“In Africa, indigenous peoples and local communities have customary rights to around 80 percent of the land, but they are only recognized for 16 percent of that territory,” explained Patrick Kipalu, Africa Program Coordinator at the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI).

Governments maintain control over more than two-thirds of global forest area, much of which is claimed by local communities, RRI said in a report this month.

“If appropriately leveraged, natural climate solutions can contribute upwards of 37 percent of cost-effective CO2 mitigation by 2030 and evidence shows Indigenous Peoples and local communities are key to achieving such outcomes.” This is one of the key conclusions from the global baseline study described as “the most comprehensive assessment to date of carbon storage in documented community lands worldwide.”

A recent study released by Washington-based research coalition Rights and Resources Initiative showed that indigenous peoples and local communities across the globe owned at least 418 million hectares, 15.2 percent of the forestland in the regions.

Granting forest dwellers legal rights to their traditional lands helps fight deforestation and climate change, but the vast majority of the world’s forests remain under government control with limited access for communities, researchers said. Only about 14 percent of forests, or about 527 million hectares, were legally owned or designated for local communities in 58 countries surveyed by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group.

The NGO Rights and Resources International (RRI) estimates that indigenous peoples have legally recognized rights to just 10 percent of the world’s land, though they control as much as 65 percent through customary, community-based tenure systems. Anne-Sophie Gindroz, RRI’s facilitator for South East Asia, said that the law isn’t only failing indigenous communities when it comes to awarding them title to their traditional lands. 

Land managed by indigenous people holds vastly more carbon than previously thought, according to a report that calls for an urgent strengthening of their land rights to avoid its release into the atmosphere. But while communities have succeeded in securing governmental recognition of their forest rights for 15 per cent of forests globally, the pace of recognition since 2008 has decreased, according to the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), the organisation behind a second report.

The study, led by Rights and Resources International (RRI), found that indigenous peoples are far better stewards of the land than their countries’ governments.

While communities have succeeded in securing governmental recognition of their forest rights for 15 per cent of forests globally, the pace of recognition since 2008 has decreased, according to the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), the organisation behind a second report.

Thai campaigners have criticized a pilot program that allows villagers to live in the forest as long as they care for the environment, arguing that it does not give land tenure security.

Los gobiernos y las empresas utilizan cada vez más la persecución legal para retratar a los activistas indígenas como criminales y terroristas, poniéndolos en mayor…

Un informe publicado por la representante de los pueblos indígenas de la ONU el pasado lunes revela que tanto el sector privado como los gobiernos codician las tierras de los pueblos indígenas para llevar a cabo en ellos proyectos de desarrollo económico.

A new United Nations report warns that “in a wide variety of countries,” both physical violence and legal prosecution are used against Indigenous Peoples defending their rights and lands. They are “criminalized”.

In support of the Special Rapporteur’s report, a new website brings together audio and written testimony provided by indigenous leaders on this pervasive problem worldwide. The report and supplementary materials describe a systematic attack on indigenous land and human rights defenders around the world, an effort to silence those who oppose development projects on their lands.

Governments and corporations are increasingly using legal persecution to portray indigenous activists as criminals and terrorists, putting them at heightened risk of violence, the United Nations said on Monday. Indigenous leaders and campaigners fighting to protect land from development are being stymied and silenced by rising militarization, national security acts and anti-terrorism laws, according to a report submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Land conflicts can be fatal for burgeoning agribusiness or other enterprises located in rural regions, but many companies have limited knowledge of how to anticipate and evaluate land-related risk. This is particularly true for land held under collective arrangements by Indigenous peoples or other communities, which is seldom formally documented.

None of these measures can be achieved if forests are not at the heart of land use policies, development strategies, and actions that go far beyond the forest sector. Consequently, there has been an increased emphasis on certain sustainable management practices, especially those that can integrate multiple sectors to evaluate the opportunities of food, water and energy security.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on indigenous peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, has released a report highly critical of the global conservation movement and calling for indigenous peoples and other local communities to have a greater say in protecting the world’s forests. Titled Cornered by Protected Areas and co-authored with the US-based NGO Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), the report is an explicit condemnation of “fortress conservation.”

Indigenous peoples and local communities conserve lands and forests for a quarter of the cost of public and private investments in protected areas, according to new findings released at the Oslo Tropical Forest Forum last week, yet “fortress conservation” strategies often see indigenous peoples driven from their land in an effort to protect it from human activity.

Throwing weight behind the demands of indigenous peoples and activists, a new research by Washington-based Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) has found that indigenous peoples and local communities are able to achieve equivalent conservation outcomes by investing only a fraction of the total money spent on conservation by all other agencies.