Strengthening indigenous and community rights is a climate solution that can be implemented right now—and women are leading the way
Strengthening indigenous and community rights is a climate solution that can be implemented right now—and women are leading the way

Strengthening indigenous and community rights is a climate solution that can be implemented right now—and women are leading the way

A United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released today has for the first time acknowledged the critical role of indigenous and community land rights as a solution to the climate crisis. In response, indigenous and community networks and organizations issued a statement emphasizing the long-awaited recognition of their role in protecting forests … Continued

A United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released today has for the first time acknowledged the critical role of indigenous and community land rights as a solution to the climate crisis. In response, indigenous and community networks and organizations issued a statement emphasizing the long-awaited recognition of their role in protecting forests and calling on all actors to implement six key recommendations—including the recognition of indigenous and community women’s land and resource rights. Signatory groups span 42 countries covering 76 percent of the world’s tropical forests and 1.6 billion hectares of land customarily used or managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, a land mass nearly the size of Russia.

Keeping forests standing is crucial to meeting global climate goals, and doing so requires respecting the rights of the local peoples who manage them. While up to 2.5 billion people customarily manage 50 percent of the world’s lands, governments formally recognize their ownership to only 10 percent. For the women in these communities, the situation is worse: countries that recognize their collective forest and land rights are the exception rather than the norm. Without secure land rights, neither women nor men can fully protect, invest in, or govern over their lands and resources.

Indigenous and community women—who increasingly play an outsized role in forest management, subsistence cultivation, and rural economies—are often the first to feel the impacts of climate change. But their unique knowledge of forest resources also offers promising paths forward. Because women tend to use, conserve, and value resources differently, their decisions regarding resource use can have potentially significant effects on the maintenance of biodiversity for generations to come.

Kalpana Giri, a senior program officer at The Center for People and Forests (RECOFTC), argues that women’s ability to contribute to climate change mitigation first starts with their meaningful inclusion in decision-making spaces. “If we set the inclusion process right, then immediately we will see the diverse types of people who live in forest landscapes, and the representation of these communities will increase,” said Giri. “Because of that representation, people will acknowledge that yes, women do matter in forest conservation. And because of that engagement they will also begin to understand what needs to be done further.”

While data is limited, research shows that women’s involvement in forest management contributes to their wellbeing and the health of their communities—and the condition of their forests improves as well. Data from Nepal and India has shown that community-based forestry groups with a high proportion of women in the management committee (at least one-third) managed the forest better and achieved a higher degree of economic equity. In some countries, forest rights legislation supports these findings by explicitly recognizing women as stakeholders in forest governance. For example, the Forest Rights Act in India requires that village assemblies and forest rights committees meet women’s participation quotas to achieve quorum.

In Nepal, where women’s participation as decision makers on the executive committees of community forest user groups (CFUGs) was initially met with skepticism, women’s increased governance of CFUGs over the past 30 years has propelled them to positions in local governance.

“Lack of knowledge and awareness on the preservation of forest caused two main problems. On the one hand forest was being devastated and on the other hand we were having problems in collection of fodder and firewood,” said Manju Malashi, a CFUG leader and treasurer of the Federation of Community Forestry User Group Nepal (FECOFUN). “Under my leadership, we organized trainings on various subjects (e.g. leadership training, accounting, good governance), which led to strengthening of community forest user groups and improvement in their activities.” In the 2017 local elections, Malashi was elected mayor of her home town in the Far-Western Region of Nepal.

On the other side of the world, in Peru, women leaders from the National Organization of Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Women of Peru (ONAMIAP for its Spanish acronym) are organizing to secure participation in the implementation of Peru’s new Framework Law on Climate Change. After the law was passed in 2018, advocates from seven national indigenous organizations came together to demand that the regulation of the law be subject to prior consultation and include direct financing for indigenous and women’s proposals. In 2019, the government finally agreed to one of ONAMIAP’s central demands: the creation of an Indigenous Climate Platform as a permanent space for the discussion and monitoring of climate policies.

“We hope first that the government will include all of our proposals in the regulation of the climate change law,” said Melania Canales, the current president of ONAMIAP. “And after, we want the law implemented, so it doesn’t just become ‘one more law’ or remain in the sleep of the just. And for that I believe that the organizations and institutions need to work together—but there needs to be political will.”

Collective organizing by indigenous and community women—often starting at the local level—is positioning women to scale up their leadership and their contributions to sustainable development. But the global community must do more than acknowledge indigenous and community women, including investing directly in their proposals and solutions.

“As everyone is scrambling to make sense of the climate crisis, strengthening indigenous and community rights is a solution that can be implemented right now,” said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. “We need each and every member state of the UN to embrace these findings and make Indigenous Peoples partners in efforts to protect our planet and achieve sustainable development.”


Support indigenous and community women by sharing their response to the UN IPCC climate and land report. Access the full social media kit here.