Community Land Rights
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Global campaign
Up to 2.5 billion people depend on indigenous and community lands for survival.
Moreover, secure community land rights are the source of food, medicines and construction materials, as well as wealth, welfare, culture, identity, community cohesion.
These lands make up over 50% of the land on the planet, yet only 11% of it is secured. A disastrous gap given the role Indigenous Peoples and local communities play in preserving cultural diversity and combating the climate crisis. More importantly, these lands are rightfully theirs.
Historically, governments, mining companies, speculators, agribusinesses and powerful local elites have been appropriating forests, pastures, shores and other community-owned resources from their rightful owners.
These include the women and men, usually farmers, pastoralists, hunter-gatherers, fisher-folk and others using resources such as forests, water bodies and pastures as a common resource.
Communal land rights - often referred to as “the commons” - are lands that communities maintain as their shared property. As such, they can be considered the heart of indigenous and community lands. Some Indigenous Peoples and local communities use all their land as shared property. Others allocate lands to individuals and families within the community; however, the community exercises jurisdiction over the entire lands, which are held and managed collectively. Lands for grazing and wildlife, forests and woodlands, mountaintops, sacred sites, lakes and rivers are usually retained as shared property. These lands are the most vulnerable to land grabbing. (A Common Ground: Securing land rights and safeguarding the earth, 2016)
Our members stand in solidarity with the ongoing struggles of these communities seeking to secure their collective land rights once and for all.
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A Common Ground in Scotland
In 1997, the Isle of Eigg made history, when Island residences came together to purchase the island in partnership with the Highland Council and the Scottish Wildlife Trust after decades of absentee landlords
Meet the residents of Eigg#Mission Possible
With the support of the Land Rights Now Campaign, activists and community members in Montenegro were able to prevent the government from building a military training ground on traditional pastureland.
PLAY VIDEOLAND RIGHTS NOW CAMPAIGN
Join the fight, sign up now!ILC Toolkit #5: Indigenous Peoples and communities land rights
26 April 2018
Read MoreCommunity association succeeds in securing land thirty years after dispossession
25 April 2016
Read MoreCommunity Organisations successfully recover grabbed land in Bangladesh
3 April 2019
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