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Santiago de Chile (dpa) - Indigenous peoples can play a key role in the fight against deforestation and climate change.
Where indigenous communities have legal rights to their land, significantly less land is being cleared than in other areas, according to a study published on Thursday by the World Food Organization (FAO) and the Development Fund for Indigenous Peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean (Filac).
According to the meta-study, the rate of deforestation in indigenous protected areas in the Amazon region of Brazil, Bolivia and Colombia between 2000 and 2012 was just half to a third compared to other areas with similar ecological characteristics.
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"Indigenous peoples and the forests in their territories play an important role in the global and regional fight against climate change as well as in the fight against poverty, hunger and malnutrition," said FAO Regional Representative Julio Berdegúe.
"On their land, a third of the carbon is bound in the forests of Latin America and the Caribbean, and 14 percent of the carbon in all tropical forests worldwide."
The authors of the study called on the governments in the region to further strengthen the land rights of the indigenous peoples.
In addition, indigenous peoples should be rewarded for their work in environmental protection.
"Almost half of the intact forests in the Amazon basin are in indigenous areas," said Filac President Myrna Cunningham.
«Their importance for the protection of the forests is obvious.
While the area of intact forests in indigenous areas only fell by 4.9 percent between 2000 and 2016, it fell by 11.2 percent in other regions. "
Rumilda Fernández from the Mbya Guaraní people in Paraguay is one of the guardians of the forest.
The young woman uses her cell phone to measure and monitor the territory of her ethnic group in the Caaguazú department.
“The technology helps us to protect our country,” she says.
FAO technicians trained Fernández in GPS technology, and now she is passing on her knowledge to other young people.
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"Many village communities do not have land titles," says Fernández.
"Time and again people invade our territories and steal the land."
For a long time the Mbya Guaraní did not know exactly how much land their community actually was entitled to.
Now they take pictures of trees, rocks and streams and mark them on a digital map on their mobile phones.
This creates a cadastre that can help enforce territorial claims.
For the FAO, strengthening indigenous communities is an efficient and cost-effective strategy in the fight against deforestation and climate change.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, indigenous peoples live on 404 million hectares of land, and 269 million hectares are collectively owned or used.
Marking lands as indigenous territories only costs between $ 68 and $ 6 per hectare.
"The costs of protecting indigenous land are 5 to 42 times lower than the costs of other strategies to reduce CO2 emissions," the study says.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210325-99-969911 / 2
Study by FAO and Filac