To address the climate crisis and reach sustainable development goals, Indigenous, community, and Afro-descendant land rights must be secure. While communities claim and manage roughly half of the world’s lands—including much of the remaining forestland and biodiversity hotspots—only 10 percent of these tenure agreements are legally secure. Closing this gap in land recognition would produce transformational impact on the climate crisis and create a multiplying effect by guarding human rights and the rights of women.
Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) is a global coalition of more than 150 rightsholder organizations and their allies dedicated to advancing the land and resource rights of local peoples—informed and driven by Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, and local communities themselves. It leverages that coalition to amplify the voices of local peoples and proactively engage governments, multilateral institutions, and private sector actors to adopt institutional and market reforms that support the realization of land rights. The coalition links projects and organizations to global-level discourse and decision making that shape policy.
“We are the largest network of rights holders in the world and have successfully managed projects and grants in 30 plus countries since 2005,” said Solange Bandiaky-Badji, Coordinator of the Rights and Resources Group, in a recent presentation to the Skoll Foundation. “We work to ensure that new laws and policies recognize Indigenous Peoples and local communities—particularly the women within them—as the legal owners of their land and recognize that they are the ones to manage those lands to protect biodiversity and forest preservation. They are the leaders on the frontline.”
At least two billion people depend on community lands for their livelihoods and day-to-day needs, and land tenure is a key dimension of any discussion of climate. “We know from our research that between 1.6 and 1.9 billion Indigenous local people live in the planet’s most important biodiversity areas and that community forest lands store at least 293 billion tons of carbon,” said Alain Frechette, Director of Strategic Analysis and Global Engagement. RRI is developing new research, with the help of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, that will further explore the scope of these forests in carbon capture.
“Community-controlled lands exhibit lower rates of deforestation, generate greater investments in forest maintenance activities, and support more people in terms of social, economic, and livelihood needs than forests owned or managed by either public or private entities,” said Frechette. “Without clear and secure collective tenure rights, strategies like REDD+, which involves reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, will simply not succeed.”
RRI research shows that only a handful of tropical forest countries explicitly recognize community rights to carbon or the ecosystem services that these provide, said Frechette. Even fewer have the legal frameworks to support operationalization of emission reduction strategies. “There is increasing demand for engagement,” said Frechette. “We see that as a very positive sign.”
Women across the developing world are increasingly assuming responsibility for the care and management of community lands and forests. Women play essential roles in the development of sustainable and inclusive rural economies and lead the defense of community resource rights in local, national, and global policy arenas. RRI elevates the voices of these women leaders and promotes formal recognition of women at the national level in policy reforms. It spotlights the role women play in defending their lands and supports their work at the advocacy level.
“Secure land and resource tenure rights are a very important step in creating the enabling conditions for women’s economic empowerment through livelihoods, economic initiatives, and increased influence and political voice,” said Omaira Bolanos, RRI’s Director of Latin America and Gender Justice. “To bring concrete changes to women’s land rights, we need to involve those women on the frontlines.”
Rights and Resources Initiative creates an enabling environment for land tenure reform by connecting and organizing local and global actors around a common agenda guided by Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and community organizations and their allies. It gathers Indigenous and community leaders and those from the largest forest agencies in the world to learn from one another. It also convenes leaders from companies, investors, the development finance community, and civil society to leverage private sector support for collective tenure rights.
“Many progressive companies have made policy commitments to support community rights, but they face challenges in implementing them in practice,” said Bryson Ogden, Associate Director of Strategic Analysis and Global Engagement who leads Interlaken Group, RRI’s network for influential private sector leaders committed to action on community land rights. “We create spaces for global business leaders to come together, leverage their expertise, and connect directly with communities and governments in countries where supply chains and investments are challenged by insecure land tenure.”
The Interlaken Group is one example of several such networks created by RRI; it has a strong track record of bringing together unlikely allies to incubate initiatives, platforms, and institutions to address gaps in the realization of community land rights. With RRI’s support, Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, and local communities have advanced collective tenure security over more than 4.2 million hectares of land and forest.
