Themes

Explore the key themes the Forest Peoples Programme addresses, including Human Rights, Climate Change and Biodiversity, Business, Trade and Finance, Deforestation, Community Governance, and Culture and Knowledge.

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Lands, Territories and Resources

Indigenous peoples have symbiotic relationships with their ancestral territories which are central to their identity, survival, well-being and self-determined development.

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Self-determination and FPIC

Self-determination is the right of all peoples, including indigenous peoples and forest peoples, to determine their futures.

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The “Forests COP”? - Highlights on forests and indigenous peoples from the UNFCCC 19th Conference of the Parties

Key decisions on REDD+ adopted at the 19th Conference of the Parties (COP19) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Warsaw, and future UNFCCC climate negotiations and financing commitments by donors, such as the United Kingdom, will pose further significant challenges for indigenous peoples' rights and its advocates.

The Warsaw UNFCCC COP19 (which took place from 11-22 November 2013) has been dubbed the “Forests COP”. Pending solutions for critical issues such as climate finance, emission reduction commitments and compensation for loss and damage, Parties adopted a “package” of decisions on REDD+, including Monitoring, Reporting and Verification, Reference Emission Levels and Forest Reference Levels. Other REDD+ decisions adopted at COP19 commit governments to provide safeguard information systems (SIS), which demonstrate how safeguards are being addressed and respected throughout the implementation of REDD+ activities. These safeguard information systems must be provided before results-based payments can be received.

The COP also adopted a decision on drivers of deforestation. While it fell short of acknowledging the role and impact of “external” drivers, such as trade and consumption of forest and agricultural products (mostly due to the pressure of Brazil and Indonesia) the document indeed encourages “Parties, organizations, private sector to take action to reduce the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation”. As expected, the key contentious issue for Indigenous Peoples was the ambiguous language that had been adopted at the SBSTA meeting in June 2013 (“Noting that livelihoods may be dependent on activities related to drivers of deforestation and forest degradation and that addressing these drivers may have an economic cost and implications for domestic resources”).Indigenous Peoples were concerned that this ambiguous language could consider their livelihoods as drivers of deforestation, so raised the matter to Parties in an attempt to reformulate the sentence so it is clear that indigenous peoples’ livelihoods are not to be considered as deforestation drivers but rather as contributors to forest conservation. Parties finally agreed to include a note in the COP report, clarifying that the text was not meant to stigmatise indigenous peoples' livelihoods.

Other COP decisions dealt with coordination of financial support for REDD+, and the request to the UNFCCC’s Standing Committee on Finance to consider the issue of financing for forests. Indigenous peoples also focused on the ADP (Durban Platform for Enhanced Action), since REDD+ is likely to be brought into the wider land-based adaptation and mitigation negotiations with the risk that previously agreed language on indigenous peoples' rights and instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) might be lost in translation. The concept of land-based mitigation and adaption opens the path towards new approaches to forest management and conservation for climate-related purposes. One of these, notably “the landscape approach”, was discussed by participants of the Global Landscapes Forum held in parallel to the COP. The World Bank BioCarbon Fund also launched the “Initiative for Sustainable Forest Landscapes” (ISFL), funded by Norway (135 million USD), the UK (120 million USD), and the US (25 million USD). Additionally, the UK will further contribute to the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility's Carbon Fund and Germany will scale up its REDD+ Early Movers programme (12 million Euros). Norway, who have allocated a further 40 million USD for UNREDD, and Germany will increase their support for results-based payments in Colombia and Ecuador. A joint statement by Colombia, Norway, Germany and the United Kingdom was also made public, supporting the Colombian government’s goal to reach zero deforestation in the Amazon by 2020.

The outcomes of COP19 pose significant challenges given this new push from the top down to facilitate REDD+ when implementation and readiness activities in most forest nations remain at a very early stage and few actions have been taken to secure forest peoples’ tenure rights. Major focus must be given to implementation of robust application of safeguards at the country level and this must be a priority for all Parties involved. Advocacy efforts will need to ensure that international climate commitments are based on international human rights instruments and standards such as the UNDRIP and that these are applied in practice on the ground. If not, concerns over the problems with REDD+ and lack of attention to deforestation drivers will continue and deforestation rates are unlikely to fall.

For more detailed information on the outcomes of COP19 and their impacts on forests and indigenous peoples, please see Forest Peoples Programme’s latest briefing.

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