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 Surinamese Government has allowed the construction of a large road and extensive logging in the Saamaka territory without local peoples' consent, in violation of orders from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. We are calling on the international community to #StandWithSaamakaPeople to protect over 1 million hectares of the Amazonian rainforest.
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.
On 9 January 2024, Congress approved Law 31973—signed by Alejandro Soto and Waldemar Cerrón—which modifies Forestry Law 29763 of 2011. This modification will cause chaos in the management of Peru's forests and an acceleration of deforestation, going against global trends to limit climate change and biodiversity loss.
RRI collaborators are celebrating two big victories for Indonesia’s agrarian reform movement this October. The Consortium for Agrarian Reform’s years-long advocacy with peasant and smallholder farmers has led to redistribution of two agrarian reform priority locations by the Indonesian Government, transferring their control to peasant and their union who have long reclaiming and managing these lands.
In the lead-up to COP28, amid a growing push to restore degraded and deforested lands as natural climate solution, a new peer-reviewed study shows better outcomes when Indigenous Peoples and local communities are in charge.
This October, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)’s National Assembly passed the country’s first-ever legislation on land-use planning. The historic bill’s passage is a result of years-long advocacy by civil society organizations led by RRI collaborator Centre for Innovative Technologies and Sustainable Development.
On the eve of CoP15, Landscape News spoke with Gam Shimray, Secretary-General of the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP) who has been defending and promoting the rights of Indigenous Peoples for almost 30 years. Here, he explicates just how deeply rights, biodiversity and the global future are intertwined.
At CoP26 in Glasgow, 22 donors made a historic commitment to contribute $1.7 billion to support Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ rights to their lands and forests. Almost one year later, questions abound over the Pledge’s disbursement, impact, and accessibility.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Between December 6 - 9, 2021, representatives from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and PT Inecda Plantations traveled to Talang Parit to meet with the community for the first time since their complaint was submitted to the RSPO in 2020. These meetings offer a glimmer of hope for the community and the island’s natural resources since the Indonesian government issued PT Inecda a plantation permit in 1984.
The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities (GATC) and the Campaign for Nature (C4N) receive grant from Bezos Earth Fund to jointly scale up the recognition of tenure rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples in the Tropical Andes and Congo Basin.
In welcome news for India’s forest communities, the state of Odisha has approved 14 Community Rights and Community Forest Resource Rights titles for 24 villages in its Nayagarh district, under the country’s 2006 Forest Rights Act. The government’s move to grant these titles is praiseworthy for one key reason: they recognize women’s critical role in protecting community forests.
A new report by the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), a global partnership for successfully reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and the World Bank’s fund for Enhancing Access to Benefits while Lowering Emissions (EnABLE), outlines tangible ways global communities can make inroads in the effort to mitigate climate change through strengthening Indigenous sovereignty.
Nature-Based Solutions are broadly defined as solutions to societal challenges that involve working with nature. When anchored in culturally appropriate solutions and the self-determined priorities of local peoples, nature-based actions have the potential to strengthen synergies, transform human-environment interactions, and effectively drive system-wide transformation.
To the west of Great Slave Lake, the second-largest lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories, is a plateau that towers 600 meters above the surrounding Mackenzie Valley. The plateau, which features a unique mosaic of boreal forest, wetlands, and lakes, and is home to dozens of at-risk species, including the woodland caribou, wood bison, and waterfowl, is known as the Edéhzhíe Dehcho Protected Area/National Wildlife Area (pronounced eh-day-shae.)
This analysis shows that the vast majority of tropical forested countries seeking to benefit from international forest carbon markets have yet to define in law and in practice the rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples over carbon in their customary lands and territories.
The fires in Similipal National Park and Tiger Reserve have brought to the fore the tug of war between the forest department and the community for biosphere ownership.
A new operational guide is set to help Indigenous and local communities sustainably manage their forest concessions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).