From July 8th to July 10th, Brasilia held an event called the Pre-COP of the Traditional Peoples and Communities of Brazil . This was a national preparatory meeting for COP30, the next UN climate change conference that will be held in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025.
Over 50 young leaders from Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local communities across Asia, Africa, and Latin America will gather in Bali, Indonesia, for the first-ever Global Youth Forum.
In July 2025, the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) signed into law the country’s first-ever land-use planning legislation, marking a historic step toward community-centered land governance and sustainable development in one of the world’s most biodiverse countries.
At its 20th anniversary celebration in Kathmandu, the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) announced the winners of its inaugural Collective Action Awards. The awards honor Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, and local communities from Africa, Asia, and Latin America for their leadership in defending their collective land, forest, and resource rights.
Hundreds of Indigenous and local community representatives from the world’s largest tropical forest basins held a historic convening on May 26–30, 2025, with government representatives, international development institutions, and donors to present their demands ahead of the next UN Climate Conference in Brazil (COP30).
As South Sudan’s Parliament prepares to reconvene in the coming days, the South Sudan Land Alliance, a coalition of civil society organizations and land rights advocates, is calling on the Transitional National Legislative Assembly to prioritize the passage of the National Land Policy.
The First Global Congress of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities from the Forest Basins brings together forest guardians from the Amazon, Congo, Borneo-Mekong-Southeast Asia, and Mesoamerica. These territories, long safeguarded by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, are essential to the Earth’s biodiversity and carbon balance—providing powerful solutions to the climate crisis.
We declare that there is no solution to the climate crisis without the recognition and protection of our territorial rights. Here, we present our priority demands and urge the Brazilian Presidency of COP30 to present concrete results for the respect, recognition and protection of our territories.
There are 13,318 villages in Tanzania, and of them, only 34% have a Village Land Use Plan (VLUP). A VLUP is a crucial prerequisite for obtaining a Certificate of Customary Right of Occupancy—the equivalent of securing land tenure. This can be especially important for women, who are often marginalized in land inheritance, lack access to credit services, and have little voice in disputes. Since 2021, the Ukijani project has helped issue more than 1,700 Certificates in villages throughout the country.
The secretary of the Board of Directors of the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Jungle (AIDESEP) shares the challenges she had to overcome to become an Indigenous woman leader.
Community Forest User Groups play an important role in protecting the forests on Chandragiri Hill in Nepal, but they didn’t begin to make significant progress in this quest until the women of these communities were allowed to join.
With population growth in Madagascar, land is in ever shorter supply and conflicts over land ownership are multiplying. We must build greater community recognition of women’s important role in society—not as competitors to men, but as people working together towards a common goal of better livelihoods and sustainable land management.
Decades after the world adopted what continues to be the most comprehensive roadmap for women’s rights, RRI’s latest report highlights enduring challenges in securing the rights of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women.
South Sudan, one of Africa’s most diverse countries and the world’s youngest Nation, is at a critical juncture. Despite being home to over 60 major ethnic groups, the country lacks a comprehensive land policy, leaving communities vulnerable to land grabs, exclusion, and conflict.
Have you ever wondered why people experiencing poverty in rural areas of the Global South tend to have insecure land tenure? If you have, you may have rightly concluded that the greed of powerful actors and colonialism are an important part of the story. But this barely begins to describe the forces that have strengthened and weakened tenure security across time for those with little voice and power.
This is the story of the president of the Association of Afro-descendant Women of Northern Cauca, Colombia, who faced the threats of armed conflict to fight for the rights of Afro-descendant women.
As the fight for climate justice continues, acknowledging the connections between land, water, ecosystems, and human communities is critical for the realization of positive and lasting change.
A new RRI study shows how Indigenous women-led enterprises boost local economies and are important for territorial governance and climate resilience.
This was by far the largest UNCCD CoP to date (the previous CoP15 in 2022 had 7,000 participants), but even in an increasingly crowded space, Indigenous voices rang loud and clear, achieving several important breakthroughs.
Building on the State of Funding report published in April 2024, this blog post shares important updates on finance for Indigenous Peoples', Afro-descendant Peoples', and local communities' tenure and forest guardianship and examples of how direct funding is already driving important progress in tropical forests and other key ecosystems.
After decades of being omitted from the UN’s biodiversity convention, Afro-descendant Peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean got great news at the 16th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) recently held in Cali, Colombia.