LHASA: Tibetans have said that China is trying to strip them off their lands under the garb of climate mitigation efforts thus jeopardizing the basic rights and livelihoods of the countrymen.

Citing locals, Tibet Press reported that they were forced to give up ownership of their land as well as stopped from using grazing fields. They said that Beijing has started revoking land permits and confiscating farmlands and grazing grounds under the Grassland Preservation Policy.

Water resources from Tibet take care of China’s water needs, which have caused Beijing to declare grasslands as national parks. All this has disrupted the lives and the livelihoods of Tibetan people, according to the media outlet.

Tibet is a part of the Third Pole- Earths’ largest store of glaciers, ice and permafrost. Thus urbanization and disrupting the traditional likelihoods in Tibet are going to have huge negative COP26 Summit in Glasgow.

According to the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD), China was punishing Tibetans in the name of climate action and reducing carbon emissions.

China is relocating and resettling nomadic pastoralists from highlands to urban areas, which can lead to loss of land tenure security, food security and a host of other collective rights, it said, Tibet Press reported.

China’s program to address climate change involved restructuring Tibetan’s way of life even as allowing an intensive, industrial, market-based economy in other parts of the country, TCHRD said. Chinese troops occupied Tibet in 1950 and later annexed it.

The 1959 Tibetan uprising saw violent clashes between Tibetan residents and Chinese forces. The 14th Dalai Lama fled to neighboring India after the failed uprising against Chinese rule. The Dalai Lama, the supreme Tibetan Buddhist leader, established a government-in-exile in India. (ANI)