"Indigenous leaders to push for land tenure rights as climate solution at COP26", 27 Oct 2021

Indigenous leaders from around the world are heading to the COP26 United Nations climate summit..., where one of the main topics on their agenda will be highlighting community land tenure as an often-overlooked way to mitigate climate change. Research demonstrating that granting Indigenous peoples and forest communities formal titles to their lands as a cost-effective approach to tacking climate change has been piling up for years. Two new reports released on Oct. 27 by the World Resources Institute and the PRISMA Foundation add to that growing body of work. “No [climate] initiative can succeed if rights are not recognized,” said Mina Setra, deputy to the secretary-general of the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN), an organization with more than 2,400 affiliated communities throughout Indonesia... [L]and and forest rights of Indigenous peoples and other local communities (IPLCs) prevents deforestation and destruction contributing to climate change. “The science is now so far advanced, it’s pretty irrefutable,” Peter Veit, director of WRI’s Land and Resource Rights initiative and the lead author of the report, told Mongabay in an interview. “There’s no excuse for not securing IPLC lands in your country. The challenge now is that we need to act on the evidence that exists.”...