November 14 marks Gender Day and Water Day at CoP27 in Sharm-El-Sheikh, Egypt. We must take a moment to recognize how Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women and girls are leaders in climate change mitigation and adaptation and integral to attaining the UN's 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.
On November 11 at CoP27, 41 grassroots women’s organizations from Asia, Africa, and Latin America launched a new advocacy network called the Women in Global South Alliance for Tenure and Climate.
RRI is excited to announce the launch of its new online Tenure Tool. This platform, hosted on RRI’s website, will give rightsholders, researchers, activists, policymakers, and the public free and easy access to qualitative and quantitative data on the forest tenure rights of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, local communities, and the women within those communities.
This analysis highlights the urgent need to work on a rights-based approach to conservation in the Colombian and Peruvian Amazon considering the multiple collective rights of Indigenous Peoples and Afro-descendant Peoples. The study proposes a roadmap to transform, strengthen and expand existing conservation legal frameworks.
In this new report, researchers compiled data on this funding stream and assessed the grants along different dimensions of “Fit for Purpose” criteria—determining whether the funding achieved its intended goals or was compromised in delivery and effectiveness.
Following more than three years of investigation into the armed conflict in Colombia, the Truth Commission, which was created by the signing of the peace agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2016, published the first chapter of its final report on June 28, 2022. This blog post looks at some of its key findings and testimonies.
This July, an RRI delegation participated in the first-ever IUCN Africa Protected Areas Congress (APAC) in Rwanda and included Indigenous and community leaders from the Republic of Congo, the DRC, Liberia, Cameroon, and Kenya. APAC marked a crucial moment in shaping Africa’s conservation agenda and culminated in the Kigali Call to Action. This is our delegation’s response to this Call.
The Stockholm+50 associated event aimed to highlight the role and importance of Indigenous peoples and local communities in safeguarding the world’s forests, ecosystems, and biodiversity. The event was one of three collaborative events held on June 1st at Sida ahead ofStockholm+50, co-arranged by Sida, The Tenure Facility, SwedBio, The Rights and Resource Initiative, and the Focali – SIANI Dialogue Forum.
Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) and the Chepkitale Indigenous Peoples' Development Project (CIPDP) organized a site visit to Chepkitale to learn from the Ogiek of Mt. Elgon and shine light on the transformative role of community-led conservation in protecting Kenya's biodiversity-rich forests.
When members of the Indonesia-based AsM Law Office landed in Monrovia, Liberia this June, they had a two-fold agenda for their two week exchange with leaders of Liberian civil society.
Rights and Resources Initiative expresses its solidarity with the leaders of the Indigenous rights movement in Ecuador who are being criminalized for exercising their legitimate right to mobilize and defend their human rights.
Long-time RRI collaborator Social Entrepreneurs for Sustainable Development (SESDev) examines how Liberia’s Land Rights Law has impacted women’s land rights and livelihoods since 2018.
A new study led by biologists at University of Amsterdam shows that the minimum land area requiring urgent conservation attention to safeguard Earth’s biodiversity is 64 million square km, equalling 44% of the planet’s terrestrial area.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Senate took a big leap forward on June 10, 2022 in recognizing the customary rights of its Indigenous population by adopting a new law on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of the Indigenous Pygmy Peoples.
Global trade, consumption, population growth, and urbanization drive transformations that, in part, drive nature’s destruction. The World Economic Forum ranks biodiversity loss as a global top-five risk. Clearly, protecting the environment should be high on political and policy agendas—but too often environmental governance is weak and policy implementation neglected.
Over 1,900 Native communities impacted by extractive and infrastructure projects during the pandemic
Platform reveals the multidimensional impact of extractive and infrastructure projects in six Latin American countries during the first two years of the pandemic. Peru and Colombia are the countries with the most affected communities.
India is among the top ten countries most vulnerable to climate change. A new study finds that the Forest Rights Act is an effective tool to enable rights-based and gender-responsive approaches to climate action and can legally empower forest dwellers to manage and govern nearly 40 million hectares of the country's forests.
We are delighted to share that Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) has received an unrestricted grant of USD 15 million from Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott to support the recognition of land and resource rights of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples and local communities across the world – including the women within these groups.
The increased interest in carbon markets comes with a number of risks. Many forest carbon offsetting schemes are located in lands historically claimed, inhabited, and used by Indigenous Peoples and local communities but oftentimes the rights of these communities have not been secured, putting their well-being at risk — and threatening the future of carbon markets.
To forge women’s empowerment worldwide, governments and donors must take action for gender justice and urgently make funding available and accessible to Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women’s organizations in countries in the Global South that have been historically under-supported and under-funded.
In Nawalpur district, 197 km southwest of Kathmandu, women from the Tharu and Kumal tribes in Madyavindu Municipality worked together throughout the 2021 monsoon season finding ways to adapt and support their communities while adhering to pandemic safety guidelines, demonstrating their inspiring resilience and socio-economic prowess.
Several forest regulations recently introduced by Nepal’s Ministry of Forest and Environment are raising serious human rights concerns among the country’s local forest communities. These provisions, currently under cabinet review, are geared to become part of Nepal’s Forest Act. But local forest communities say they are in direct contrast to the Act’s spirit and violate their rights.
On February 9, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights heard oral arguments in a case against the State of Guatemala that could set a precedent for Indigenous communities across Latin America, strengthening their quest for collective rights to their ancestral lands and the right to control their natural resources.
This report is a product of an extensive collaboration between 20 Indigenous and local community organizations across Asia, and brings together data and stories from communities on the ground to re-position global human rights and conservation discourses at the center of Asia’s unique political realities. It frames conservation beyond being an issue of natural resource management and highlights the question of governance, autonomy, and sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples and local communities to achieve their self-determined development aspirations.