Indigenous peoples and local communities have customary rights to at least half of the world’s land, but legal ownership over just ten percent. Research has shown that legally recognised community forests store more carbon and experience lower rates of deforestation than forests under other tenure regimes.

Despite legal insecurity, local indigenous communities worldwide invest up to 4.5 billion dollars per year in conservation, as much as 23 percent of the amount spent on land and forest conservation by the formal environmental community, said the report…

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