The Community Land Rights and Conservation Finance Initiative

Why Now?

The Community Land Rights and Conservation Finance Initiative (CLARIFI) was formed by RRI and the Campaign for Nature to fulfill a critical gap in the current ecosystem of funding for Indigenous and community rights and conservation.

About 1.8 billion Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, and local community members claim, live in, and steward the Earth’s most critical ecosystems: home to the vast majority of global biodiversity and 800 GtCo2e, all at risk of conversion by outside actors. Lands that are legally owned and managed by these communities demonstrate far lower deforestation rates and higher rates of carbon storage than other protected and unprotected areas. But despite these contributions, Indigenous Peoples and local communities own less than 15% of all forest lands globally.

Over the past decade, less than 1% of global climate funding has gone to Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ forest management. And just one-tenth of that 1% was directed towards securing their land tenure rights. The situation is even worse for Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and community women, whose land and resource rights are particularly constrained by unjust laws and practices despite their roles as forest and household managers, food providers, and rural enterprise leaders.

What will CLARIFI do?

Through targeted funding, coordination, and multi-level advocacy, CLARIFI will help Indigenous and community rightsholders tap into new and existing funding to expand the mapping and formal recognition of their lands, and to create and implement plans to support their conservation, livelihoods, gender justice, and self-determined development.

CLARIFI will mobilize large-scale funding from diverse sources concurrent with technical and organizational support. Its regranting mechanism will be flexible and able to operate in various developmental and political contexts to coordinate with many different types of organizations to support a broad range of activities. It will contribute to raising USD $10 billion between now and 2030 to achieve the following goals:

• Help protect at least 30% of the planet by 2030 by adding 400 million hectares to Indigenous Peoples’, Afro-descendant Peoples’, and local communities’ legally recognized territories.
• Reduce deforestation to help reach the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. 
• Increase these communities’ legal land ownership to at least 50% of all tropical forests.

How will it work?

1. By raising and deploying funds: CLARIFI is a regranting mechanism that will allocate funding to existing Indigenous, Afro-descendant, local, and women-led organizations rather than implementing projects directly. It aims to provide grants of USD $100k to USD $50 million. It will also serve as a trusted fiduciary for national and regional-level funds established by indigenous and community organizations.
2. Through coordination and monitoring: RRI and Campaign for Nature will coordinate with the existing Path to Scale network of donors and other funding initiatives that are raising ambition around tenure rights, monitor progress, learn, and adapt re-granting processes as needed.
3. And supporting a broad range of activities: CLARIFI will support the formal recognition of Indigenous Peoples’, Afro-descendant Peoples’, local communities’, and women’s collective land rights, as well as the development of their organizational capacities and governance, their self-determined conservation and natural resource management plans, and advocacy for legal reforms.
4. With co-governance by communities, their allies, and donors: CLARIFI is designed to be jointly led by representatives and/or leaders of Indigenous, Afro-descendant and local community rightsholders’ groups, their allies, and donors.

CLARIFI complements the existing ecosystem of financial mechanisms for investing in community rights, livelihoods, and conservation, including those that were instigated by RRI (the Tenure Facility and the Strategic Response Mechanism) as well as national and regional-level funds being created by Indigenous and community rightsholders’ organizations. The below matrix shows how CLARIFI will fill the current gap in the existing ecosystem of funding for community rights.

CLARIFI’s Steering Committee

CLARIFI’s design and early implementation is being guided by an advisory council including Indigenous and community rightsholder representatives from Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as its founding partners (RRI and Campaign for Nature).

Read the full web announcement on The Land Writes Blog.

If you would like more information, please contact Nelly Njinguet.

CLARIFI is an initiative by the Rights and Resources Initiative and Campaign for Nature.