IPLCs are contributing to progress on this target both through responsible management and conservation of their own forests on their lands (see also targets 7 and 11), and also through activism at all levels to combat habitat loss and degradation caused by others. For example:
- Analysis of annual deforestation rates across 73 sites in the tropics found that deforestation is significantly lower in community-managed forests than in protected areas.
- A study of forest loss by the World Bank Independent Evaluation Group comes to similar conclusions about the effectiveness of community-managed forests, in particular forest areas managed and controlled by indigenous peoples.
- A recent study by the World Resources Institute found that deforestation rates in the Bolivian, Brazilian and Colombian Amazon were significantly lower between 2000 and 2012 within tenure-secure indigenous lands than on other lands.
- With the support of civil society allies, the indigenous Amazonian Kayapo in Brazil have successfully conserved 105,000 km2 of tropical forests in a frontier zone characterised by heavy deforestation, through decades of fighting encroachment by illegal gold miners, mahogany loggers and ranchers (see Figure 5.2). They also led an environmental movement to pressure the World Bank to stop loans for the construction of a mega-dam project on the Rio Xingu, which would have flooded and destroyed parts of their territory. This is an example of how building alliances with indigenous peoples and investing in the capacity building and empowerment of the rightful indigenous owners of the forest can result in large scale conservation of the world’s richest ecosystems
Activism at local, national and international levels to stop habitat loss and degradation caused by large-scale commodity production
- On the island of Palawan in the Philippines, the Coalition Against Land Grabbing (CALG), a network of indigenous peoples and farmers, successfully mobilised 4,200 affected people to call for a province-wide moratorium on palm oil expansion. This appeal was backed by the Philippines Commission on Human Rights, triggering a Commission-led investigation into legally binding standards for agribusiness in the Philippine
- Case study “Kapuas Hulu, West Kalimantan, Indonesia: indigenous Dayak try to save forest, river and lake habitats under threat from palm oil expansion” gives another example of a local action against palm oil expansion, from West Kalimantan in Indonesia.
Across the world, IPLCs have linked up efforts such as these to conserve the world’s habitats. For example, a global coalition of indigenous peoples from the Amazon, Central America, the Congo Basin and Indonesia have pledged to protect 400 million hectares (ha) of forests in these regions in support of the New York Declaration on Forests.The Palangka Raya Declaration on Deforestation and Rights of Forest Peoples is another example of how IPLCs’ organisations across the globe are working together to curb deforestation and provide concrete policy recommendations to address the underlying drivers of habitat loss and degradation64 (see case study “The Palangka Raya Declaration”).
