Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)

Dear Friends,

The importance of ensuring respect for the rights of forest peoples’ to control their forests, lands and livelihoods, becomes ever clearer and yet more contested. As the articles in this edition of our newsletter starkly reveal, land and resource grabs are not just being imposed by commercial developers but are being actively promoted by governments, whose principle responsibility should be to protect the rights of citizens. Yet these same impositions are also being resisted, sometimes at great personal cost, by local communities and indigenous peoples.

This week indigenous peoples from around the world have joined international government leaders at the Convention on Biological Diversity’s 11th Conference of the Parties (COP11) in Hyderabad, India. This important meeting involves crucial negotiations related to indigenous peoples, who are advocating for the protection of their traditional lands and drawing attention to the social and cultural dimensions of conservation and respect for their rights as the Parties to the Convention assess the progress and effectiveness of the CBD’s work to-date and devise new plans and solutions for the global biodiversity crisis.

Many decisions of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) contain language on indigenous peoples and local communities*, for instance on their full and effective participation, impacts on their lands and livelihoods, the value and contribution of their traditional knowledge and customary sustainable use, and the need for support in capacity building.

"Since almost a decade back, the Resilience and Development Programme (SwedBio) and partners such as Forest Peoples Programme, Tebtebba Foundation and the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IIFB) have been working for strengthening governance in indigenous territories based on customary sustainable use. The work by SwedBio and partners was initiated by supporting good cases, including presenting them and describing the key factors for success behind. These pilot cases, covering a broad range of social ecological systems, have successively formed a base for building better international policies that adopt customary sustainable use (CSU) as a means for strengthened resilience of biological diversity and contribution to human wellbeing among indigenous peoples and local communities."