Deforestation

Tropical forests continue to be cleared at an alarming rate to make way for industrial agriculture, extractive industries, and infrastructure development. These direct drivers of deforestation are often fuelled by laws and policies that fail to respect the rights to lands, territories and resources of indigenous peoples and forest peoples and instead incentivise non-transparent concession allocation systems and unsustainable production, trade and consumption of commodities from tropical forests.  

Why is it relevant to indigenous peoples and forest peoples?  

Despite a well of promises and commitments by governments and corporations worldwide to reduce and halt deforestation, it continues to escalate. Alongside major environmental and climate impacts, aggressive deforestation is causing, or is linked with, severe human rights violations. For instance, indigenous peoples and forest peoples experience encroachment on their customary lands, destruction of their food and water sources and diminished livelihood security, which often result in impoverishment, malnutrition and ill-health. Often, loss of forests also goes together with loss of traditional knowledge, culture and local ways of life. Community resistance to land grabs and forest clearing frequently results in threats, criminalisation and violence against those that resist – with murder being the price that a devastatingly high number of land and human rights defenders have had to pay for their work and courage.

“Loggers are cutting down our medicinal plants. Our diet has been disrupted… When we protect against the invasion of our forests, the police come and arrest us and threaten us.” Baka community member, Bikoro province, DRC, 2015   

As the world continues to negotiate how to address deforestation, indigenous peoples and forest peoples are attracting increasing attention in multilateral fora for their historic contribution to forest protection as well as to the solutions they are presenting for the future. The fact that indigenous peoples are among the best forest protectors in the world, is backed up by a growing body of research, including studies that show annual deforestation rates in forests where indigenous peoples have secure land rights to be 2-3 times lower than in other similar lands.