From the Blue Community Environmental Defenders, Uganda/DR Congo:
When communities hold secure rights to their land, the forests on it stand a far better chance of standing too. That conviction is what brought our team to the Lendu Plateau, in the Ituri-Epulu-Aru landscape of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Today, on the International Day for Biological Diversity, the world is asked to think about acting locally for global impact. For the communities of the Lendu Plateau, local action begins with a question that is too rarely put to them: who decides what happens to this land?
Over recent weeks we have been working through that question alongside them. We have accompanied communities as they come to know and assert their land rights, because rights that are understood are rights that can be defended. We have begun the consultations and the patient groundwork that community forestry requires so that the people who live in these forests are the ones who govern them. And we have stood with farmers strengthening the livelihoods that make long-term stewardship possible.
None of this is charity, and none of it is ours to lead. Our part is to walk alongside communities as they claim what is already theirs by right and by custom.
What is at stake reaches well beyond the plateau. These forests hold the corridors that wildlife depend on to move and survive and tropical forest cover that helps regulate a climate we all share. Secure community tenure is among the surest ways to keep them intact.
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was negotiated far from here. Whether its promises are kept will be decided here by those who know the land and mean to hold it.
