Thomson Reuters Foundation - OpEd

October 26, 2021
Last week, leaders from around the world came together at a global summit to negotiate a comprehensive plan to safeguard nature around the world. 

Whether the resulting global strategy, expected to be finalized in 2022, is sufficiently ambitious and successful will be influenced by one item: the degree to which countries put advancing human rights, in general, and the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, in particular, at the heart of their plans and real actions.

Science has recently shown what many of us have always known, that indigenous peoples and local communities have historically been and still are the best stewards of nature. Biodiversity is declining less on indigenous lands and traditional territories than elsewhere in the world, and an outsized proportion of the world’s remaining biodiversity is found in these areas. 

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Campaign for Nature

May 20, 2021
Today, the ICCA Consortium released its Territories of Life: 2021 Report. The report includes the most up-to-date analysis of how much of the planet is likely conserved by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, estimating that they are conserving more than 22% of the extent of the world’s Key Biodiversity Areas on land and at least 21% of the world’s lands. The report also found that Indigenous Peoples and local communities are the de facto custodians of many existing state and private protected and conserved areas, without being recognized as such, underscoring the critical need for equitable governance and the importance of ensuring that all existing and new protected and conserved areas fully respect Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ rights.

In addition to providing updated spatial analyses and related findings, the report details 17 case studies of territories of life from five continents, highlighting concrete examples of how Indigenous Peoples and local communities sustain our planet and describing what types of actions are needed to better support them, their rights, and their contributions to biodiversity.

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PolitiFact

May 7, 2021
As part of his plan to put the brakes on climate change, President Joe Biden set a goal of conserving 30% of America’s land and waters by 2030. For land in particular, that’s a heavy lift — only about 12% of the nation’s land is now under some form of protection.

Biden’s target is part of a larger international ambition to protect a third of the world’s land and waters by 2030. On a global scale, the protected regions would do a lot of work to pull carbon from the air and store it in the soil, coral reefs, sea grasses and other carbon sinks. The effort goes under name 30 by 30, or 30x30.

But some advocates for indigenous peoples see a threat in the international push to protect land.

One of those groups, Survival International, calls the global 30x30 plan "the biggest land grab in history." We dug in to see where that figure comes from, and whether it represents a reasonable estimate of the likely harm due to the 30x30 plan.

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The Washington Post - OpEd

March 31, 2021
The covid-19 pandemic has pummeled the globe, harming the health of the planet and its peoples. In Latin America, the economic blows have fallen with particular force.

Across the region, resources that might once have been used to protect forests — which are among Latin America’s biggest contributions to fighting climate change — have been channeled into shoring up the economy and battling the disease.

This means that Indigenous communities in these forests often are confronting not only the deadly covid-19 virus, but an unprecedented invasion of their ancestral territories, as illegal loggers, drug lords, ranchers, miners and many other groups take advantage of the cover of the pandemic.

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Latercera - OpEd

December 18, 2020
El Covid-19, el cambio climático y la extinción masiva de especies nos están golpeando al mismo tiempo. Estas tres calamidades tienen un mismo origen: hemos desconocido que la naturaleza tiene un límite.

El modelo económico actual, abrazado por Chile y la mayoría de los países en el mundo, está poniendo nuestra supervivencia en riesgo. La mejor ciencia disponible pronostica que, de seguir en esta trayectoria, tendremos eventos climatológicos cada vez más extremos, más sequías e inundaciones, mayores olas de calor y frío, millones de desplazados climáticos, más incendios, nuevas pandemias, colapso de las pesquerías comerciales y la extinción de un millón de especies. Todo esto provocará más muertes que el coronavirus.

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The Hill

May 1, 2020
[…] The COVID-19 pandemic is causing heartbreaking loss of life across the world. Our daily lives have ground to a halt, and we do not yet know the full magnitude of the long-term social and economic impacts. But it has also given us all time to rethink our priorities and reminded us of what is truly important.

In an open letter to the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, BirdLife International is calling for the U.N. to declare a healthy natural environment a fundamental human right. Currently, the declaration does not make any reference to preserving our environment — yet this is the foundation on which all other human rights — and indeed, all life on earth — depends. For our children and grandchildren to enjoy sufficient food, water and safety, and to raise families of their own, the natural world must be healthy and strong enough to support them.

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Forest Peoples Programme

February 23, 2020
In October 2020, the Convention on Biological Diversity will adopt a strategy — the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework — to replace the Aichi Targets. The Framework is intended as a step towards meeting the vision of a world ‘living in harmony with nature’ by 2050.

In order to reach that vision, there must be recognition of the interdependency of human rights and a healthy planet. As the Framework is negotiated, Forest Peoples Programme is therefore collaborating with a number of allies (including those listed below) to highlight the importance of human rights for biodiversity stewardship.

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International Business Times - OpEd

February 22, 2020
As climate change deepens, forests –– those lush, abundant, mysterious stands of trees that for millennia have quietly produced the air we breathe and the water we drink –– have never been more critical to our survival. It’s become clear that,  as leading scientists have said, “Our planet’s future climate is inextricably tied to the future of its forests.” For a climate stable future, we must keep forests standing, as they are one of the most effective tools we have to combat climate change. Thankfully, the basic prescription for saving much of the world’s forests is refreshingly simple: hold corporations accountable for their role in driving deforestation and uphold Indigenous rights to their ancestral lands. 

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