Rights to Lands, Territories and Resources

For indigenous peoples and forest peoples to survive and flourish, and to sustainably steward their lands and forests, they need secure collective rights to own, use, manage and control the lands, territories, and resources they own and govern under their customary tenure systems and on which they depend for their own means of subsistence. Under international law, governments have an obligation to respect and protect these rights. FPP supports initiatives led by indigenous peoples and forest peoples to assert their land, territory, and resource rights, map their ownership, use and stewardship of lands and forests, file land title claims, enhance territorial governance, and establish the conditions for flourishing and diverse local economies, livelihoods, and food systems. Their struggles to secure their land rights are inextricably linked to defence of their forests from environment harms and the realisation of their right to a clean, safe, healthy, and sustainable environment, rooted in cosmovisions where nature and culture are often indivisible and struggles for land are “struggles for life”, both human and otherwise.

Lands and natural resources in the territories of indigenous peoples and forest peoples are often coveted by external actors – loggers, miners, ranchers, agribusiness, plantations, financiers, as well as by those pursuing exclusionary forms of conservation (including as a means of accessing carbon or other nature markets). Insisting on respect for indigenous peoples’ and forest peoples’ land and self-determination rights and seeking accountability where they are violated is at the core of FPP’s engagement with these other sectors where we have a mandate from our partners to do so.