Who Protects the Forests

The question of who protects the world’s forests has a clear empirical answer. It is not governments. It is not conservation organizations. It is not corporations with sustainability pledges. The most effective protectors of forests, measured by deforestation rates, carbon storage, and biodiversity retention, are indigenous peoples and local communities who have managed these landscapes for centuries or millennia before the concept of “conservation” entered the policy vocabulary.

A 2022 study published in Nature Sustainability analyzed satellite data across 55 countries and found that forests managed by indigenous peoples showed deforestation rates 17 to 26 percent lower than comparable forests without formal protection.¹ The finding was not new. It confirmed and strengthened a body of evidence that has been accumulating for more than two decades, from studies in the Brazilian Amazon, the forests of Central America, the peatlands of Indonesia, and the boreal regions of Canada. The consistency of the finding across geographies, forest types, governance systems, and time periods makes it one of the most robust relationships in conservation science.

Indigenous peoples manage approximately 22 percent of the world’s land surface.² These lands contain an estimated 80 percent of the planet’s remaining biodiversity.³ Roughly 50 percent of the world’s remaining intact forest landscapes, forests large enough to retain their full ecological function, overlap with indigenous territories.⁴ The spatial coincidence between indigenous land management and ecological integrity is not accidental. It is the result of management practices, governance systems, and cultural relationships with land that predate and, in most cases, outperform the conservation strategies devised by modern institutions.

The data is unambiguous. The policy response has not been.

The evidence base

The evidence that indigenous land management reduces deforestation has been documented across every major tropical forest region. The most extensive data comes from the Brazilian Amazon, where the contrast between indigenous territories and surrounding areas is visible from space.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined deforestation patterns in the Brazilian Amazon between 2000 and 2014 and found that indigenous territories experienced forest loss rates approximately three times lower than unprotected areas with comparable biophysical characteristics.⁵ The researchers controlled for factors that could explain the difference without reference to indigenous management: distance from roads, slope, soil quality, rainfall, and proximity to markets. After accounting for these variables, the protective effect of indigenous tenure remained large and statistically significant.

The finding was replicated across the Amazon basin. A 2020 analysis by the World Resources Institute, covering indigenous and community lands in Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru, found that between 2001 and 2018, indigenous and community forests across these four countries emitted per hectare, on average, one-sixth the carbon of forests outside such areas.⁶ The carbon advantage was attributable almost entirely to lower deforestation rates. Indigenous territories were not storing more carbon per unit of standing forest. They were simply retaining more standing forest.

In Central America, the pattern holds. Indigenous territories in Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua have consistently shown lower deforestation rates than adjacent non-indigenous areas, even in regions experiencing intense agricultural expansion and illegal land invasion.⁷ The Miskito people of the Mosquito Coast, the Maya Biosphere Reserve communities in Guatemala, and the Rama-Kriol territories in Nicaragua all demonstrate the relationship between tenure security and forest retention.

In Indonesia, customary (adat) forests have shown lower deforestation rates than forests managed by the state or allocated to concessions, despite the enormous economic pressure from the palm oil industry.⁸ A 2017 study in Land Use Policy found that community-managed forests in Kalimantan lost less than half the forest cover of comparable state-managed forests over a 12-year period.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the international body that synthesizes the scientific evidence on biodiversity, concluded in its 2019 Global Assessment that land managed by indigenous peoples and local communities is declining less rapidly than other lands, and that at least a quarter of the global land area is traditionally owned, managed, used, or occupied by indigenous peoples.⁹ The assessment found that indigenous and traditional knowledge systems contribute to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and that the erosion of these knowledge systems is itself a driver of environmental degradation.

Why it works

The effectiveness of indigenous forest management is not mysterious, though it is often treated as such in policy discussions that frame indigenous peoples as passive beneficiaries of conservation rather than active agents of it. The mechanisms are identifiable, replicable in principle, and grounded in institutional structures that have been refined over generations.

The first mechanism is tenure security. When indigenous communities have legally recognized rights to their territories, they have both the incentive and the authority to prevent unauthorized land clearing, logging, and encroachment. Tenure security transforms the calculus of forest protection: the community that holds secure rights to a forest bears the costs of protecting it but also captures the benefits, including non-timber forest products, clean water, fisheries, and the cultural and spiritual values that forests provide.

