Global impacts of extractive and industrial development projects on Indigenous Peoples' lifeways, lands, and rights

Abstract

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.

Fig. 1.. Map of environmental conflicts involving Indigenous Peoples and other groups (n = 3081), ILO C169 signatory countries, and Indigenous Peoples’ lands.

The resolution is by necessity imprecise, as boundaries between Indigenous and other lands are often under dispute. Unmapped areas do not necessarily indicate an absence of Indigenous Peoples or an absence of conflicts, but areas for which an Indigenous connection cannot be inferred on the basis of publicly available geospatial data or no conflict data are available (40). A total of 95% of the environmental conflicts involving Indigenous Peoples began during or after the 1970s, while more than 50% of cases began between 2007 and 2020. Note that social-environmental impacts occurring in environmental conflicts have long-term effects that compromise Indigenous Peoples’ lifeways well beyond the year when the conflict started. ILO C169 signatory countries are provided in table S3. UNDRIP was adopted in 2007 in the General Assembly by a majority of 144 states (table S4).

Fig. 2.. Overview of environmental conflicts involving Indigenous Peoples.

(Top) Left: Environmental conflicts involving Indigenous Peoples compared to the share of the Indigenous population of the world population. Right: Most reported Indigenous groups affected by environmental conflicts and their linguistic situation. (Bottom) Sectors causing environmental conflicts with Indigenous Peoples globally. Sectoral definitions and examples are provided in table S1. Population estimates refer to 2019 (43).

Fig. 3.. Heatmap of reported social-environmental impacts and UNDRIP rights (in parentheses) jeopardized across sectors, causing environmental conflicts with Indigenous Peoples (n = 1044).

Confidence intervals (95%) of reported frequencies are shown in bold italics in the figure and in detail in table S5. Additional uncertainty in reported frequencies may result from potential data reporting biases (see Materials and Methods for discussion on data limitations). Impact categories are not mutually exclusive; percentages do not add up to 100% (table S1).