongs be righted, and how can these damages be prevented in the future?

Dominant forms of conservation practice are increasingly coordinated at a global scale through transnational institutions, agreements, and organizations. How does this global scale of coordination affect the capacity to integrate diverse cultural perspectives into effective biodiversity conservation policy and practice?

Environmental degradation, climate change, and biodiversity loss has focused much attention on the capacity for adaptation. What are the relations between culture, cultural diversity and capacity for adaptation to environmental degradation?
 

Models of management of natural resources will have to be reviewed and revisited in the context of the emerging challenges, especially in those parts of the world that will be most affected by climate change. In this context a number of initiatives are already underway in a number of nations to review policies and programmes for enabling better responses to the challenges and opportunities presented by climate change. Indigenous and traditional management models may have to be reviewed in the changed context to enable effective adaptation without conflict over governance and security issues.

What are the challenges posed by climate change and the responses to it in the management of natural resources? Are nation states viewing this issue from the point of security and the emergence of future potential conflicts?

Are indigenous people and local communities being included in the research being done and the new policies adopted by nation states? What about the impact of climate change on women and children? Who has benefited from the new opportunities that climate change has posed? What are the public-private partnership policies that are being adopted? What needs to be reviewed and improved?

Another aspect of conflict, environment and security pertains to the governance and management of natural resources in nations in internal conflict or those emerging from such conflicts.

Have livelihoods of indigenous groups and other local communities been affected by conflict? What have been some context specific successful coping strategies adopted by different communities? What has been the impact of conflict on women and their management of natural resources for livelihoods?