Drawing on international standards and Green Climate Fund policy documents, this report traces the adequacy and implementation effectiveness of the Fund’s current institutional frameworks across a representative sample of approved projects. Noting critical gaps in nearly every aspect of the Fund’s operational modalities and project approval processes, the report calls on the GCF to take progressive steps to make Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ rights a key part of its climate actions going forward.
This paper proposes a framework of analysis to systematically classify and evaluate legal pathways to secure recognition of community-based property rights.
A new analysis from RRI provides an unprecedented assessment of legal frameworks regarding indigenous and rural women’s community forest rights in 30 developing countries comprising 78 percent of the developing world’s forests.
Amid the realities of major political turbulence, there was growing recognition in 2016 that community land rights are key to ensuring peace and prosperity, economic development, sound investment, and climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Compelling quantitative evidence of the unparalleled role that forest peoples have to play in climate change mitigation.
A new report quantifying the carbon stored aboveground in tropical forests that are legally owned or traditionally held by Indigenous Peoples and local communities in 37 countries across tropical America, Africa, and Asia.
Protected areas have the potential of safeguarding the biodiversity for the benefit of all humanity; however, these have also been associated with human rights violations against Indigenous Peoples in many parts of the world.
New research from RRI reveals that 13 submissions to the World Bank’s Carbon Fund–one of the most advanced REDD+ initiatives–either fail to recognize the importance of land rights or adequately include local peoples in key decision-making processes.
A review of submitted Intended Nationally Determined Contributions to determine the extent to which Parties made clear commitments to strengthen or expand the tenure and natural resource management rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities as part of their climate change mitigation plans.
Just over a decade ago, several forest agency leaders from around the world met in Beijing, China at a conference convened by the Rights and Resources…
This report explains what tenure risk is and offers objective evidence that the problem is widespread and of increasing frequency, as well as provides highlights from a real-world analysis of over 360 case studies.
The aim of this conference was to take stock of efforts to scale up Indigenous Peoples’ and community land and resource rights worldwide and to…
The first analysis to quantify the amount of land formally recognized by national governments as owned or controlled by Indigenous Peoples and local communities around the world.
RRI’s annual review of the global state of rights and resources
This joint-opinion brief is released at the 19th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Lima, Peru to…
From a business perspective, the risk posed by conflicts between concession operators and local populations in emerging or frontier markets concerns more than just companies…
An analysis of the growing body of evidence linking community forest rights with healthier forests and lower carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.
While governments are increasingly recognizing local ownership and control of forests, forest tenure arrangements remain in dispute or unclear in many places, including low, middle, and high income countries.
While there were many encouraging pronouncements in 2013—from courts, governments, and some of the world’s largest corporations —unfortunately, progress for community land rights on the ground remains very limited.
In order to strengthen collective efforts to address these challenges and capitalize on current opportunities to scale up community land rights around the world, from…
A legal analysis of the national legislation assessing whether these legal systems recognize the community rights to access, withdraw, manage, exclude and alienate to forest resources and land.
This essay identifies, summarizes, and analyzes leading international and national laws and judicial cases recognizing or otherwise supportive of native/aboriginal title.
This report measures whether governments have continued to reduce their legal ownership and control of the world’s forests from 2002 – 2008, and assesses the implications of forest tenure change for forest peoples, governments, and the global community.
The questions of who owns the forests, who claims them, who has access to them and further, who should own them, are hotly contested in many forest regions of the world.