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.
Gabon’s Massaha communities are documenting the rich biodiversity stored in their ancestral territories to demonstrate the transformative power of community-led conservation. Can they help one of the world’s most forested countries conserve 30% of its biodiversity by 2030?
A report aims to influence the localization agenda and improve bilateral policies and practices to ensure that more direct, fit-for-purpose support reaches Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples and their supporting organizations to secure tenure rights and conserve key ecosystems and biodiversity.
With financial support from the Bezos Earth Fund, RRI's coalition in the Congo Basin has undertaken concrete actions demonstrating alternatives to conservation approaches that exclude communities. In some places, the project's interventions have halted illegal logging, mining, and oil companies’ activities that threaten land and soil degradation as well as local livelihoods.
In this review, we provide a legal snapshot of some of the changes and developments that occurred in 2023. We delve into the shifts, pivotal moments, and groundbreaking strides that defined the year at the sub-national, national, regional, and international levels.
The Masyarakat Adat Dalem Tamblingan have lived in and around the Alas Mertajati Forest and Lake Tamblingan areas in Bali since at least the 9th century AD. Now, the community is fighting back and appealing to the government to legally recognize nearly 7,000 hectares of its customary territory.
Rights and Resources Initiative and Rainforest Foundation Norway are thrilled to announce the launch of the Path to Scale dashboard, a new open-source online tool that gives easy access to donor funding data for Indigenous Peoples’, Afro-descendant Peoples’, and local communities’ tenure and forest guardianship.
The Rights and Resources Group’s Board of Directors has named as its newest members three global leaders in environmental, financial, and human rights advocacy: Emma Norrstad Tickner from Sweden; Emily Kinama from Kenya; and Peter “Mike” Bryan from the United States. They join Gam Shimray, an Indigenous Naga leader from Northeast India who joined in October 2023.
Co-authored with 15 organizations from across Asia—spanning youth groups, Indigenous networks, and ally organizations—this new report collates and brings to the fore the experiences and leadership of youth activists from across the continent into a call to action.
More than 100 participants from 11 countries gathered in Arusha, Tanzania, this week for the 4th Conference of National Land Institutions in Africa, working to secure community land rights.
Women leaders from Africa, Asia, and North and South America gather in Brazzaville to strengthen the global solidarity movement for women-led initiatives to protect biodiversity and build climate resilience.
Members of the new network agree to create more documentation on land rights and governance processes for Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women; call for strengthening advocacy capacity.
P2B, a peasants' organization based in Banten, Indonesia, is a leading actor in the local struggle for agrarian reform and collective land tenure rights.
Nepal's Indigenous Tsum Nubri community achieves a key legislative victory in maintaining traditional methods of forest governance.
RRI marked the beginning of 2023 with a global dialogue on Rights-Based Conservation and Climate Approaches, co-hosted with the Embassy of Sweden in Washington DC.
Indigenous and community leaders from North America and the global South come together to build relations and strengthen a global solidarity movement around Indigenous and community-led responses to the global biodiversity and climate crises.
On December 6, RRI, the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership (CRP), and the ICCA Consortium—in partnership with the Canadian Research Chair in Human Rights, Health, and the Environment, Montreal International and the Christensen Fund—will co-host a pre-COP15 dialogue on Indigenous and community leadership in conservation.
This keynote address was shared in person on July 21, 2022 at the IUCN Africa Protected Areas Congress in Kigali, Rwanda. Patrick calls on governments to leverage the cultural diversity of Africa to craft new conservation models that legally recognize and secure the tenure rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities as a just and viable solution to the global biodiversity crisis.
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.