This report offers RRI's updated assessment of the status and strength of Indigenous Peoples’, Afro-descendant Peoples’, and local communities’ statutory forest tenure rights across 35 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
This second edition of the State of Funding for Tenure Rights provides an updated analysis of international donor funding for Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples in tropical countries from 2011 to 2024. This edition includes an expanded scope to all terrestrial ecosystems, recognizing the importance of tracking funding beyond forests.
This report represents two decades of working together across continents, cultures, and movements to build a more just and sustainable planet for Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples—particularly the women and youth within them.
This 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.
Discover the power of collective action: learn about some of our pivotal successes of 2023 that energize us as we embark upon our 2024 workplans.
Growing recognition of the key roles of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, and local communities in resource governance has led to many international commitments, but taking actions to advance human rights-based approaches to climate and conversation remains a challenge. This policy brief explores the structural constraints to rights-based action and shares a framework to help implement these commitments.
This year's Climate Week theme, "We Can. We Will", focused on the urgent need for action, provided the backdrop for 25 leaders from Indigenous Peoples, NGOs, Civil Society and donors to discuss what they can do to ensure that the rights and priorities of communities are at the center of global area-based conservation efforts. This report brings together the most important aspects of this dialogue.
This report presents the most comprehensive and up-to-date picture of global progress towards the legal recognition of community-based land tenure, and offers a baseline against which the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework 2030 Targets can be monitored.
This document shares emerging ideas, principles, and good practices to socialize the concept of community monitoring among companies and investors in land-based sectors, as well as outline steps they can take to meaningfully engage with Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples to monitor and respond to the potential environmental and human rights impacts of their operations, supply chains, or investments.
The engagement of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, and local communities must be driven by their self-determination and potential as main actors in a multifunctional transformation process. This process must be grafted on climate change mitigation and adaptation, nature and biodiversity conservation, landscape restoration, radical food systems change, the empowerment of women and youth, as well as land and resources conflict management.
Pastoralists are well adapted to harsh environments and have deep knowledge about their natural resources. They have also suffered from drought, famine, political interference, physical insecurity, armed aggression, increasing impoverishment, and marginalization. Despite these obstacles, pastoralists have long managed their lands for various purposes including livestock mobility, which depends on large commonly owned landscapes, knowledge of ecosystem productivity, and on the ability to negotiate access to resources.
This report assesses donor funding for IPs’ and LCs’ tenure and conservation between 2011 and 2020 to learn from historical trends and outline key opportunities to improve the effectiveness of this funding over the next five years. It proposes to make donor funding more fit for purpose—which means that climate, conservation, and rights funding is channeled in ways that are relevant and appropriate for IPs and LCs and ensures funding engagements are led by their organizations—and flexible, long-term, gender-inclusive, timely and accessible, and mutually accountable.
The historic US$1.7 billion Pledge made at the UNFCCC CoP26 in Glasgow by governments and donors in support of Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ collective…
Este estudo analisa a situação do reconhecimento legal dos direitos dos Povos Indígenas, comunidades locais e Povos Afrodescendentes ao carbono em suas terras e territórios em 31 países da África, Ásia e América Latina.10 Juntos, esses países defendem quase 70 por cento das florestas tropicais do mundo11 e representam pelo menos 62 por cento do potencial total de solução climática natural viável identificado por McKinsey et al. (2021),12 e, portanto, a maior parte das reduções de emissões baseadas na natureza e oportunidades de compensação de carbono em países com florestas tropicais e subtropicais.
This study reviews the status of the legal recognition of the rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples to the carbon in their lands and territories across 31 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Together, these countries hold almost 70 percent of the world’s tropical forests and represent at least 62 percent of the total feasible natural climate solution potential, and thus the bulk of nature-based emissions reductions and carbon offset opportunities in tropical and subtropical forest countries.
Esta análise mostra que a grande maioria dos países com florestas tropicais que procuram se beneficiar dos mercados internacionais de carbono florestal ainda não definiu na lei e na prática os direitos dos Povos Indígenas, comunidades locais e Povos Afrodescendentes sobre o carbono em suas terras e territórios consuetudinários.
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.
A growing body of evidence suggests that recognition of the collective tenure rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendants is a powerful and cost-effective strategy for addressing the climate and biodiversity crises. In spite of this, international funding for rights recognition pales in comparison to donor mobilization around alternative solutions to these crises.
This report is informed by the imperative to prevent the collapse of biodiversity while respecting the tenure and human rights of Indigenous Peoples (IPs), local…
The legal recognition and protection of the land and territorial rights of Indigenous Peoples (IPs), local communities (LCs), and Afro-descendants (ADs) offers one of the…
Identifying Opportunities to Invest in Securing Collective Tenure Rights in the Forest Areas of Low- and Middle-Income Countries
The global urgency to both document and secure Indigenous Peoples’, local communities’, and Afro-descendants’ customary rights cannot be overestimated. Research shows that legally recognized community…
This report identifies factors that have contributed to the success of local, national, and regional initiatives employed in low- and middle-income countries to strengthen indigenous and rural women’s governance rights concerning community lands.
If properly leveraged, natural climate solutions can contribute over 37% of cost-effective CO2 mitigation by 2030. Evidence shows Indigenous Peoples and local communities are key to achieving such outcomes. This report presents the most comprehensive assessment to date of carbon storage in documented community lands worldwide.