Forest Trends – Forest Communities and Territorial Governance
Forest Trends (FT) has twenty years of experience partnering with indigenous communities, governments, businesses, and civil society, collaborating to conserve forests and biodiversity in the Amazon and other regions in the world. Forest Trends’ Communities and Territorial Governance Initiative (FT-CGTI) works directly with indigenous and other traditional communities to secure their rights, conserve their forests, and improve their livelihoods, through pioneering new approaches. For example, FT-CGTI has launched programs such as the Cultural Mediators Program, which integrates topics like climate change and traditional indigenous knowledge in the curricula of schools attended by indigenous children and youth. The Capacity-Building Program on Indigenous Territorial Governance is a one-year long program designed to strengthen the integrated governance of indigenous territories. Forest Trends also develops initiatives with local communities to support their economic resilience, by bringing their forest products to the marketplace. We also promote and monitor the flow of climate finance directly to indigenous territories: we co-developed the world’s first indigenous REDD+ project with the Surui people, and helped design the benefit sharing mechanism for the Acre-SISA jurisdictional program. Both the Surui Project and SISA offer very important lessons to guide future place-based carbon projects as well as jurisdictional programs, among which the need for FPIC to be a continuous process. Forest Trends continues to advocate for direct funding to indigenous peoples and other traditional communities (e.g., The Economics of Climate Change Mitigation in Indigenous Territories). Join us to meet Beto Borges and learn.
