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 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.
According to a new report by RRI, existing national laws have the potential to recognize Indigenous Peoples’, Afro-descendant Peoples’, and local communities’ rights to own or control more than 260 million hectares (Mha) of land across the world—an area twice the size of Peru.
A new resource seeks to support companies and investors in understanding the shared value community monitoring could add to their operations and investments, and outlines principles to help them build productive partnerships with communities to secure their land tenure and improve compliance with environmental and social standards and commitments.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As the role played by Indigenous Peoples and local communities in safeguarding the planet gains long-due recognition by global climate and conservation initiatives, their representatives and allies have launched a new mechanism to finance locally-led efforts with full respect for the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
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.
A high-level discussion convened by RRI and the FCDO, UK sought to address the ownership gap in collective land rights to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss.
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.
Andy White (RRI), Gam Shimray (AIPP), and Samuel Nguiffo (CED Cameroun), send a letter on behalf of the RRI Coalition to Marco Lambertini, Director General of WWF International. The letter is a follow-up to an RRI meeting with Mr. Lambertini and his team, held on February 6, 2021.
As rising pollution levels, accelerating climate change, and population growth accumulate pressure on the world’s freshwater resources, there has never been a greater need to legally secure the freshwater rights of the Indigenous peoples and local communities who claim and steward over half of the world’s land — including vital watersheds that sustain healthy aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.
With surging international, national, and sub-national policy attention to land tenure security (LTS) in developing countries in recent years, it is timely to ask: What have been the effects of thousands of efforts to improve it in dozens of developing countries? To date, almost all efforts to answer this question have been relatively small-scale, discrete studies within the boundaries of a single country.