Not only—as most of you know—will the world’s 370 million indigenous people be most negatively affected by a warming planet while having had the least to do with it heating up, BUT attempts to mitigate climate change are in many cases also doing them a bad turn. 

At the UN conference in Darwin, Australia, the United Nation’s University, according to Reuters, said:

"Biofuel production, renewable energy expansion (and) other mitigation measures (are) uprooting indigenous peoples in many regions."

The comment summed up the findings of a paper titled, “The impact of climate change mitigation measures on indigenous peoples and on their territories and lands,” which used case studies to examine the impact of biofuel on the cost of food in the Arctic; their displacement of people in Malaysia and Indonesia due to biofuel plantations; and carbon forestry projects that have displaced people in India and Uganda.

To try and avoid problems such as these in the future, the paper recommends that a working group representing indigenous people be created within the UNFCCC– the UN secretariat tasked with overseeing the Kyoto Protocol treaty.   

There’s a lot we don’t know about solving climate change, but providing everyone a seat at the negotiating table will unearth the answers a whole lot fasters.