We believe in the inherent dignity of all people. But around the world, too many people are excluded from the political, economic, and social institutions that shape their lives.
The vision of the Land Portal Foundation is to improve land governance to benefit those with the most insecure land rights and the greatest vulnerability to landlessness through information and knowledge sharing.
The International Land and Forest Tenure Facility is focused on securing land and forest rights for Indigenous Peoples and local communities. We are the first financial mechanism to exclusively fund projects working towards this goal while reducing conflict, driving development, improving global human rights, and mitigating the impacts of climate change.
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Organized as in partnership with the Ford Foundation, the Land Portal Foundation, the Tenure Facility and the Thomson Reuters Foundation, this series of three webinars featured indigenous and non-indigenous leaders in virtual roundtables to discuss both the key effects that COVID-19 is generating in their communities as well as possible solutions and the way forward. The webinars focused on public health, climate change and biodiversity and the regulatory rollback versus a ‘green recovery.’ The webinars emphasized how to maintain the momentum for land rights recognition, explored direct actions being taken by indigenous communities to defend their territories against those who seek to profit from the COVID-19 crisis and looked at how indigenous communities can benefit from and contribute to global efforts to scale up green investments, financing and transitioning to a just and sustainable green economy.
- Webinar 1: COVID-19 and Public Health: Indigenous Peoples on the Front Line
Wednesday, September 2nd, 9:00 AM-10:30 AM EST (3:00 PM – 4:30 PM CEST) - Webinar 2: COVID-19, Biodiversity and Climate Change: Indigenous Peoples Defining the Path Forward
Thursday, September 10th, 9:00 AM-10:30 AM EST (3:00 PM – 4:30 PM CEST) - Webinar 3: COVID-19, Regulatory Rollback and the ‘Green Recovery’: Indigenous Peoples Raise Their Voices
Thursday, September 17th, 9:00 AM-10:30 AM EST (3:00 PM – 4:30 PM CEST)
Community Voices
We asked land governance stakeholders to express their views on the impact of COVID-19 on indigenous and local communities. To share your perspective, send us a 30 second video to hello@landportal.info.
Wednesday, September 2nd, 9:00 AM-10:30 AM EST (3:00 PM – 4:30 PM CEST)
Three-quarters of emerging infectious diseases are zoonoses, meaning they can be transmitted from animals to humans, with Ebola, SARS, MERS and now COVID-19 being examples. Scientists are warning that deforestation, industrial agriculture, illegal wildlife trade, climate change and other types of environmental degradation increase the risk of future pandemics.
Indigenous Peoples and local communities manage more than half of the world´s land. These biodiverse ancestral lands are vital to the people who steward them and the planet we all share. But governments only recognize indigenous and community legal ownership of 10 percent of the world´s lands. Secure tenure is essential for safeguarding the existing forests against external forces. This is specifically true for forests managed by Indigenous Peoples, where much of the world’s carbon is stored.
As COVID-19 has hobbled governments around the world, environmental protections have diminished or disappeared altogether, leaving the door wide open for abuse, corruption, land grabs. Indigenous peoples and their territories are prime targets to pillage during this vulnerable period.
The global conservation community now faces the added challenge of Covid-19 on top of a longstanding set of complex conservation, sustainability, and development challenges. In the wake of this pandemic, return to business as usual is not a viable option. The existing systems and structures upon which conservation is based must evolve. Climate change, biodiversity conservation, and poverty elimination efforts have been further complicated by Covid-19, with the brunt of the pandemic borne most acutely by the poorest and most vulnerable.
I am Dolene Miller, an Afro-descendant from the Caribbean (Atlantic) Coast of Nicaragua and for me it is important and very necessary to support any initiative to protect my community from COVID19. As ethnic minorities, we are facing a health crisis in precarious conditions because the national government itself has not wanted to assume its responsibility to protect the population from infection, has not issued a quarantine and, on the contrary, is promoting massive activities according to its thesis of contagion of the herd.
We represent around five percent of the population of humanity, but we preserve around eighty-two percent of the world's biodiversity.
COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted Indigenous Peoples around the world, cutting a swathe through communities with limited health facilities, disrupting already fragile economies and shining a harsh spotlight on the increased vulnerabilities created by insecure tenure in a time of global pandemic.
As the world struggles to deal with the shockwaves created by the Coronavirus pandemic, scientists have been drawing direct links between the emergence of new diseases, collapsing biodiversity and the destruction of vital forestlands which for generations have been stewarded by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.
COVID-19 has exacerbated an already deeply alarming regulatory vacuum, which is being exploited by unscrupulous governments and private sector operators to ramp up the destruction of vital indigenous forestlands – this threatens efforts to rebalance humanity’s relationship to nature with indigenous and local voices at its heart.
The ability of the Embera villages in Panama to shut off the road into their community, and to exclude outsiders, is based in large measure on the government’s official recognition of their indigenous collective land rights.