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.

This series of three webinars features indigenous and non-indigenous leaders in a virtual roundtable to discuss both the key effects that COVID-19 is generating in their communities as well as possible solutions and the way forward.

The World Indigenous Forum (WIF) is the largest indigenous-focused conference in the world. We exist to support indigenous business owners globally – and to connect them with expert knowledge, international markets and the investment partners they need to finance and scale their businesses.

Land and Labour in the Karen Hills: Cosmology and value in the study of agrarian change

Date and location:

13.30-15.00, 6 January 2021 (Thai time)

Chiang Mai University

The webinar Rolling back social and environmental safeguards in the name of COVID-19., organized by Forest Peoples Programme, the Tenure Facility,  Middlesex University, the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and the Land Portal, took place on Thursday, February 18, 2021 . 

April 22nd, 2021 | 9:00AM-10:30AM EST - 3:00-4:30 CEST

Watch livestream here:  

The new book Migration and Women’s Land Tenure Security in the Greater Mekong Sub-region draws on country-level and ethnographic research, based on a collaboration between FAO and Chiang Mai University.

Indigenous Peoples globally have high exposure to environmental change and are often considered an ‘‘at-risk’’ population, although there is growing evidence of their resilience. Ample research illustrates that Indigenous Peoples are actively observing and adapting to change in a diversity of ways. In this webinar we examined the common factor affecting resilience to environmental change among Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

In most countries, land inequality is growing. Worse, new measures and analysis published by the International Land Coalition show that land inequality is significantly higher than previously reported.