Indigenous people number over 300 million. They are inhabitants of practically each main biome of the earth and especially of the least disturbed terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems of the world. Based on an exhaustive review of recently published data, this chapter stresses the strategic importance of indigenous peoples in the maintenance and conservation of world's biodiversity. Four main link...

According to the most recent national data in Australia, chlamydia and gonorrhoea were 3 and 18 times more likely to be diagnosed in Aboriginal populations, respectively, compared with the non-Indigenous population, with 16–19 years old Indigenous Australians carrying the greatest burden of these infections. Reports confirm that almost half this age group living in remote communities has one or...

One of the central conservation debates over the last quarter of a century has been the effect of conservation initiatives on local livelihoods. Most recently, numerous negative evaluations have been made of both coercive top-down approaches to management of protected areas, which were dominant before the 1980s and focused on enforcement of protection, and efforts to decentralize governance and...

Abstract Participation of Indigenous peoples and local communities is encouraged in calls for sustainable transitions transformations. The term ‘community’ widely used yet nebulously defined. Conservation that removes people from their land invokes epistemological authority displaced relationships. We relate our work to the articles this special issue rethink relationship between humans nature ...

To examine differences in land use and environmental impacts between colonist and indigenous populations in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon, we combined data from household surveys and remotely sensed imagery that was collected from 778 colonist households in 64 colonization sectors, and 499 households from five indigenous groups in 36 communities. Overall, measures of deforestation and forest f...

BACKGROUND Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand consistently place near the top of the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Index (HDI) rankings, yet all have minority Indigenous populations with much poorer health and social conditions than non-Indigenous peoples. It is unclear just how the socioeconomic and health status of Indigenous peoples in these coun...

OBJECTIVE This paper details how we, as 'cultural outsiders', conducted a large gambling survey in an Indigenous Australian community that adhered to Indigenous ethical protocols and values while differing from some standard survey practices. APPROACH The paper summarises the ethical guidelines for conducting Indigenous public health research. It describes research processes used in the study...

Arctic indigenous peoples face significant challenges resulting from the contamination of Arctic air, water, and soil by persistent organic pollutants, heavy metals, and radionuclides. International cooperative efforts among governments and research institutions are under way to collect the information needed by environmental health scientists and public health officials to address environmenta...

Cad. Saúde Pública, Rio de Janeiro, 26(5):853-878, mai, 2010 values are formed. There is thus a significant difference between the lifeworlds of indigenous leaders, especially those who are more professionalized, and the lifeworlds of common indigenous subjects, more bound to the traditional forms of daily life in their cultures. This means that in discussions involving traditional values, comm...