Download our 2021 Annual Report

It is hard to talk about 2021 without mentioning the pandemic, and honouring the tragic loss of community members, friends, and family to Covid. The structural challenges ahead for forest peoples and their lands and territories are also stark and shifting. At the start of 2021, research gathered by a collaboration led by FPP alerted global policy makers to a widespread rollback of social and environmental safeguards during the pandemic and in its wake. Meanwhile, FPP and partners continue to call out human rights abuses in commodity supply chains, while working with local and international networks on new ways to demand accountability, including via EU and UK reforms on corporate due diligence. The ‘Zero Tolerance Initiative’ (ZTI) network, of which FPP is a founder member, strengthened its joint advocacy for action to address violence and criminalisation linked to global supply chains.

Land rights struggles are often long, and the arc of change can be slow. In response, the deepening of FPP’s focus on cultural resilience during 2021 included the co-creation of the ‘Indigenous-led Education Network’ (ILED), as a means of enabling indigenous peoples’ own initiatives to affirm and sustain their identity, languages, and cultures. Self-determination also relies on all sections of communities having a strong seat at the table, and FPP’s gender programme continued to strengthen its support for wholecommunity engagement, including by women, in the collective task of defending rights.

Celebrating successes, including the staging posts along the way, is crucial to any struggle. 2021 provided one such cause for celebration for the Batwa in Uganda, whose constitutional court case successfully found the Government to have violated their rights by unlawfully evicting them from protected areas established on their ancestral lands. Elsewhere, our legal team, often in partnership with local lawyers, continued to champion supporting forest peoples to seek justice, including by further growing FPP’s Strategic Legal Response Centre (SLRC).

2021 was a pivotal year for UN climate and biodiversity framework negotiations seeking to address the growing ecological and climate crises affecting all planetary life. FPP accompanied indigenous delegations to travel to the UN climate summit in Glasgow, where they engaged in major actions inside and outside the global negotiations. The £1.7bn pledge to ‘Support for Indigenous Peoples’ and Local Communities’ Tenure Rights’ was encouraging. However, emerging carbon- and biodiversity-related targets and markets also risk creating adverse human rights impacts.

Are we winning? (‘We’ being the broader movement of which FPP is a part.) I suspect there are few liberation movements who felt they were winning, until they had. As Mandela said, ‘it always seems impossible until its done’. An unspoken aspect of our practice of change therefore relies on not letting the healthy scepticism stemming from a realistic analysis of the challenges, eclipse the optimism needed to overcome them – or as Curtis Mayfield put it, to keep on keeping on.

Tom Lomax

Director, Forest Peoples Programme

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Download our 2021 Annual Report

Download our Financial Statements 2021