Climate Change - Further Threat to Australia's Aboriginals

Climate change will further marginalise Australia's Aboriginal communities, forcing them out of their traditional lands, destroying their culture and significantly affecting their access to water resources, indigenous rights advocates warn. "As coastal and island communities confront rising sea levels, and inland areas become hotter and drier, indigenous people are at risk of further economic marginalisation, as well as potential dislocation from and exploitation of their traditional lands, waters and natural resources," said Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma.

Cultural genocide

Indigenous people have been living in close affinity with nature for thousands of years, preserving the environment and protecting the biodiversity. "Dispossession and a loss of access to traditional lands, waters, and natural resources may be described as cultural genocide; a loss of ancestral, spiritual, totemic and language connections to lands and associated areas," said the Human Rights Commission's 2008 Social Justice and Native Title reports launched this week.
Aboriginal people account for only 2.5 per cent of the total population, with an estimated population of 517,200, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' 2006 Census. "The cruel irony is that indigenous people have the smallest ecological footprint but are being asked to carry the heaviest burden of climate change," Commissioner Calma added.

New partnership with indigenous people urged

The government of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has signed the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and committed to reducing Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020 if the world agrees to an ambitious global deal to stabilise levels of CO2 equivalent at 450 parts per million or lower by 2050. The new reports are urging the government to create new partnerships with indigenous Australians in climate change policy and planning. 

(Source: IPS)