1.3 billion people rely on forests to survive

[xchrom]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21812-13-billion-people-rely-on-forests-to-survive.html


Many of the forests that people occupy are state property and can be sold or leased without consulting the inhabitants (Image: Picture Contact BV/Alamy)

Hands off our forest! The UN has adopted a series of voluntary guidelines to protect indigenous peoples' rights to the land on which they live. And not before time, as a recent report suggests hundreds of millions could be evicted by modern-day land grabs.

Many indigenous peoples have lived in the same place for centuries, but they do not have legal tenure. Forest peoples, who live in the rainforests of South America, Africa and south-east Asia, are particularly vulnerable. Their forests are often sold or leased to companies or foreign countries for farming, logging or mining. The local people are usually evicted.

The sheer scale of the problem is highlighted in a report from the Forest Peoples Programme in the UK. The FPP estimates that roughly 1.3 billion people – more than one-seventh of the global population – are directly dependent on forests.

At least 350 million could lose their homes in land grabs, says Sophie Chao of the FPP, because their rights to the land are not recognised under national law.

[BlueToTheBone]

1. Of course, the whole planet

relies on the forests to breather.

[XemaSab]

3. But only about 6 billion of us

rely on forests for clean drinking water.

[BlueToTheBone]

5. who gets the nasty stuff?

[Gregorian]

2. Maybe it'll get better when there's another billion humans on the planet.

Add another billion and let's see how things look in terms of resources.

[xtraxritical]

4. Look what happened to our own Native Americans.

They preserved the land for ten thousand years and we have decimated it in about two hundred. Support Zero Population Growth.