Background briefings

Sierra del Divisor: The Watershed Mountains

In the depths of the Amazon lies a region known as the Sierra del Divisor – “The Watershed Mountains” This unique and biodiverse land is home to a number of uncontacted tribes. They are running for their lives from loggers and drug traffickers w...

Yaguareté Porã

Home to the country's last remaining uncontacted Indians and famed for its biological diversity, Paraguay's Chaco forest is being rapidly destroyed by Brazilian company Yaguareté Porã to provide beef for Europe, Russia and China. If the company i...

Tiger Reserves, India

The lives of tribal people across India are being destroyed in the name of tiger conservation. This is illegal under national and international law. And it won’t save the tiger.

Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswana

The Central Kalahari Game Reserve was created in 1961 as a “place of sanctuary” for the Bushmen to live in. Now these Bushmen hunters are being starved off their land in the name of conservation despite diamonds being mined inside the reserve.

Southeast Cameroon

The development of protected areas in southeast Cameroon has progressively robbed the Baka “Pygmies” of access to their ancestral lands. They are regularly harassed, arrested and even tortured by wildlife officers and the soldiers that accompany t...

India's Forest Rights Act

When the Forest Rights Act was passed in 2006 it was intended to address the ‘historical injustice’ to India’s ‘traditional forest dwellers’. But now this vital law is under threat.

Mainstreaming

‘Unless we affirm our culture and right and language, we won’t live. We have to say, by ourselves at least, ours is good: our colour is good, our language is good, our art is good, our way of living is good. If we can respect your religion and y...

Shifting cultivation

What is it and who does it? Swidden agriculture, also known as shifting cultivation, refers to a technique of rotational farming in which land is cleared for cultivation (normally by fire) and then left to regenerate after a few years. Governmen...

Camisea Gas Project

100km from Machu Picchu the lives of uncontacted tribes are at threat. A huge gas project known as Camisea is located in the heart of their land. Now the Peruvian government is searching for more gas that will reach further into their territory.

Protected areas

‘Protected areas’ or ‘parks’ are catch-all phrases for areas of land or sea that are being protected in the name of conservation. Over 13% of the land on our planet is in a protected area. That is a vast two billion hectares – over twice the area ...

The Bennett Code

The Bennett Code is a draft Code of Conduct for conservation organisations, endorsed by Survival.

Conservation Refugees

Across the world millions of people – the majority of them Indigenous – have been illegally evicted from their ancestral homelands in the name of conservation. In India alone hundreds of thousands of people have been evicted from parks and over th...