Land Rights: Safeguarding Nature and Indigenous Communities
Seven Indigenous Wounaan communities are safeguarding more than 50,000 hectares of intact tropical forest. While Wounaan communities pursue legal recognition - collective titles - of their tropical forested lands, illegal loggers, ranchers and land speculators invade, deforest and claim the territories as their own. The Wounaan Land Rights program provides the communities with the means to title their territories and push back on the environmental destruction.
While titles are processed, the territorial monitoring program continues to prove that environmental justice is possible for Indigenous communities in Panama. Wounaan are utilizing both administrative and criminal pathways to seek environmental justice for almost 200 hectares of deforestation. This year, the work of territorial monitors has resulted in:
Nine (9) additional environmental complaints are being prosecuted by the Ministry of Environment and Environmental Prosecutors Office.
An additional 18 people have been charged for their environmental violations.
Since the start of the program in 2022, 195 hectares of deforestation in Wounaan territories has been reported to Panama’s environmental authorities; 67 people charged for their environmental violations and 24 penalized.
Wounaan Land Rights are the core of Native Future’s mission because Indigenous Wounaan – nine untitled communities, the Wounaan National Congress (WPNP), and the Foundation for the Development of the Wounaan People (FUNDEPW) – tell us it is their top priority. For decades, they have been telling their government and international funders that it is their number-one need, too. Yet, even with global recognition of the role Indigenous territories play in biodiversity conservation and mitigating climate change, their territories remain unrecognized, unprotected, and increasingly subject to inequitable usurpation into national conservation strategies.
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