Workshop Report - Dana + 20: Mobile Indigenous Peoples, Conservation, Sustainable Development, and Climate Change Two Decades after the Dana Declaration
Mobile Peoples – including many Indigenous, traditional, nomadic and tribal peoples – are confronted with unprecedented challenges, including increasingly frequent floods and droughts associated with climate change; desertification, deforestation and other forms of land degradation; and loss of biodiversity, all of which threaten their food sovereignty, security and access to fodder. The impacts of climate change are unfolding in the territories of Mobile Peoples, exacerbated by ongoing emissions from the use of fossil fuels by top emitter countries and the polluter elite.1 In the name of biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation, Mobile Peoples are increasingly displaced, dispossessed and expelled from their traditional territories, or else targeted as emitters just for continuing their traditional lifeways. In 2002, the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) at the University of Oxford brought together scholars, practitioners and grassroots activists to discuss the impact of conservation on Mobile Peoples’ livelihoods and rights. A key product was the Dana Declaration on Conservation and Mobile Peoples (www. danadeclaration.org), which was endorsed in the Durban Accords at the World Parks Congress (2003) and at the World Conservation Congress. Ten years later, the RSC convened a Dana+10 workshop, again in Wadi Dana, to review progress since 2002 and to consider how the principles of the Dana Declaration hold true not only in the context of conservation, but with regards to the extractive industries. The Dana+10 group developed a statement that was delivered at the Rio +20 meetings in June 2012. Now, twenty years since the Dana Declaration, the Refugee Studies Centre has partnered with Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment to take stock of achievements and progress over the past two decades, and to consider emerging and evolving challenges. Working with the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN, Jordan), representatives of the World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples (WAMIP), concerned policymakers and academics, and representatives of Mobile Peoples from around the world – including Mongolia, Malaysia, India, Iran, Jordan, Sweden, Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia and Peru – were brought together for a Dana +20 workshop from September 7th to 10th, 2022. A series of pre-meetings were held online with delegates from June–August 2022 to discuss and develop key themes for the final workshop agenda