Climate change and environmental degradation in Yanomami People’s Land: Intersectional threats and the need for improved policy-making

Abstract

The Yanomami are an Amazonian Indigenous people in northern Brazil and southern Venezuela. The Yanomami are considered a ‘recent contact Indigenous People’, with the first contacts with non-indigenous recorded between 1910 and 1940 and with some groups in voluntary isolation. They are one of the resilient peoples that practise their traditional way of life, which involves a strong connection to the land and the environment. Following an expert-driven literature review based on a set of available documentation on the Brazilian Indigenous Peoples, focusing on the overlapping threats that affect Indigenous Lands and triangulating the information collected with data produced on Brazilian Amazon Rainforest Monitoring Program by Satellite (PRODES) within the Space Research National Institute (INPE), this communication presents a case analysis of the main pressures and threats Yanomami People faces. The overlapped threats manifest in structural and cyclical issues, linked to the environmental crisis arising from extractives’ illegal activities, such as logging, and mining invasions, the recurrent attacks, mercury contamination of the river water, malnutrition caused by contaminated fish, scarcity of hunting, and violence committed against the people, especially women and children. Added to these multiple social, political, and environmental threats are the impacts of climate change, which disproportionately affect forest peoples. Deforestation, fires, drought, and other extreme events that are linked to climate change effects are analysed, leading to reflections on Brazilian government policies' influence and on the urgency to implement policies in defence of Indigenous Lands, the Amazon Forest, and its guardians.