‘Taraw ng Lumalayag’ (Voyager Karst) is located within a 22,202-hectare Protected Area (PA) and is part of the Cabayugan ancestral domain, which housed the first Tagbanua settlers, Bayi Sinada and Apu Magsinambi. It is considered a sacred cave. (Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Delahay)
Research institutes report that despite the country’s abundance of indigenous lands and the ecosystem services they provide, about half of its ancestral territories are under environmental threat.
At least 1.25 million hectares of ancestral lands are currently ‘involved in environmentally destructive projects,’ reveals the 2022 Indigenous Peoples Speech Report (Sipa) by the Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center (LRC) became.
Extractive industries such as logging, mining and quarrying account for at least 51% of all environmentally significant projects (ECPs).
The LRC has defined an ECP as a project that creates significant ecological risks, including large-scale disturbance and pollution of land, waterways, air, climate, and biodiversity.
Citing recent data from the Environmental Management Agency, the LRC said that 83 of the country’s 410 ECPs have ancestral domain name registration certificates, which are formal deeds of Indigenous Peoples (IP) ancestral title. Discovered to be located in or near the land beneath the Tome (CADT). Land under the 1987 Indigenous Rights Act (Ipra). According to the report, 49% of mining projects competed with CADT, and 87% of forest areas covered by large-scale logging competed with registered ancestral domains.
The LRC report also said that the country’s indigenous territories cover nearly 13 million to 14 million hectares of landscape, but are registered with the CADT, based on 2021 data from the National Commission for Indigenous Peoples. It points out that the land area is only 5.97 million hectares.
Yet, even without formal land titles, 5.3 million hectares of ancestral territory is forest, accounting for 75% of our remaining forest cover and generating P1.1 trillion in ecosystem value annually.
The LRC, one of the groups that pushed for Ipra’s passage, said the current situation showed that the law’s protective mechanisms were “undermined.”
“Underlying these tensions and pressures with intellectual property and its ancestral domain is the poor implementation of the free and prior informed consent (FPIC) process,” the group notes in its report. , added that “there have been numerous reports of fraudulent takeovers of FPIC.”
Lawyer Mai Taqueban, executive director of the LRC, said in the face of the climate crisis, “There is an urgent need to protect ancestral domains and their natural defenses against extreme climate impacts.”
“The exploitation and commoditization of nature is, sadly, a permanent framework for managing our natural resources,” said Takeban.
She added that the situation has not only marginalized IPs, but has also exacerbated their human rights situation, as “many of them naturally oppose these projects.”
According to the report, 45 IPs were killed between 2019 and 2021, in incidents “related to various land and resource grabbing issues.”
Taqueban said intellectual property rights will “pursue the intellectual property agenda” including “Ipra’s harmonization of natural resources and other laws affecting intellectual property rights under the new government.” Stated.
The LRC launched Sipa 2022 ahead of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference. It “aims to encourage both local and global leaders to support indigenous peoples’ actions in addressing the climate crisis.”
read: Palace eases IP fears in ‘development’ of ancestral domains
read next
Subscribe to INQUIRER PLUS to access The Philippine Daily Inquirer and over 70 other titles, share up to 5 gadgets, listen to the news, download at 4am and share articles on social media. You can Call 896 6000.
