Forest people forced off their land in the name of conservation

The document examines how conservation policies are used to forcibly evict indigenous peoples from ancestral lands, often masking commercial interests. It highlights the disproportionate impact on women and children and provides case studies from India's Panna Tiger Reserve and Kenya's Embobut Forest to illustrate human rights violations and the failure of top-down conservation models.

• Governments frequently use conservation as a pretext to evict indigenous communities, sometimes with the hidden agenda of leasing or selling the land for commercial purposes once the inhabitants are removed.
• Forced evictions lead to a loss of livelihoods and culture, and can increase human-wildlife conflict as shrinking forest areas lead to more frequent incursions of animals like tigers and elephants into farming villages.
• Conservation-driven evictions disproportionately harm women, as monetary compensation is typically given to men and women lose the natural resources essential for feeding their children, leaving them vulnerable to harassment by officials when they attempt to access the forest.
• In India's Panna district, adivasi communities have been evicted from the Panna Tiger Reserve since 1982; while the government justifies this as wildlife protection, it has granted mining leases to companies such as Rio Tinto within the reserve.
• The Sengwer people in Kenya's Embobut Forest have faced systemic land denial and forced evictions, exacerbated by a World Bank-funded Natural Resource Management Project (NRMP) from 2007 to 2013 that failed to comply with safeguard policies on Indigenous Peoples.

APA

Center for International Environmental Law (2016). Forest people forced off their land in the name of conservation. https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Forest-people-forced-off-their-land-in-the-name-of-conservation.pdf

Chicago

Center for International Environmental Law. Forest people forced off their land in the name of conservation. 2016. https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Forest-people-forced-off-their-land-in-the-name-of-conservation.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Center for International Environmental Law |title=Forest people forced off their land in the name of conservation |date=September 2016 |url=https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Forest-people-forced-off-their-land-in-the-name-of-conservation.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{centerforinternationalenvironmentallaw2016forest, author = {{Center for International Environmental Law}}, title = {{Forest people forced off their land in the name of conservation}}, institution = {Center for International Environmental Law}, year = {2016}, month = sep, url = {https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Forest-people-forced-off-their-land-in-the-name-of-conservation.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }