#land-rights

🇺🇸 United States · Access Fund

A national climbers' organization turns crag days into conservation days, rallying volunteers for litter clean-ups, trail work and land purchases that keep climbing areas wild.

🇪🇨 Ecuador · Amazon Frontlines

A frontline legal and advocacy organization helping Amazonian indigenous nations win court-ordered title to their ancestral territories.

🇺🇸 United States · American Prairie

A grassroots effort to stitch together the largest nature reserve in the continental United States across Montana's shortgrass and mixed-grass prairie.

🇱🇹 Lithuania · Sengirės fondas (Ancient Woods Foundation)

A Lithuanian foundation is buying up the country's last old-growth forest fragments, one plot at a time, and leaving them wild forever.

🇦🇴 Angola · ACADIR (Associação de Conservação do Ambiente e Desenvolvimento Integrado Rural)

Angola's first locally-led conservation NGO helps communities in Cuando Cubango secure land and resource rights while rebuilding farms, fisheries and wildlife after decades of war.

🇧🇷 Brazil · MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra)

Latin America's largest social movement, born from land occupations in the 1980s, has helped hundreds of thousands of landless rural families win legal title to farmland through Brazil's agrarian reform program.

🇺🇸 United States · Cultural Fire Management Council

Co-founded by Yurok tribal member Margo Robbins, the Cultural Fire Management Council is putting Indigenous-led 'good fire' back into Northern California's forests to restore basket-weaving plants, food sources, and fire-resilient land.

🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina · Center for Environment (Centar za životnu sredinu)

A Banja Luka NGO whose river-protection campaigns persuaded Bosnia's second-largest city, and a dozen more municipalities, to pledge no new dams on their rivers.

🌍 Global · Sustainable Fibre Alliance

The Sustainable Fibre Alliance certifies cashmere herders in Mongolia and China against a standard that ties market access to rangeland health, tackling overgrazing driven by global demand for cashmere goats.

🇹🇯 Tajikistan · Association of Nature Conservation Organizations of Tajikistan (ANCOT)

A Dushanbe-based conservation network unites family- and community-run conservancies across Tajikistan's mountains, turning former poachers into rangers protecting markhor, urial and snow leopard.

🇳🇨 New Caledonia · Association pour la Conservation en Cogestion du Mont Panié (Dayu Biik)

Seven Kanak tribes co-manage New Caledonia's highest peak, protecting a critically endangered ancient pine found nowhere else on Earth.

🇦🇺 Australia · Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation

Yolŋu Traditional Owners founded Dhimurru to manage Australia's first jointly declared land and sea Indigenous Protected Area across northeast Arnhem Land.

🇦🇺 Australia · DJAARA (Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation)

DJAARA led the first Aboriginal cultural burn on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in central Victoria in 170 years, reviving Djandak Wi ('Country Fire') to heal box-ironbark forests under the principle of 'right fire, right time.'

🇨🇱 Chile · Fundación Glaciares Chilenos

Chile holds more than 80% of South America's glaciers, and this citizen-founded foundation is racing to get them taught in schools and written into law before they vanish.

🇪🇹 Ethiopia · EthioTrees Ecosystem Restoration Association

Landless and smallholder farmers in Ethiopia's Tembien highlands are regenerating degraded mountain slopes with exclosures, hillside terraces and native trees, funded by carbon credits they control.

🇳🇬 Nigeria · Health of Mother Earth Foundation

Some Niger Delta villages have not known a fully dark night in sixty years, because the gas flare at the end of the road never goes out.

🇧🇼 Botswana · Ecoexist Trust

Ecoexist Trust helps Okavango farmers protect their harvests and livelihoods so both people and Botswana's elephants can thrive side by side.

🇦🇺 Australia · Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation

An Indigenous-led network is putting traditional 'cool burning' knowledge back into Aboriginal hands to heal Country and cut catastrophic bushfire risk across Australia.

🌍 Global · Gola Rainforest Conservation (GRC-LG)

Declared a Transboundary Peace Park by Sierra Leone and Liberia after their civil wars, the Gola rainforest now channels UN peacebuilding funds into joint conservation across a once-contested border.

