Blog Posts: land rights

As countries submit new climate plans this year, they should consider the emissions-reduction benefits of stronger community land rights.

Despite making up more than half of the world’s 3 billion rural people, merely 14% of agricultural landowners globally are women. Five communities offer lessons on how women can realize their rights to community land.

New WRI research shows that legal large-scale mining concessions and illegal mining areas overlap with more than 20% of Indigenous land in the Amazon.

Una nueva investigación de WRI muestra que las concesiones mineras legales a gran escala y las áreas mineras ilegales se superponen con más del 20% de la tierra indígena en la Amazonía.

Emerging evidence from this pandemic and experience from previous disease outbreaks show that it’s rural women who will disproportionately bear the socio-economic hardships of COVID-19.

As the price of gold and other minerals soars, expanded mining in Amazonian countries has damaging impacts on the forest and its people, including the 1.5 million Indigenous People who depend on the Amazon for their livelihoods and well-being.

Indigenous peoples and other local communities have long argued that they play a central role in safeguarding more than half the world’s land, including much of its forests. The world’s leading climate scientists now agree.

About half of the world's land is collectively held. In this podcast, WRI Vice President Lawrence MacDonald interviews Peter Veit, director of the Land and Resource Rights Initiative in the Governance Center at WRI, about the social, environmental and economic case for securing tenure for indigenous and community lands.

When palm oil companies forcibly took communities' land in Liberia, lawyer Alfred Brownell tried to stop them. He received threats to his life and had to escape the country — but he's not done fighting.