-Radio Free Asia Tibetan.
Reported by Lobe Socktsang for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Written in English by Richard Finney.
Policies aimed at mitigating climate change are destroying Tibetan approaches to managing the land and forcing nomads from their grazing grounds.
Chinese policies aimed at mitigating climate change on the Tibetan plateau are destroying traditional Tibetan approaches to managing the land, and serve only to further government efforts to move nomads from their grazing grounds, according to a report released this week.
“China has explicit and elaborate plans to empty Tibet of Tibetans, concentrating them in towns and cities, with few ways forward into the urban economy, and no way back to their lands,” says the report “Unsustainable Futures” by the India-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy.
“Nomadic families all over Tibet have, over decades, been gradually squeezed into poverty by ever-tightening restrictions on the size of land allocations,” says the TCHRD report, which comes ahead of a UN climate change conference to be held at the end of October and in November in Glasgow.
Other Chinese policies impacting traditional nomad lifestyles include the compulsory fencing of allocated lands and construction of houses on winter pasture, limits on herd size, and pressure to sell more animals at younger ages, TCHRD said. Continue Reading