The Peoples Forests Partnership at London Climate Action Week

The Peoples Forests Partnership (PFP) has just returned from an engaging London Climate Action Week, in which the Partnership jointly held a session on how to strengthen community rights and positive outcomes and what role carbon and biodiversity finance must play to help get it right. The session, ‘Carbon & biodiversity finance that supports community rights’, took place on Wednesday 26 June at 14:00 BST and featured case studies and panellists from the UK, Liberia, Nepal and Latin America. Around 80 people attended both in-person and virtually.

Key messages from the session:

• Support for human and land rights must form the basis of any nature market and financing instruments for nature.

• Markets and finance that aim to invest in land or biodiversity conservation and restoration need to be made accessible to communities around the world so that they can develop their own projects.

• Inspirational governments around the world are working on institutionalizing the role of communities in land stewardship, as showcased in this session by the governments of Liberia and Scotland.

“With innovative business partnership and ownership structures that strengthen community rights, we can scale this market and deliver the impact and change that we need to see in the world. And we must do it now.”

                                                                        Anna Lehmann, PFP Executive Director

Pasang Dolma Sherpa speaks via virtual link to the session

Panellists at the event discussed the threats posed by climate finance and markets that undermine community and human rights, and what they request from governments, developers, investors and buyers in order to create innovative financial flows that support communities in their roles as land stewards. They also shared the history of and challenges around community land rights in their particular regions and shared ideas of key building blocks in a market design to anchor climate action in the rights of the people, along with the role of standard-setting organisations in such a design.

Whilst PFP supports the creation of equitable market and financial instruments, not all members might choose to get involved in carbon or biodiversity markets. The decision lies with Indigenous Peoples, traditional owners, local communities and Afro-descendants (IP, LC and AD). Tellingly, all speakers in the panel highlighted a need for a programme of meaningful support that enables communities to take action on climate themselves and makes finance more accessible to them.

This point was clearly illustrated by Pasang Dolma Sherpa, Executive Director of the Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Research & Development (CIPRED) and a PFP founding and Executive Committee member. Sherpa has been working with IP, LC and AD for the recognition of Indigenous knowledge, cultural values and customary institutions that contribute to the sustainable management of forests, biodiversity and climate resilience for over a decade. She will continue her involvement with PFP’s advocacy on rights-based approaches as co-chairperson of PFP’s recently formed task force on the issue.

Sherpa communicated the desire for IP, LC and AD to be on an equal footing. She explained that, with discussion on carbon finance moving as fast as a bullet train, rights-based approaches that include IP, LC and AD are still found wanting. IP, LC and AD continue to face huge capacity challenges and must contend with threats of land grabbing and day-to-day encroachment. With little regulation in place, Sherpa highlighted the danger that carbon market solutions put human rights or community rights at risk – hardly recognizing them because of a strong focus on carbon accounting over real action on the ground – all the while threatening land tenure security for customary institutions.

The European Court of Human Rights has now ruled that climate inaction by governments is a violation of human rights, making the need for decisive action that effects real change more acute than ever. Speaking on what IP, LC and AD should ask governments for, Sherpa said: “The peoples’ key concerns need to be understood. Free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous peoples must form the basis for any nature-based market and development of their lands and territories, with land tenure security as a foundation and with expertise and capacity-building to be shared in order to bring local communities to the table.”

Gustavo Sánchez speaks via virtual link to the session

Also among the panellists was Gustavo Sánchez, Director of the Mexican Land Workers Organizations’ Network (Red MOCAF), and like Sherpa a PFP founding and Executive Committee member. Sánchez, an agricultural economist, has dedicated his time to strengthening forest community organizations through drafting policy and supporting communications and participation of Indigenous and local community organizations in international spaces. He sits on the board of directors of the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests (AMPB); the Resources and Rights Initiative (RRI) and the Community Land Rights and Conservation Finance Initiative (CLARIFI).