🇺🇸 United States · Amah Mutsun Land Trust

The Amah Mutsun Land Trust is training tribal members as wildland firefighters to bring cultural burning back to California's Central Coast, lighting the first fire of its scale in the Santa Cruz Mountains in roughly two centuries.

🇰🇪 Kenya · GROOTS Kenya

A national movement of grassroots, women-led community groups training Kenyan women to map, register and defend their names on land titles in a country where only 3% of women hold a title deed solely in their own name.

🌍 Global · Tree Aid

Tree Aid works with communities across Africa's Sahel to grow trees and restore degraded drylands, turning shrinking farmland back into productive ground.

🇨🇴 Colombia · Cuerpo Colegiado de Guardianes del Río Atrato (Comisión de Guardianes del Río Atrato)

Fourteen community-elected guardians from the Chocó rainforest co-represent the Atrato River's legal rights after mercury from illegal mining poisoned it.

🇧🇿 Belize · Ya'axché Conservation Trust

A Belizean nonprofit manages a 275,000-hectare forest landscape linking the Maya Mountains to the Caribbean Sea, partnering with local farmers.

🇦🇺 Australia · Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council

Kimberley Traditional Owners govern the Martuwarra Fitzroy River as a living ancestral being with an inalienable right to flow.

🇨🇦 Canada · Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated

Nunavut Tunngavik represents 30,000 Inuit as the legal steward of the largest Indigenous land claim settlement in Canadian history.

🇨🇦 Canada · Indigenous Leadership Initiative

First Nations, Inuit and Metis Guardians are monitoring wildlife, guarding watersheds and reviving language through Canada's fast-growing Indigenous-led land stewardship movement.

🇺🇸 United States · Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance (NAFSA)

A national network founded by Mohawk seedkeeper Rowen White that reunites Native American nations with ancestral seeds lost to colonization and helps tribes rebuild their own seed systems.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Instituto Socioambiental (ISA)

A São Paulo-founded institute has spent three decades mapping, litigating for and monitoring the Indigenous territories that science increasingly finds are Brazil's best defense against deforestation.

🇳🇦 Namibia · Nyae Nyae Development Foundation

Backed by the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation, the Ju/'hoansi San of Namibia's Kalahari run an early-season controlled-burning program that has turned a conservancy once devastated by wildfire into a model of community fire mapping.

🇦🇺 Australia · Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa

Martu Traditional Owners run four ranger teams protecting threatened desert wildlife and culture across millions of hectares of Western Australia's Western Desert.

🌍 Global · Réseau Billital Maroobé (RBM)

Founded by herders themselves in 2003, Réseau Billital Maroobé unites pastoral organizations across nine West and Central African countries to keep cross-border transhumance corridors open and defend mobile grazing as the Sahel's rangelands dry out.

🇮🇳 India · Ka Synjuk Ki Hima Arliang Wah Umiam Mawphlang Welfare Society

India's first REDD+ project pays indigenous Khasi communities to protect and restore Meghalaya's sacred cloud forests.

🇵🇭 Philippines · MASIPAG (Magsasaka at Siyentipiko para sa Pag-unlad ng Agrikultura)

A farmer-scientist alliance safeguarding the Philippines' rice heritage by collecting, breeding and freely sharing thousands of traditional and climate-resilient rice varieties.

🇲🇰 North Macedonia · Macedonian Ecological Society (MES)

North Macedonia's oldest environmental NGO runs the anti-poisoning patrols and village outreach keeping the country's last Griffon Vulture colonies alive.

🇲🇱 Mali · Mali Elephant Landscapes (WILD Foundation)

An all-Malian field team protects the world's last desert-adapted elephants and their 1,000km migration route by putting local communities in charge of natural resource rules.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN)

Indonesia's largest Indigenous alliance is racing to map millions of hectares of ancestral forest before loggers and plantations get there first.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Masungi Georeserve Foundation

An award-winning geotourism and restoration project protecting 2,700 hectares of 60-million-year-old karst landscape in the Upper Marikina Watershed.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Hutukara Associação Yanomami

Illegal gold miners use mercury to bind the gold, the rivers carry it into the fish, and the Yanomami eat the fish — so the association measured its own people's hair to prove it.

🇳🇦 Namibia · Namibian Association of CBNRM Support Organisations (NACSO)

An umbrella alliance supporting Namibia's communal conservancies, which grant rural and indigenous communities legal rights to govern and profit from their own land and wildlife.

🌍 Global · Nia Tero

A global nonprofit that channels funding and support directly to Indigenous peoples defending and governing their own territories.

🇹🇭 Thailand · EnLAWTHAI Foundation

A lead processing plant flushed its waste into the creek a Karen village drank from, and every one of the village's 221 residents was poisoned. Winning took nineteen years.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Northern Rangelands Trust

An alliance of indigenous pastoralist-led community conservancies governing millions of hectares of communally owned rangeland in northern Kenya.

🌍 Global · Saami Council

Sápmi is one homeland with four national borders drawn across it, and the reindeer do not recognise any of them.

🇹🇭 Thailand · Pgakenyaw Association for Sustainable Development (PASD)

A Karen (Pga k'nyau) indigenous community association defending traditional rotational farming and customary forest stewardship in northern Thailand.

🌍 Global · Peace Parks Foundation

NGO stitching southern African national parks across colonial-era borders into connected transboundary conservation landscapes.

🇵🇪 Peru · Asociación ANDES (Asociación para la Naturaleza y el Desarrollo Sostenible)

A Quechua-led biocultural park in the Peruvian Andes where six indigenous communities collectively steward more than a thousand native potato varieties in their original mountain landscape.

🇸🇱 Sierra Leone · Namati

Community paralegals trained by Namati are helping Sierra Leonean villages fight exploitative land leases and win back territory signed away without their consent.

🇲🇪 Montenegro · Center for Protection and Research of Birds (CZIP)

Montenegro's national BirdLife partner tracks the country's outsized share of Europe's birds and fights the hydropower and logging plans that threaten their last wild rivers and forests.

🇺🇾 Uruguay · Aves Uruguay

Uruguay's oldest bird conservation NGO maps and defends the grasslands and wetlands that keep 450 species aloft.

🇷🇸 Serbia · RERI (Renewables and Environmental Regulatory Institute)

A Belgrade legal watchdog using Serbia's own regulations to fight illegally sited small hydropower plants that were draining protected mountain rivers.

🇪🇨 Ecuador · Radio Sucumbíos

For over three decades this community radio station has been the only daily source of news for six Indigenous nationalities in Ecuador's oil-scarred Amazon, turning listener call-ins about contaminated rivers and deforestation into some of the region's only sustained environmental journalism.

🌍 Global · Rainforest Trust

A US nonprofit that buys and protects threatened rainforest to safeguard biodiversity.

🇺🇸 United States · Malpai Borderlands Group

A collaborative of Arizona-New Mexico borderlands ranchers invented "grassbanking" — trading grazing rest on drought-hit ranches for conservation easements — to keep nearly a million acres of open range intact and productive.

🇮🇳 India · Centre for Pastoralism

The Centre for Pastoralism works with India's estimated 10-20 million mobile herders to reclaim traditional grazing grounds under the Forest Rights Act and prove that seasonal migration is a sound way to manage rangeland, not a relic to be fenced off.

🇨🇱 Chile · Fundación Reforestemos

Born out of the 2011-12 Torres del Paine wildfire, this Chilean foundation now runs the country's largest restoration campaign, planting native trees and rebuilding green space after each new round of megafires.

🇦🇷 Argentina · Ovis 21

Ovis 21 turned holistic planned grazing into a certified regenerative wool supply chain that is healing over a million hectares of Patagonia's historically overgrazed sheep-ranching grasslands.

🇻🇳 Vietnam · PanNature (People and Nature Reconciliation / Trung tâm Con người và Thiên nhiên)

A Vietnamese conservation NGO is replanting native trees to stitch two protected forests back together into one wildlife corridor for the endangered white-cheeked gibbon.

🇺🇸 United States · Sequoia Parks Conservancy

After wildfire killed thousands of ancient giant sequoias, this park partner is funding cone collection, nurseries, and hand-replanting to bring the burned groves back.

