Transcript: Climate Quickie: What is Indigenous forest guardianship?
TEDxLondon Climate Curious
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ndigenous communities protect, nourish and heal ancestral forests: 470 million Indigenous Peoples care for and manage 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity, in fact. So why are their rights under attack from companies, miners and illegal loggers? Nonette Royo, a human rights lawyer and executive director at the Tenure Facility, an organisation providing financial and technical assistance to Indigenous Peoples to support their efforts to secure their land rights, joins Climate Curious by TEDxLondon to explain why.
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TRANSCRIPT
BEN HURST:
In this week’s Climate Quickie live from TED’s Countdown Summit in Detroit, we’re joined by Nonette Royo, a human rights lawyer, and executive director at the Tenure Facility.
Nonette explains what tenure rights are, and how she’s using them to provide legal to Indigenous people, by taking their land defending rights to court.
This is super important, because Indigenous communities protect, nourish and heal ancestral forests.
Did you know, 470 million Indigenous people care for and manage 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity?
So why are their rights under attack from companies, miners and illegal loggers?
Over to Nonette to tell us more.
Stay Curious.
NONETTE ROYO:
I am Nonette Royo. I am the Executive Director of the Tenure Facility. I’m by practice a human rights lawyer and I’ve been, uh, leading this organization in Stockholm since it was funded.
My organization, it’s about tenure, rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities who are forest guardians. And they protect a huge amount o f our land and forests, and they’re key to our climate solution.
Tenure rights are, essentially a set of, Legal, instruments or rights of relationships between people, communities, and their land translated into instruments that spell out that relationship and allows the people collectively [00:01:30] to stay in the land and continue what they do, with the land, you know, nurturing it, tending it, benefiting from it, and, and living with it.
It’s very important for us to understand that two thirds of the world’s land is stewarded and protected, and attended by communities, Indigenous peoples, Inukitut communities 790 million people. And, their relationship to that land is almost invisible.
Their collective stewardship to the land is generally invisible. And it is time immemorial, some of them, and most of them, really long term. And it is passed on from generation to generation, and it’s about time for us now to really make that visible through collective recognition and titling.
because of that, they can continue protecting and tending, and maintaining their relationship with, with that land.
For right now with modern infrastructure and technology, roads have gone deeper and deeper into the remote areas. Um, and the communities that have stayed together and kept their boundaries defined using their laws that actually protect their land use have actually shown that the forest and then nature around the area.
Are still intact. And you can see this in maps that are now available to us. Map biomass, from Brazil. These places are intact and are continuing to stay green and that’s actually physical evidence of where communities are together.
The forests are much more protected and regrown because of that interaction.
It’s important for us to understand that land tenure collectively with Indigenous peoples as the holders of that collective title ensures that the practices of protection, stewarding, benefiting, and sustaining forest and nature become much more important.
Stewardship is anchored on the value that nature is not separate from people and other kids Animals, plants, insects, and the responsibility of humans, who in general, the indigenous peoples who have recalled the memory of messages from the ancestors and whole traditional knowledge passed on from generation is to protect and steward, protect, tend, and benefit from, but in a manner that does not take the resources away from the next generation.
So you can look us up in our website https://thetenurefacility.org/
EPISODE ENDS
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