Wangan and Jagalingou’s battle against Adani will be a starting point for academic study of Indigenous rights in climate change era

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Traditional owners fighting to stop Australia’s largest proposed coalmine are at the centre of a new University of Queensland project exploring worldwide Indigenous rights movements in the era of climate upheaval.

Leaders from the Wangan and Jagalingou traditional owners council, who are enmeshed in a legal and lobbying effort to head off Adani’s Carmichael mine, will collaborate with academics and human rights lawyers for the first “flagship” project chosen by UQ’s Global Change Institute.

The prominent Canadian activist and journalist Naomi Klein said the W&J traditional owners were “at the forefront of fossil fuel resistance and protecting their land, water and culture”.

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UQ said the project would “explore the international Indigenous movement that is reimagining human rights and social and economic development in the global era of scarce water resources, climate change and energy transition”.

The project – We Are The People From That Land: Centring Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in the Transition to a Sustainable, Low-Carbon Future – will involve work by three UQ “investigators” across different disciplines.

The academics will work with W&J leaders including Murrawah Johnson, who Klein said was “a powerful spokesperson and organiser who is on the front line of holding back one of the largest proposed coal mines in the world”.

“With her elders and council, she is shining a light on the urgent need for a justice-based transition in the face of the climate crisis,” Klein said.

The W&J at large are divided over the question of allowing Adani to exploit their Galilee basin homelands for the open-cut Carmichael coalmine.

Questions about discrete payments by Adani to some W&J representatives who support the mine were this year a flashpoint in an ongoing dispute over who legitimately speaks for traditional owners.

The UQ project researchers are the economist John Quiggin, the social science researcher Kristen Lyons, who has worked in development and environmental sociology, and the political scientist Morgan Briggs.

UQ said the GCI “flagship projects cut across disciplinary and thematic boundaries, demanding new ways of thinking”.

Human rights lawyer Benedict Coyne, who has acted in some of the W&J challenges around the mining proposal, will provide legal analysis.

Johnson said the project was “a great opportunity for the Wangan and Jagalingou people to chart a new path to justice and sustainability, and to social and economic opportunities in the transition to a low-carbon world”.

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“The project will help shape a shared understanding of how to sustain our lands and waters and enrich our culture, and build our futures on this,” she said.

Adrian Burragubba, the senior W&J traditional owner who is spearheading legal challenges around the mining proposal, said: “We want to share our knowledge and give the world an appreciation of the significance of our culture and the way in which the protection of lands and waters is a matter of Indigenous law and environmental sustainability”.

Coyne said the project would “greatly enhance our understanding of the intersection of the important issues at play in contemporary Australia and internationally regarding climate change, natural resource conservation and human rights – particularly the rights of Indigenous peoples”.

The project will be funded to the value of up to $120,000 over two years.

It is backed by a longtime GCI supporter, the multimillionaire Wotif founder turned philanthropist Graeme Wood, who is also a financial backer of Guardian Australia.

Wood said W&J council leaders were “forging new ground in our understanding of Indigenous rights in Australia in the transition to a low carbon and just future”.

• This story was amended on 14 November 2016 to clarify that Benedict Coyne is not acting in his capacity as president of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights.