First global pact backing indigenous land rights launched

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Native peoples struggling to retain or regain stewardship of forests that sustained them for countless generations may finally have backing from an organization 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 seven percent outside those areas.

Tropical vegetation soaks up planetwarming 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.