Indigenous Peoples and Climate Change

Abstract

There has been a growing attention on the need to take into account the effects of global climate change. This is particularly so with respect to the increasing amount of green house gas emissions from the Untied States and Europe affecting poor peoples, especially those in developing countries. In 2003, for example, the experts of several international development agencies, including the World Bank, prepared a special report titled “Poverty and Climate Change: Reducing the Vulnerability of the Poor through Adaptation” (OECD 2003). This report followed the Eighth Session of the Conference of Parties (COP8) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in New Delhi, India in October 2002. It showed that poverty reduction is not only one of the major challenges of the 21st century, but also that climate change is taking place in many developing countries and is increasingly affecting, in a negative fashion, both the economic conditions and the health of poor people and their communities.