Global Summit on Collective Livelihoods & Conservation

The Talang Parit Indigenous community in Indonesia successfully used the RSPO complaints system to reclaim their customary land from a Samsung-linked palm oil company, culminating in a 2025 decision affirming their rights. As a result, the community is set to regain 300–500 hectares of productive palm oil gardens, valued at roughly USD 30,000 each 2-hectare plot, alongside a smallholder rejuvenation program, marking a major step forward in restoring livelihoods, strengthening local economies, and demonstrating how rights-based advocacy can translate into tangible community prosperity.

Community women from Tharu and Kumal tribes in Nepal restored degraded farmland and generated income by planting lime trees during the COVID-19 lockdown. These women displayed economic resilience by using traditional farming knowledge to simultaneously sustain their communities’ livelihoods and land.

The communities of Goudévé and Kponvié came together to secure their land while strengthening everyday livelihoods. In the face of land insecurity and climate pressures, they chose collective action, organizing peacefully to manage and protect more than 1,000 hectares of land vital for farming, food security, and future income. Building on this foundation, communities jointly adopted agroforestry and local composting practices. Farmers, particularly women and youth, began integrating fruit trees into their fields and replacing expensive chemical fertilizers with compost made from local resources, reducing production costs, improving soil fertility, and opening new income opportunities.

Women and youth in five provinces of the DRC were supported to strengthen livelihoods by building on local and Indigenous knowledge as a response to climate change. Women-led organizations documented and applied nature-based practices, such as agroecology, agroforestry, organic soil management, and sustainable use of forest resources, that are already part of community life. Through participatory learning and youth apprenticeship programs, communities developed ecological briquette production, organic agricultural inputs, and climate-resilient farming activities. These initiatives reduced production costs, improved food security, created income opportunities, and reinforced women’s leadership in local land and climate governance.

ASOARKA represents 212 Indigenous women from the Kankuamo reservation of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia. They’ve created fique handicrafts since 1993 to promote the preservation of cultural practices and respond to the lack of employment of Kankuama women. The woven fabrics have been their tool of economic resistance during the armed conflict. Rose Montero, a member of ASOARKA, said: “The participation and empowerment of women in other scenarios, transmitting knowledge to children and young people, has also allowed us to relate to other productive experiences, carry out exchange processes, and learn about them. It has also made us aware of organic production and environmental management.”

Made up of members of the Shipibo-Konibo people in the Amazon region of Peru, the community creates and sells products that strongly connect to the ancestral roots, customs, and languages, such as the production of handicrafts using one of their ancestral design systems called Kené, which was declared as National Cultural Heritage in 2008. Maroti Shobo, which means “sales house” (casa de ventas, in Spanish), has been a known name in the Peruvian handicraft world for more than 50 years, but it was in 2003 when three women artisans decided to restructure the Association to take it out of inadequate management and create an organization mainly integrated by women. From that day on, 24 Indigenous women partners keep running their shop, which opens every week in Plaza de Armas in Yaricocha.