A 2021 meta-analysis published in World Development reviewed 59 studies from 27 countries and found that tenure security was the single strongest predictor of forest retention on community-managed lands.¹⁰ Communities with legally recognized tenure had significantly lower deforestation rates than communities with customary but unrecognized claims. The finding suggests that the protective effect of indigenous management depends not solely on traditional practices but on the legal and institutional framework that empowers communities to enforce those practices against external threats.

The second mechanism is governance. Indigenous communities typically have well-defined rules governing the use of forest resources: which areas can be harvested, which species can be taken, in what quantities, and during which seasons. These rules are enforced through social mechanisms, including community monitoring, reputational sanctions, and in some cases formal penalties imposed by traditional authorities. The rules are not static. They adapt to changing ecological conditions, population pressures, and market forces. But they share a common structure: they regulate the rate of resource extraction to maintain the long-term productivity of the ecosystem.

This adaptive governance is precisely what is missing from most state-managed conservation frameworks, which tend to impose uniform rules across diverse landscapes, lack the local knowledge to calibrate those rules to specific ecological conditions, and lack the enforcement capacity to ensure compliance in remote areas. An indigenous community that monitors its own territory daily can detect and respond to illegal logging or land clearing far faster than a government agency that sends inspectors to the area once or twice a year.

The third mechanism is ecological knowledge. Indigenous peoples possess detailed, empirically grounded knowledge of the ecosystems they manage, including the behavior of wildlife, the phenology of plants, the dynamics of water systems, and the indicators of ecosystem health and degradation. This knowledge, accumulated over hundreds or thousands of years of direct interaction with specific landscapes, represents an information base that is, in many respects, more detailed and more locally accurate than the data available to scientific researchers or government agencies.

The integration of indigenous ecological knowledge with scientific conservation practice is one of the most promising and most underutilized strategies in biodiversity conservation. The IPBES has called for the systematic inclusion of indigenous and local knowledge in biodiversity assessments and conservation planning.⁹ Some conservation organizations have begun to adopt this approach. But the dominant paradigm in conservation science still treats indigenous knowledge as supplementary rather than foundational, as anecdotal rather than empirical, and as a resource to be extracted rather than a system to be supported.

The cost advantage

Indigenous and community-based forest management is not only more effective than conventional conservation approaches. It is dramatically cheaper.

A 2021 report by the Rainforest Foundation estimated that the cost of supporting indigenous and community forest management ranges from $5 to $7 per hectare per year, compared to $20 to $30 per hectare per year for government-managed protected areas.¹¹ The cost difference reflects the fact that indigenous communities provide their own monitoring, enforcement, and management labor, using existing governance structures and local knowledge rather than salaried staff, vehicles, equipment, and infrastructure.

The cost-effectiveness ratio is significant because it determines how much forest can be protected per dollar of conservation investment. At $5 per hectare, a $10 million investment can support the management of 2 million hectares of indigenous forest. At $25 per hectare, the same investment supports 400,000 hectares of protected area. The difference, in a world where conservation funding is chronically insufficient, is the difference between protecting a landscape and protecting a fragment.

Despite this cost advantage, indigenous and community-based conservation receives a tiny fraction of global conservation funding. A 2021 analysis by the Rainforest Foundation Norway found that between 2011 and 2020, only 17 percent of climate finance directed to forests reached the local level, and less than 1 percent was directed specifically to indigenous peoples and local communities.¹² The overwhelming majority of forest-related climate finance went to national governments, multilateral institutions, and international conservation organizations.

This funding disparity persists despite the evidence that indigenous forest management is more effective and more cost-efficient than the alternatives. The reasons are structural. International climate and conservation finance flows through institutional channels that are designed to distribute money to governments and large organizations, not to community-level entities. The due diligence requirements, reporting standards, and fiduciary obligations of multilateral funds are calibrated to the capacity of national institutions, not indigenous governance systems. The result is a financing architecture that systematically excludes the most effective forest managers from the resources they need to continue managing their forests.

The threats

The forests managed by indigenous peoples are under escalating pressure from forces that their traditional governance systems were not designed to resist: industrial-scale agriculture, mining, infrastructure development, and the geopolitical interests of national governments that view indigenous territories as obstacles to economic development.

