Climate efforts won’t succeed without secure community rights – A Mongabay interview with Nonette Royo

• Indigenous territories account for at least 36% of the world’s “intact forests” and Indigenous Peoples and local communities (ILPC) live in or manage about half of the planet’s lands, making these areas a critical imperative in efforts to combat climate change and species loss.
• Yet in many places, IPLCs lack formal recognition of their customary lands and resources, jeopardizing their basic human rights and heightening the risk that these areas could be damaged or destroyed. For these reasons, helping IPLCs secure land rights is increasingly seen as a central component of efforts to address climate change and achieve conservation goals.
• Nonette Royo, the executive director of the Tenure Facility, is one of the most prominent advocates for advancing the rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and women. Royo spoke with Mongabay about progress and obstacles in the push to advance local peoples’ tenure rights as well as the Tenure Facility’s approaches.
• “Many models are now emerging to get these types of approaches, which require deep listening and letting communities lead the process, and adjusting or adapting their own agenda, and being willing to be transformed in the process,” Royo said. “This is most needed in the conservation space. This means respecting all rights, not just of people (as individuals or collective), but of their ways of tending with nature and co-beings with nature.”

Nonette Royo, a lawyer from Northern Mindanao in the Philippines who has been working at the intersection of rights and the environment for more than 30 years and has co-founded several organizations, is one of the most prominent advocates for advancing the rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and women. Royo is now the executive director of the Tenure Facility, which was created to provide financial and technical support to IPLCs in their struggle to secure and strengthen their rights, including legal recognition of their land tenure. Royo has served in that capacity since the Tenure Facility became an independent organization in 2017 when it was spun out of the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI).

Mongabay have conducted an interview with Nonette concerning land rights and the issues faced by Indigenous People’s and local communities. Click below to read the full article.