From the Blue Community Environmental Defenders, Uganda/DR Congo:
On 11 May, Environmental Defenders held workshops in Djupio, and on 12 May our teams met with community members of Pajen groupement in the Chiefdom of Wagungu and Anghal, near Lake Albert, to listen to local voices on the growing deforestation and tropical forest loss reshaping their lives.
For several weeks, our teams have been engaging chiefs, village heads, customary authorities, and territorial leaders across Mahagi and Djugu territories, a landscape recognized as an Alliance for Zero Extinction site and a Key Biodiversity Area, to raise national and international policy awareness on the urgency of community forestry as a pathway to keep forests standing and improve forest peoples’ livelihoods.
Through these engagements, we are laying the foundations for community-based natural resource management, supporting communities to submit legal requests for forest concessions, establish community governance mechanisms, and develop participatory land use plans and local procedures for the sustainable use of natural resources.
In a region experiencing rapid biodiversity loss and visible climate change impacts on communities whose lives depend entirely on these forests, this work is both an environmental and a human rights imperative.
Environmental Defenders will continue to walk alongside the people of the Lendu Plateau until community forestry becomes a lived reality across Ituri Province.
