 |
| Provided by AFP Brazilian natives demonstrate in front of the Planalto Palace in Brasilia, during the National Mobilization Week to protest and demand their rights, in 2015 |
Native
peoples struggling to retain or regain stewardship of forests that sustained
them for countless generations may finally have backing from an organisation
with both swag and sway.
The
International Land and Forest Tenure Facility -- the first and only global
institution dedicated to securing the land rights of indigenous communities
worldwide -- was formally launched in Stockholm on Tuesday.
Funded by
Sweden, Norway and the Ford Foundation, a major US philanthropy, the Tenure
Facility has already provided grants and guidance for pilot projects in Peru,
Mali, and Indonesia, helping local communities leverage rarely enforced laws to
protect their land and resources.
Disputes
over land rights in tropical forests teeming with exploitable resources -- from
hard woods to precious stones to oil -- can quickly escalate into deadly
conflict, and local peoples more often than not wind up on the losing end.
More than
200 environmental campaigners, nearly half from indigenous tribes, were
murdered around the world in 2016 alone, according to watchdog NGO Global
Witness.
Restoring
some measure of control to the original inhabitants of forests appropriated by
corrupt governments or extraction industries has also proven an effective
bulkhead against global warming, according to a 2014 global survey by the
US-based World Resources Institute, a think tank.
In Brazil,
for example, deforestation in indigenous community forests from 2000 to 2012
was less than 1 percent, compared with 7 percent outside those areas.
'Unrelenting conflicts'
 |
| Provided by AFP Representatives
of indigenous communities and activists protest in front of the Chinese Embassy in Lima, Peru, on September 22, 2017, to support the Achuar, Kichwa and Quechua Amazonic tribes affected by oil industry activities on their ancestral lands |
Tropical
vegetation soaks up planet-warming CO2 emitted by the burning of fossil fuels.
Destroying
these forests outright not only reduces the area available to absorb carbon
dioxide, it also releases CO2 into the atmosphere, accounting in recent decades
-- along with agriculture and livestock -- for more than a fifth of global
greenhouse gas emissions.
"We
see climate change and inequality as two of the greatest existential threats
facing the planet," said Ford Foundation president Darren Walker.
"Creating
mechanisms that allow indigenous peoples and local communities to gain tenure
over their land or forests is a way to tackle both these problems," he
told AFP ahead of a conference keyed to the launch.
Walker has
pledged five million dollars, and expects -- based on other grants in the
pipeline -- the facility to have 100 million within a year.
The project
aims over the span of a decade to boost forestland properly titled to
indigenous peoples by 40 million hectares, an area twice the size of Spain.
Such
efforts, they calculate, would prevent deforestation of one million hectares
and the release of 500 million tonnes of CO2, more than the annual emissions of
Britain or Brazil.
"The
Tenure Facility provides a powerful solution to save the world's forests from
the ground up," said Carin Jamtin, director general of the Swedish
International Development Cooperation Agency, a key funder.
Corruption and abuses
More than
two billion people live on and manage half the world's land area in customary
or traditional systems, yet indigenous communities have formal legal ownership
of only 10 percent.
And even
where they do have title, corruption and abuses have led to protracted
conflicts with local and national governments, companies and migrant workers.
Native
populations can even run afoul of major green initiatives to fight climate
change or stem biodiversity loss.
A
controversial UN-backed programme, for example, known as REDD+ -- Reducing
Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation -- creates incentives to keep
forests intact, paid for by rich nations or companies seeking to offset
pollution under carbon trading schemes.
But the
projects that REDD+ finances can push aside the needs and rights of indigenous
peoples who are often most directly affected by the changes set in motion,
critics say.
A
peer-reviewed 2013 study -- one of the few to examine the impacts on local
communities -- concluded that less than half of 50-odd projects in Africa,
Latin America and Asia did anything to alleviate the poverty of
forest-dependent peoples.
But many
did enhance their land tenure rights, they concluded.
Related Article:
No comments:
Post a Comment