On December 11 2018, at the sidelines of the second ordinary session of the Economic Commission of West African States (ECOWAS) Parliament, a parliamentary network on gender equality in land, agricultural investments and food security was launched.
The Sengwer are an indigenous hunter-gatherer people living along the slopes of the Cherangany Hills in the western highlands of Kenya. Their estimated population is 33,187.
We cannot restore tropical forests without restoring the rights of their traditional owners.
Implementing a coordinated global response to curb demand for energy and eliminate further deforestation would reduce the need to deploy artificial carbon dioxide removal technologies, according to a decisive report from the U.N. scientific panel on climate change.
WATER. The most basic necessity that most people take for granted because it is readily available by just a turn of the tap.
But for some groups in Malaysia, safe drinking water and sanitation is not accessible.
Fred Nelson is executive director of Maliasili and Michael Taylor is director of International Land Coalition
Land rights have finally been invited to the party - sitting at the intersection of some of the world’s most urgent development, environmental, and human rights priorities.
Until today, the world had no internationally comparable data on citizens’ perceptions of the security their property rights; no way of tracking how people evaluated the likelihood of their home or other land being taken from them.
The world would be a pretty dull and hungry place if it weren’t for Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
Indigenous Peoples and local communities play a central role in feeding the world. They look after much of the world’s biodiversity, with at least 80% of planet’s biodiversity found in Indigenous territories and waters. And they have an incredible track record of protecting the climate by preventing deforestation and properly managing pasturelands.
Granting forest dwellers legal rights to their traditional lands helps fight deforestation and climate change, but the vast majority of the world's forests remain under government control with limited access for communities, researchers said.
Only about 14 percent of forests, or about 527 million hectares, were legally owned or designated for local communities in 58 countries surveyed by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group.
BERTA CÁCERES, ASSASSINATED in her home in March 2016, was just one of hundreds of Latin American environmental activists attacked in recent years. At least 577 environmental human rights defenders (EHRDs) were killed in Latin America between 2010 and 2015 – more than in any other region. In addition to violence, EHRDs suffer legal threats and harassment, severely impeding their work. Before Cáceres' murder, she faced trumped-up charges due to her opposition to hydroelectric dams on her indigenous community's territory.
A CLASSIC RESPONSE from governments and businesses in recent time is not just to characterize legitimate grievances by Indigenous Peoples and local communities as anti- government, anti-development, and anti-investment. They are waging wars against Indigenous Peoples and individuals who are protecting the planet and its people by criminalizing their legitimate grievances and then threatening, arresting, intimidating, and imprisoning those who dare challenge this mode of development.
FRONT LINE DEFENDERS has documented 821 human rights defenders (HRDs) who have been killed in the four years since we started producing an annual global list in cooperation with national and international NGOs. Seventy-nine percent of this total came from six countries: Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and the Philippines. The vast majority of these cases have never been properly investigated, and few of the perpetrators of the killings have been brought to justice.