Indigenous people more often face arrest, violence when protecting land say researchers – APTN News
Jul 22, 2020
After analysing thousands of environmental stand-offs around the world, a group of international researchers report that Indigenous people are more often threatened with arrest, violence, and in some cases death, than others.
In a first of its kind study published in Global Environmental Change, researchers from all over the world looked at more than 2,700 environmental conflicts and found that those protesting injustice often “suffer from high rates of criminalization, physical violence and murder.”
“There’s some sort of violence against those protecting the environment in about one out of every five cases. In eight per cent of cases, there’s an activist killed,” explained Leah Temper, a researcher at McGill University’s school of Natural Resource Sciences who contributed to the study.
“These numbers increase dramatically when Indigenous communities are involved in these conflicts,” Temper added.
Researchers used the information tracked by the Environmental Justice Atlas, or EJ Atlas, an environmental data-tracking website co-directed by Temper.