In Brazil, the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, one of the largest protected indigenous areas in the world, experienced a massive invasion of illegal gold miners that peaked in 2022 and 2023. An estimated 20,000 garimpeiros (illegal miners) entered the territory, contaminating rivers with mercury, destroying forest, spreading disease, and creating a humanitarian crisis that prompted international condemnation.¹³ The invasion was facilitated by the weakening of federal environmental enforcement agencies during the Bolsonaro administration, which reduced the budget and operational capacity of IBAMA (the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources) and publicly questioned the legitimacy of indigenous land rights.

In Indonesia, the expansion of palm oil plantations into customary (adat) lands has been a persistent source of conflict for decades. Despite a 2013 ruling by Indonesia’s Constitutional Court recognizing that customary forests are not state forests, the implementation of the ruling has been slow and incomplete.¹⁴ Oil palm companies continue to obtain concessions that overlap with customary territories, and indigenous communities that resist the encroachment face legal action, intimidation, and, in some cases, violence.

The criminalization of indigenous land defenders is a global pattern. In 2020, Global Witness documented the killing of 227 environmental defenders worldwide, the highest number ever recorded.¹⁵ More than one-third of those killed were indigenous people, despite indigenous peoples constituting approximately 5 percent of the global population. The defenders were killed in disputes over land, mining, logging, and agribusiness. The perpetrators included state security forces, private security personnel, paramilitary groups, and hired assassins. The rate of prosecution for these killings is vanishingly low.

The Philippines, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Honduras, and Guatemala account for the majority of recorded killings, but the threat to indigenous land defenders extends across every continent where indigenous peoples are in conflict with extractive industries or agricultural expansion.¹⁶ The pattern is consistent: indigenous communities that assert their land rights and resist unauthorized encroachment face retaliatory violence, and the perpetrators of that violence operate with near-total impunity.

REDD+ and the politics of inclusion

The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation program (REDD+), established under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, is the primary international mechanism for channeling climate finance to forest conservation in developing countries.¹⁷ The program is based on a simple logic: tropical forests store carbon, deforestation releases carbon, and paying countries and communities to keep forests standing is cheaper than reducing emissions from industrial sources.

REDD+ has mobilized significant resources. Norway alone pledged $2.5 billion to the program through its International Climate and Forests Initiative. Germany, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have made substantial contributions. The Green Climate Fund, the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, and various bilateral programs have channeled billions of dollars toward forest conservation in tropical countries.

The relationship between REDD+ and indigenous peoples has been contentious from the beginning. The program’s early design focused on national-level accounting and payments, with little attention to the rights and roles of indigenous communities that manage the forests being conserved. Indigenous organizations argued that REDD+ risked creating a system in which national governments received payments for carbon stored in indigenous forests while indigenous peoples bore the costs of maintaining those forests, including restrictions on land use, without receiving a proportionate share of the benefits.¹⁸

The Cancun Safeguards, adopted at the 2010 UNFCCC Conference of the Parties, established principles intended to protect indigenous rights within REDD+ programs, including the requirement for free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) before REDD+ activities are implemented on indigenous lands.¹⁹ The Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015, further recognized the role of indigenous peoples in addressing climate change. But the gap between these normative commitments and their implementation on the ground remains substantial.

In several countries, REDD+ projects have been implemented on indigenous territories without meaningful consultation, without the consent of affected communities, and without equitable benefit-sharing arrangements.²⁰ Carbon credits generated from forests managed by indigenous peoples have been sold on international markets, with the revenue flowing to project developers, government agencies, and international intermediaries rather than to the communities whose management practices created the carbon value in the first place.

The fundamental question raised by REDD+ is whether the international climate finance system can be structured to support, rather than undermine, indigenous land rights. If indigenous peoples are the most effective forest managers, and if the evidence on this point is as strong as the literature suggests, then the most efficient use of climate finance would be to channel it directly to indigenous communities to support the continued exercise of their management authority. The fact that the system does not do this, and that proposals to restructure it in this direction face resistance from national governments, multilateral institutions, and some conservation organizations, reveals the depth of the institutional barriers to rights-based conservation.

The rights-based approach

The alternative to the conventional conservation model, which relies on government-designated protected areas managed by state agencies and often excluding or restricting indigenous land use, is a rights-based approach that recognizes indigenous land rights as the foundation of forest conservation rather than an obstacle to it.