🇺🇸 United States · Sogorea Te' Land Trust

The first urban Indigenous women-led land trust in the US is quietly buying and receiving back parcels of Ohlone territory across the San Francisco Bay Area, acre by acre.

🇮🇹 Italy · Salviamo l'Orso

With fewer than 60 Marsican brown bears left on Earth, this Abruzzo-based group is stripping old farm fencing and replanting fruit trees to reopen the bear's mountain corridors.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Associação Caatinga

Associação Caatinga restores Brazil's semi-arid Caatinga biome using a long-root seedling technique that more than doubles tree survival on degraded, drought-hit land.

🇬🇪 Georgia · CENN (Caucasus Environmental NGO Network)

A Tbilisi-based NGO wrote Georgia's first National Forest Policy and now helps mountain villages manage their forests sustainably instead of stripping them for firewood.

🇮🇶 Iraq · Nature Iraq

Iraq's first conservation NGO fights to keep the Garden of Eden's marshes alive as upstream dams and drought squeeze the water that sustains the Marsh Arabs.

🇦🇺 Australia · Cape York Land Council

Since 1990, this Traditional Owner-run legal service has helped hand native title over four-fifths of the Cape York Peninsula back to its Aboriginal custodians.

🇱🇧 Lebanon · Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon (SPNL)

Lebanon's oldest environmental NGO revives the ancient Hima system of community stewardship to protect the country's rivers, wetlands and water-scarce highlands.

🇨🇦 Canada · Gathering Voices Society

Gathering Voices Society partners with Yunesit'in and Xeni Gwet'in First Nations to bring seasonal cultural burning back to the Tsilhqot'in Chilcotin region of British Columbia, one of the fastest-warming, most fire-prone landscapes in Canada.

🇨🇱 Chile · Fundación Rewilding Chile

Carries on the Tompkins legacy by creating national parks and rewilding Chilean Patagonia.

🇫🇷 France · Réseau Semences Paysannes (French Farmers' Seed Network)

A nationwide alliance of more than 70 French farmer and gardener organizations working to keep peasant seed varieties in circulation outside the industrial seed trade.

🇸🇧 Solomon Islands · Solomon Islands Locally Managed Marine Areas Network (SILMMA)

Across the Solomon Islands, villages set their own no-fishing zones and reef rules through a nationwide network of locally managed marine areas.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Save the Ifugao Terraces Movement (SITMo)

A grassroots, almost entirely Ifugao-run movement that keeps the 2,000-year-old, UNESCO-listed Cordillera rice terraces alive by getting mountain farmers and youth back onto abandoned paddies.

🌍 Global · Amazon Conservation Association

A US-based nonprofit's satellite program tracks Amazon deforestation and illegal mining in near-real time, feeding evidence to enforcement agencies.

🌍 Global · RECOFTC - The Center for People and Forests

Since 1987, RECOFTC has helped forest communities across the Asia-Pacific win legal tenure and management rights over the forests they depend on, growing community forestry from almost nothing to a quarter of the region's forests.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Pastoral Women's Council

Founded by ten Maasai women in 1997, the Pastoral Women's Council has helped over a thousand Maasai women win formal title to rangeland in a culture where women traditionally could not own land.

🇨🇦 Canada · Secwepemcúl'ecw Restoration and Stewardship Society (SRSS)

Eight Secwépemc communities formed their own restoration society to replant nearly 200,000 scorched hectares after British Columbia's Elephant Hill wildfire, blending Indigenous knowledge with forestry science.

🇨🇳 China · Shan Shui Conservation Center

Shan Shui Conservation Center works with rural communities in western China to protect snow leopards, giant pandas, and their habitats.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Instituto Aritana

Instituto Aritana unites 16 Indigenous peoples of Brazil's Xingu Indigenous Territory around community-built fire management plans that pair ancestral burning knowledge with modern brigades to keep megafires out of the forest.

🇲🇳 Mongolia · Snow Leopard Trust

Community-based conservation protecting the elusive snow leopard across the mountains of Central Asia.

🇹🇼 Taiwan · Citizens of the Earth, Taiwan

A Kaohsiung-founded foundation that has spent two decades taking on the coal plants, crackers and illegal factories fouling Taiwan's air.

