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These Adivasi communities lived by shifting cultivation of millets and other subsistence crops, as well as rice cultivation, in forested mountains of eastern India.

They have regenerated the forest, which had been damaged by logging and cattle ranching, restored endangered species, enhanced food security through hunting, gathering, agroforestry and shifting cultivation, and otherwise shaped a way of life they hope will ensure the continuation of their community and principles.

"The decrease in forest cover of the state is mainly due to encroachment in forest land, biotic pressure, rotational felling in tea gardens and shifting cultivation," the environment ministry's State of the Forest report said in 2015.

Far from aggravating climate change, shifting cultivation could help indigenous peoples and the rest of humankind adapt to it.

According to the FAO’s Yon Fernandez de Larrinoa, the organization is now reconsidering whether shifting cultivation is really as backward as it used to think.