Land Titling for Indigenous Communities Leads to Forest Protection, Peer-Reviewed Study Finds
View on Mongabay website"A team of researchers with Washington, D.C.-based research institution Resources for the Future, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Carnegie Institution for Science used high-resolution satellite images to examine the 11 million hectares (over 27 million acres) of forest that have been titled to more than 1,200 indigenous communities in Peru since the mid-1970s. They say their findings, which focused on the effect titling had on forest clearing and disturbance in the Peruvian Amazon between 2002 and 2005, suggest that the increasing trend towards decentralized forest governance via granting indigenous groups and other local communities formal legal title to their lands could play a key role in global efforts to slow both tropical forest destruction, which the researchers note is responsible for about the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as the transportation sector, and climate change."
"'Granting indigenous and other local communities formal title to the forests that have traditionally sustained them is probably the most important trend in tropical forest policy over the past 30 years,' Dr. Allen Blackman, a researcher with Resources for the Future and the study’s lead author, said in a statement. 'These local communities now manage almost a third of all forests in developing countries, over twice the share currently found in government-run protected areas. Yet we know very little about titling’s effects on forest cover.'"
