#land-rights

🇪🇨 Ecuador · Amazon Frontlines

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

🇱🇹 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.

🇧🇦 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.

🇹🇯 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.

🇧🇼 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.

🇰🇪 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.

🇧🇿 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.

🇨🇦 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.

🇧🇷 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.

🇦🇺 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.

🇲🇰 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.

🇳🇦 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.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Northern Rangelands Trust

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

🇹🇭 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.

🇸🇱 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.

🌍 Global · Rainforest Trust

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

🇻🇳 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 · 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.

🇬🇪 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.

🇨🇱 Chile · Fundación Rewilding Chile

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

🇸🇧 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.

🌍 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.

🇨🇳 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.

🇲🇳 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.

🇧🇪 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.

🌍 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.

🇸🇰 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.

🇦🇺 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.

🇿🇦 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.