Sánchez reminded attendees that “carbon markets are an alternative as long as IP, LC and AD rights are fully respected, but they need to be made more accessible to IP, LC and AD”. He also called for a more adequate, multilingual communications strategy for “all projects and programmes – carbon, biodiversity, water, soil conservation” – in which information is made more accessible to IP, LC and AD. Another priority, Sánchez added, was ensuring the participation of IP, LC and AD in consultation and consent processes so that they can understand the market and its pricing, develop skills and be trained. In this way, “communities can develop their own resources to carry out their own studies and analysis to develop their own projects,” he added.

During the session, it was useful and inspiring to hear of the successful examples panellists raised, in places such as Scotland and Liberia, of governments and administrations innovating to ensure more land stewards are benefitting from the lands they call home. In response to corporations acquiring land to meet nature and net-zero targets, the Scottish Land Commission has supported the practical implementation of the Scottish parliament’s Land Rights and Responsibilities Statement and its Head of Rights and Responsibilities, Emma Cooper, has been instrumental in developing Guidance on Community Benefits from Land that attempts to give voice to the marginalized communities of Scotland.

Amongst the guidelines, Cooper told the panel, the government of Scotland is introducing a Community Rights to Buy scheme, whereby community has the right to apply for land up for sale, and a community asset transfer programme and can request ownership or leasing of a publicly owned land and/or a role in decision-making over it. In addition, the Scottish parliament’s Land Reform Bill, introduced in May 2024, makes it a legal requirement for investors in larger land areas to include benefits for communities in their land management plans. Cooper iterated that these solutions are just the start of moving towards being able to take intergenerational decisions, rather than allow a few powerful individuals and corporations to take those decisions. They represent a historical effort by the Scottish government to increase the role of communities in land stewardship and decisions on land.

Zoe Quiroz Cullen speaks as fellow panellists Feja Lesniewska and Rupert Quinlan listen

We also heard from Zoe Quiroz Cullen, Director of the Climate and Nature Linkages programme at Fauna & Flora. This programme supports locally led conservation projects and programmes to access sustainable finance via the nature-based carbon and emerging biodiversity markets. Quiroz Cullen spoke of the experience Fauna & Flora and the programme have had working with civil society and government partners in Liberia over more than two decades. The programme has specifically sought to protect and restore nature in Liberia through bringing new areas under conservation management with opportunities for long-term sustainable finance through developing inclusive REDD+ projects.

The government of Liberia passed the Lands Act in 2018, which recognized community ownership of customary land. The Act also acknowledges equal rights to its benefits for all genders. Flora & Fauna subsequently rethought its approach to area-based conversation in Liberia, to steer towards community-based and locally led solutions. Challenges remained, with the Act interpreted and understood in differing ways and prevailing paradigms of area-based conversation difficult to shift. In 2023, Flora & Fauna brought together the Liberia lands and forest development authorities, communities and civil society in dialogue. This resulted in a declaration acknowledging that communities are owners of customary land in Liberia and committing its signatories to a process of customary land formalization for communities that have claims to such lands, to take place before new area-based conservation measures are created. “State-managed protective and conservation areas are one option, but they are no longer the only option,” Quiroz Cullen said.

PFP Executive Director Anna Lehmann ended the session by calling for “people prepared to scale this work up to step forward, and support the claims of IP, LC and AD for recognition of land and customary rights. We need innovative partnerships between those holding the solutions and those holding the money. The PFP is here to build this bridge and co-create the three ingredients we most need now: pragmatic solutions, trust and a shared vision. We have no time to lose.”

The event was co-organized by PFP, Fauna & Flora and Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) Alliance, and formed part of the NCS Alliance’s LCAW programme. The full list of speakers included Pasang Dolma Sherpa, Gustavo Sánchez, Emma Cooper, Feja Lesniewska, Rupert Quinlan, Zoe Quiroz Cullen and Anna Lehmann.