🇳🇿 New Zealand · Kiwis Against Seabed Mining

A plan to suck 50 million tonnes of seabed a year off the Taranaki coast met a volunteer coalition of surfers, fishers and iwi — who took it to the Supreme Court and won.

🇧🇪 Belgium · Community Land Trust Brussels (CLTB)

Continental Europe's first community land trust keeps land permanently out of the speculative market so low-income Brussels families can buy homes at up to half the price of the private market.

🇳🇿 New Zealand · Te Pou Tupua

After a 140-year campaign by Whanganui Maori, New Zealand's third-longest river became the first river on Earth recognized in law as a living being with its own rights.

🇸🇧 Solomon Islands · Tetepare Descendants' Association

Tetepare Descendants' Association is an indigenous landowner group protecting the largest uninhabited, unlogged island in the South Pacific.

🇨🇦 Canada · Mushkegowuk Council

The Omushkego Cree call the James Bay peatlands the Breathing Lands, and they are pushing to protect a carbon store that dwarfs most of the world's forests before mining reaches it.

🇪🇸 Spain · ILP Mar Menor

After nitrate runoff turned Europe's largest saltwater lagoon into green soup and washed dead fish onto the beaches, ordinary Murcians collected 640,000 signatures to give the water its own rights.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Alliance of Solwara Warriors

Papua New Guinea granted the world's first deep-sea mining licence in its own Bismarck Sea; the coastal clans who fish those waters spent eight years making the project unfinanceable.

🇮🇳 India · People United for Better Living in Calcutta (PUBLIC)

Kolkata's sewage is cleaned for free by fishponds its own fisherfolk built — and the only reason those ponds still exist is a public interest case filed in 1992.

🇿🇲 Zambia · Environment Africa

The mine at Kabwe closed in 1994 and was never cleaned up, so children play on tailings and more than nine in ten of them have lead in their blood.

🇺🇸 United States · Alaska Institute for Justice

Thawing permafrost, vanished sea ice and storms with nothing to break them are taking Alaska Native villages house by house — and no US agency has the job of relocating a community.

🌍 Global · International Land Coalition (ILC)

Hosted by IFAD in Rome, ILC unites more than 300 civil society and intergovernmental members across 86 countries to fight land grabbing and secure tenure rights for farmers, pastoralists, Indigenous Peoples and women.

🇵🇪 Peru · Rainforest Foundation US

A legal title is often the only thing standing between an Indigenous Amazon community and the bulldozers, so this program puts mapping tools and titling paperwork directly in communities' hands.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Ujamaa Community Resource Team (UCRT)

UCRT helps Maasai, Hadzabe, Datoga and other pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities in northern Tanzania win legally binding titles to the rangeland their livelihoods depend on.

🇮🇳 India · South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP)

A Delhi-based network of river researchers scrutinizes every major dam in South Asia to expose the flooding, displacement and biodiversity loss they cause.

🇸🇰 Slovakia · Lesoochranárske zoskupenie VLK (WOLF Forest Protection Movement)

A Slovak grassroots group that buys up old-growth forest tree by tree and has twice won landmark environmental-rights rulings at the EU's top court.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Vídeo nas Aldeias

Since 1986, this Brazilian collective has put cameras in the hands of Indigenous filmmakers so their own footage becomes evidence and armor in the fight to keep Amazonian territories standing.

🇨🇦 Canada · MiningWatch Canada

The company closest to mining the deep ocean is headquartered in Vancouver, and the watchdog documenting what its test runs actually did to the water is too.

🇦🇺 Australia · ALFA (NT) Limited

Aboriginal-owned ALFA (NT) Limited pays Traditional Owners to burn Arnhem Land the old way, turning ancient fire knowledge into carbon credits that fund rangers and community programs.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program (Woodland Park Zoo)

Papua New Guinea's first conservation area protects a cloud-forested mountain range as the last stronghold of the endangered Matschie's tree kangaroo.

🇿🇦 South Africa · groundWork Friends of the Earth South Africa

groundWork's #DeadlyAir lawsuit forced South Africa's courts to declare toxic Mpumalanga Highveld air a violation of the constitutional right to a healthy environment.