Nature management and social corporate responsibility

In Salekhard the participants are working actively on the platform of “Responsible nature management” within the international forum of indigenous peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East. The representatives of indigenous peoples from northern regions are telling about their problems and are making suggestions.

In their opinion, today the main thing is to develop unified standards for industrial enterprises and extracting organizations independently of their sphere of activity. Indigenous peoples of the North always have a responsible attitude to nature management. At that, there are no such problems with international companies, as they work on standards.
In addition, the participants of the session are going to send the suggestion to the State Duma of the Russian Federation on development of the draft law on obligatory ecological assessment of impact on basic environment. The experts told about the necessity legislatively to regulate access of peoples to biological resources. Now extracting companies are working under two schemes — compensation for damage or conducting of ethnological expert examination. It is important for indigenous peoples to understand the essence of these principles.
The participants marked situations when they had faced the principle that ethnologic expert examination did not justify expectations of peoples, who thought that extracting companies would be closed after conducting of the examination. They underline that legislation on social corporate responsibility is necessary, and it should be coordinated with nature-protecting legislation.
Very heated debates are taking place, and although territories are different, they have similar problems. Participants of the session do not want indigenous peoples being remembered only when forums are conducted.
As we should remind, the work of the forum is taking place on five thematic sections. The participants are discussing issues of preservation of traditional branches of economy, measures on ensuring of access to land, forest and water biological resources, regulation of activity of indigenous communities and responsible nature management.