Indigenous Peoples and other communities hold and manage 50 to 60 percent of the world's land, yet governments recognize only 10 percent as legally belonging to these groups. That's bad economic policy, shows a new WRI report.
Community forests serve as a vital source of livelihood, nutrition and medicine for the world's Indigenous Peoples. New research shows these forests have another advantage: generating billions of dollars in benefits for rural peoples and society.
The world’s legally recognized community forests hold about 37 billion tonnes of carbon, about 29 times the annual carbon footprint of all the passenger vehicles in the world.
Local communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America can lose access to critical resources when land rights are weak, threatening food and incomes for more than two billion people. Three fundamental goals must be achieved to improve land rights.
Alda Salomao is the director general of Centro Terra Viva, an organization working to secure community land rights in Mozambique. In an interview with WRI's Celine Salcedo-La Viña, she describes the tension between communities in the Afungi Peninsula and a natural gas project.