Conservation and human rights

Our Conservation and Human Rights work supports indigenous peoples and forest peoples to assert their rights to own, occupy, protect, and conserve their ancestral land and territories according to their knowledge and skills. We seek to ensure that conservation initiatives, like protected areas and national parks, do not harm the rights and livelihoods of forest peoples. We also seek recognition of indigenous peoples’ and forest peoples’ own conservation actions, supporting our partners to expand and deepen conservation as part of wider territorial management planning.

Context

Indigenous peoples and local communities are too often confronted with protected areas being created on their lands without their consent, or without being able to effectively participate in management or decision-making. Violations of their human rights remain far too common, and accountability is often lacking. At the same time, indigenous peoples and forest peoples have generationally cared for and sustained their lands, territories, and resources and have made out-sized contributions to the conservation, sustainable use, and restoration of biodiversity. Such contributions are too often overlooked.

Aims

We aim to support indigenous peoples and forest peoples to assert their rights to own, occupy, protect and conserve their ancestral land and territories according to their knowledge and skills, ensuring that conservation initiatives, such as protected areas and national parks, do not harm the rights or livelihoods of forest peoples. Additionally, we work toward the recognition of indigenous and forest peoples’ own conservation efforts, supporting our partners in integrating these actions into broader territorial management planning to foster sustainable and inclusive conservation practices.

Our work

FPP works with partners to advocate for human rights to be at the core of conservation planning. One of the most transformative changes in international policy is the adoption of the Global Biodiversity Framework in 2022, in which 196 countries pledged to adopt a human rights-based approach to biodiversity policy, and to recognise the vital roles that indigenous peoples play in addressing biodiversity loss. This was a result of decades of work by the Indigenous International Forum on Biodiversity with allies like FPP, who have been pushing for better recognition of indigenous peoples’ vital role in the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.

The successful adoption of this framework needs continued work, including on supporting rights-based implementation of the ambition in that framework to expand protected and conserved status to 30% of the world’s lands, waters and oceans. Rights-based implementation of conservation targets must recognise and advance the roles and contributions of indigenous peoples and of local communities, celebrating the vast contributions they are already making and supporting those generational systems of territorial governance to be sustained into the future. We celebrate and document where we see opportunities to transform conservation in this way
 

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Our bylaws define our places for settlement, for grazing, sacred sites, medicinal sites. We don’t allow activities along riverbanks, nor felling or cutting of live trees. The laws that we have were there from the beginning. Our clans are named after different animals and birds. We interrelate with them”

'People-to-people Declaration of Laboot' by the Women-Led Indigenous Peoples East Africa Assembly, July 2022
 

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One of the areas of our work is supporting indigenous peoples and forest peoples to track how well these new conservation policies are being implemented on the ground. Where our partners identify problems, FPP can help to set up dialogue with governments and conservation organisations where communities can push for reforms in policy and practice, including through the Whakatane Mechanism. These dialogues and advocacy can prevent widespread exclusion, eviction and dispossession of forest peoples from their land. Where dialogue is difficult or impossible, we can seek accountability and redress through legal case work, including with the Strategic Legal Response Centre.

 

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“We reject ‘protected areas’ imposed by others, they protect the interests of the powerful and destroy the only sustainable way of caring for our environment, which is through belonging." 

'People-to-people Declaration of Laboot' by the Women-Led Indigenous Peoples East Africa Assembly, July 2022
 

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FPP also works to equip communities with the tools they need to manage and safeguard their territories effectively, to gather data to prove they are doing so, and to use new technologies to map the boundaries of their territories, including through the Transformative Pathways initiative. Then we create the political space for our partners to assert their rights and evidence their vital role in conservation at the national, regional and international level.