No Territory without Ties
On the African continent, prevailing customary tenure rights offer limited protection against exploitative uses of voluntary carbon markets.
The myth of “empty” land in the Global South underpins the marginalisation of Indigenous and local communities in land-use decisions. Safeguarding their legitimate land rights and traditional stewardship practices is key to effective biodiversity conservation and climate action.
The age of modern colonisation saw the propagation of the “empty land” theory: a justification for the seizure of land based on the claim that the land was uninhabited, or those who lived there had no right to remain. As present-day Western powers set their sights beyond their borders for land-based climate mitigation measures, the false promise of “unused” land in the Global South echoes this colonial attitude. A prime example is the Congo Basin, a vast ecological area that extends over six African countries, including Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo. The basin, which contains the second-largest rainforest in the world, is a vital carbon sink that plays a crucial role in the global carbon cycle. However, while the Congo Basin rainforest is seen as an “intact wilderness”, it has been inhabited for millennia.
Almost 150 ethnic groups and Indigenous Peoples like the Ba’Aka are connected to the forest, depending on it for food, shelter, water and cultural practices. However, while this land is home to many, there is little in the way of formal land titles. Instead, traditional tenure systems allow communities to allocate and manage collectively owned land for activities such as agriculture and pastoralism. The result is not a Western system with many individual claims and extensive documentation, but a customary tenure system that is not legally recognised in any of the countries the Congo Basin spans.
Figure 1
Conservation through communities
Indigenous Peoples and local communities manage 54 percent of the world’s intact forests, totaling 610 million hectares in 2020.
It is partially due to this traditional land tenure system that communities in the Congo Basin have been sidelined from land-use legislation around environmental protection and climate mitigation in recent years. Governments and other stakeholders are often unwilling to acknowledge traditional land rights. The result is that forest-dependent communities can end up marginalised from key land-use decisions, even as they bear the brunt of the consequences. A stark example of this is the creation of strictly protected areas in the Congo Basin region in territories claimed by local and Indigenous communities. This practice has displaced hundreds of thousands of people according to conservative estimates, and continues to this day.
Even as local and Indigenous communities are physically or economically displaced from their lands in the name of environmental action, such as carbon offset projects, there seems to be little concern as to how these measures may negatively affect not just these groups, but the very land the measures aim to protect. Indigenous Peoples and local communities play a critical role in protecting ecosystems. Around 80 percent of the world’s biological diversity is found in the 22 percent of global land area still stewarded by Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous stewardship practices have restored forests, and their pastoral practices have managed soil carbon levels. On both the macro- and micro-levels, Indigenous knowledge and its application are essential for environmental protection.
Figure 2
Unrecognised and under threat
Logging and carbon offset concessions in the DRC overlap with communal lands, risking rights and livelihoods.
Despite the important relationship between local and Indigenous communities and their land, progress towards restored land rights has been slow. In the Congo Basin, some measures have started to bridge the gap. Many Congo Basin countries now include “community forests” in their forest legislation, and communities are typically given perpetual rights for activities such as small-scale timber production or hunting over a set period. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, communities can even claim lifelong concessions for up to 50,000 hectares of land, a process that started in 2016. As a result, Indigenous and local communities formally control a tiny portion of the Congo Basin rainforests.
Figure 3
Africa's largest rainforest
Despite their invaluable role for people, climate and nature, the forests of the Congo Basin are under threat.
However, to make a lasting impact, there must be better recognition of the essential role these communities and their traditional, collective land tenure systems can play in reaching environmental goals. Studies have shown that enabling practices such as communally managed forests can lead to positive environmental outcomes. Traditional and Indigenous agricultural practices such as rotating crops and land use can lead to high carbon sequestration in soil and greater species diversification. By demanding that Indigenous and local communities come first, we can ensure not just lawful protections of long-standing land rights, but better and more effective environmental and climate mitigation strategies. A first step would be to support participatory mapping in the vast unmapped areas of the Congo Basin. This should provide invaluable anthropological, socioeconomic and demographic information that has so far been absent from policymaking. Moreover, accurate georeferenced maps could provide communities with a powerful tool to prove and claim their ancestral ties to their territory.