The rights-based approach begins with the recognition that indigenous peoples have pre-existing rights to the lands and resources they have traditionally occupied and managed, rights that exist independently of and prior to the legal systems of the states that now claim sovereignty over those lands. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted by the General Assembly in 2007, affirms these rights, including the right to own, use, develop, and control the lands, territories, and resources that indigenous peoples possess by reason of traditional ownership, occupation, or use.²¹

UNDRIP is a declaration, not a treaty. It is not legally binding on states. But it establishes a normative framework that has influenced national legislation, court decisions, and the policies of international institutions. Several countries, including Bolivia, Ecuador, and the Philippines, have incorporated UNDRIP principles into their domestic law. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has issued binding decisions recognizing indigenous land rights in cases involving Nicaragua, Suriname, Paraguay, and other countries.²²

The practical application of the rights-based approach involves three elements. First, the legal recognition and demarcation of indigenous territories, establishing clear, enforceable boundaries that protect indigenous lands from encroachment by settlers, corporations, and government projects. Second, the strengthening of indigenous governance institutions, providing communities with the legal authority, financial resources, and technical capacity to manage their territories effectively. Third, the reform of national and international conservation frameworks to include indigenous peoples as full partners in the design, implementation, and governance of conservation programs, rather than as stakeholders to be consulted after decisions have already been made.

The evidence supports this approach on every metric that conservation programs care about: deforestation rates, carbon storage, biodiversity retention, and cost-effectiveness. The barriers to its adoption are not empirical. They are political. National governments resist the recognition of indigenous land rights because those rights constrain the state’s ability to grant mining concessions, build infrastructure, and allocate land to commercial agriculture. International conservation organizations resist the shift to rights-based conservation because it redistributes authority and resources away from the organizations and toward indigenous communities. The carbon market resists equitable benefit-sharing because it reduces the returns available to project developers and intermediaries.

The scale of the opportunity

The world has committed, through the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted in December 2022, to protecting 30 percent of the planet’s land and ocean areas by 2030.²³ This “30 by 30” target is the centerpiece of the international biodiversity agenda. Meeting it will require the protection of approximately 4.5 billion additional hectares of land, an area roughly equivalent to the total land area of Asia.

How this target is met matters as much as whether it is met. If the 30 by 30 target is pursued primarily through the designation of new government-managed protected areas that exclude or restrict indigenous land use, the result will be, based on historical precedent, less effective conservation at higher cost, accompanied by the displacement and dispossession of indigenous communities. The “fortress conservation” model, in which protected areas are established by removing indigenous peoples and prohibiting their traditional land uses, has a long and well-documented history of producing ecological failure alongside human rights violations.²⁴

If, instead, the 30 by 30 target is pursued by recognizing and supporting indigenous and community-managed lands as conservation areas, the result, based on the evidence reviewed in this article, will be more effective conservation at lower cost, accompanied by the strengthening of indigenous rights and governance systems. The Indigenous Peoples’ territories that already overlap with the world’s most intact forests represent an enormous, ready-made contribution to the 30 by 30 target, but only if international conservation frameworks recognize indigenous management as a legitimate and effective form of conservation governance.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has taken steps in this direction. Its Protected Area Categories System now includes “Indigenous Peoples’ and Community Conserved Territories and Areas” (ICCAs) as a recognized category of conservation area.²⁵ Several countries, including Australia, Canada, and Colombia, have established mechanisms for incorporating indigenous-managed lands into their national protected area systems. But the pace of change is slow relative to the urgency of the biodiversity crisis.

The forests are not waiting for policy to catch up with the evidence. Every year, approximately 10 million hectares of tropical forest are cleared.²⁶ Every year, indigenous land defenders are killed for trying to protect their territories. Every year, climate and conservation finance flows predominantly to governments and international organizations rather than to the communities that the evidence identifies as the most effective forest managers.

The question is not whether indigenous peoples protect forests. The data has answered that question. The question is whether the international system will restructure itself to support and scale the most effective conservation model available, or whether institutional inertia, political resistance, and the distribution of power within the conservation establishment will prevent the evidence from influencing the policy.

The answer to that question will determine the fate of a significant portion of the world’s remaining forests. Not because indigenous peoples need the international system to manage their lands. They have been doing that for millennia. But because the threats they face, from industrial agriculture, mining, infrastructure, and the criminalization of land defense, are generated by the same international economic system that the conservation community is now asking them to help save.