Indigenous leaders, government representatives and researchers will gather in Lima to launch new study, revealing roadblocks that prevent communities from securing rights to their land as companies charge ahead

LIMA (July 5, 2018) — Last year, 39 million acres (15.8 million hectares) of tropical forest disappeared — an area nearly the size of Bangladesh. Yet the rate of tree cover loss within indigenous and community forests was less than half as high as outside of them. These groups have long stewarded the world’s land, including vast swaths of tropical forests, but without formal rights, they cannot protect the ancestral domains they have sustainably managed for generations. Forced to make way for companies, many communities are losing their land at an alarming rate.

On July 11, 2018 in Lima, World Resources Institute (WRI) will release new research that sheds light on why these communities find it so hard to gain title to their lands as companies breeze through the process. The Scramble for Land Rights: Reducing Inequity between Communities and Companies is one of the most comprehensive global reviews comparing how communities and companies formalize land rights across 15 countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

WRI and CIFOR will share the new findings for the first time at the event. Researchers will speak alongside indigenous leaders from communities at the center of a battle for land in the Peruvian Amazon, where corporate interests are at odds with the communities’ livelihoods.

WHAT

Event to release a new WRI report, The Scramble for Land Rights: Reducing Inequity between Communities and Companies

WHO

  • Laura Notess, Research Analyst with WRI’s Land and Resource Rights Initiative and Report Author
  • Anne Larson, Principal Scientist, CIFOR
  • Hildebrando Antonio Collantes Zegarra, Head of the Indigenous Communities Office, Subnational Government of Ucayali for the Ministry of Agriculture
  • Julio Cusurichi, President, FENAMAD
  • Carlos Hoyos, Community Chief, Santa Clara de Uchunya
  • Lizardo Cauper, President, AIDESEP

WHEN

9 a.m. - 10 p.m. local time

Wednesday 11 July 2018

(breakfast at 8:30 a.m.; press briefing at 9:00 a.m.)

WHERE

Hotel Antigua

Miraflores, Av Grau 350

Lima, Peru