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Resguardo Indígena Colonial Cañamomo Lomaprieta.

“Indigenous peoples and local communities embody humanity’s creative intelligence and wisdom in our care and love for Mother Earth.

Pari Islanders fighting the occupation of their territory were given a glimmer of hope last month after a prominent environmental defender, Pak Sulaiman, was found not guilty of a land breach.

Over 20 leading NGOs working on corporate transparency have published a statement calling on EU policy-makers to define companies’ disclosure obligations on sustainability issues on the occasion of tomorrow’s high-level conference on the future of corporate reporting hosted by the European Commission in Brussels.

On 20 August 2018, Peru’s highest court, the Constitutional Tribunal (TC) ag

"Currently, we, the indigenous people, traditional villagers and forest people, and the places where we are living are under pressure and face sustained injustice and social tension due to large-scale “development’ activities conducted by plantation and commercial logging companies."

From the Arctic North, to the Pacific Island South, to the Tropical Forests of Latin America, Local Biodiversity Outlooks online highlights how indigenous peoples and local communities are rising to the challenge to counter the effects of some of the most pressin

The crisis

Three interlinked environmental catastrophes are facing the world, and a fourth crisis highlights where the solution lies:

On November 7, partial justice was achieved in the case of the assassination April 7, 2015 of Fernando Salazar Calvo, Indigenous leader of the Resguardo Indígena Cañamomo Lomaprieta, Caldas, Colombia: a judge sentenced two men to terms of between 20 and 40 years of jail for carrying out the assassination and carrying weapons illegally, yet the intellectual author who ordered the killing remains at large, and the investigation continues.

Dialogue meetings between RoC communities affected by forest concessions and the administrative authorities and private sector actors, including logging companies, were hosted in Ouesso in October 2018 to promote the communities' participation in land use planning and legal reform processes.

More than 400 community leaders, women, elders and families of Montes de María met the departmental government and state authorities to denounce growing insecurity in their home area, and to call for more progress in the implementation of the Peace Agreement.

Lawyers representing the community from the Peruvian human rights organisation, the Institute of Legal Defence (IDL), have highlighted 4 groundbreaking aspects of the decision which could lead to major reforms affecting indigenous land rights and forest protection in the Peruvian Amazon.

A member of one of Cameroon’s Baka Communities in the Ngoyla Mintom area, talks about being driven out of his ancestral forests, and the issues his people face on a daily basis through lack of land rights and lack of access to food, medicine and education.

In the past month, Brazil's first indigenous woman was voted to Congress while the nation’s newly elected President is expected to pursue assimilation policies toward indigenous peoples and seek an end to demarcations of their lands and protections to the environment. 

Communities in the Bajo Huallaga area of the Peruvian Amazon declared an “environmental and territorial emergency” on 16 September this year following serious and ongoing impacts on their natural resources, territories and inhabitants caused by land grabs and deforestation of their lands by loggers and palm oil companies.

Urgent action is needed to halt the takeover of indigenous peoples’ lands for megaprojects in forested provinces like Kalimantan and Papua in Indonesia. The destruction of forests and rivers is undermining local indigenous livelihoods, and destroying ancestral lands. Between 40 and 70 million people in rural Indonesia depend on access to lands and resources, including water for drinking and sanitation, protected by customary laws.

On 25-26 September 2018 Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities and human rights defenders from Peru and Colombia met in a binational workshop in Cauca (Colombia) with FPP and allies, including the Legal Defense Institute of Peru.

A landmark declaration in 2010 brought human rights abuses by business activities into the spotlight. Since 2017, we have seen significant advances in legislating requirements for human rights due diligence in key markets, and in 2018 negotiations began on a possible Binding Treaty on business and human rights.

A Special Economic Zone in Chiang Khong, northern Thailand, could bring valuable investment into the area. But if it does go ahead, the wetland forests should be excluded to preserve the biodiversity of the local area, and to preserve the way of life of the local community.