After COP27, the time has come for community-led climate change action.
Now that the dust has settled on COP27 in Egypt, many of us working in climate change are asking what was achieved, and many observers are asking “what is the climate COP really meant to achieve anyway”. To paraphrase Christiana Figueres in the most recent episode of the excellent climate change podcast “Outrage and Optimism”, COP is […]
Indigenous Voices Protecting Forests
The Hadza Hunter-gatherers of Yaeda Chini, Domanga and Mongo wa Mono villages have been powerful Indigenous voices protecting forests on their ancestral lands for decades. They have applied Carbon Tanzania’s community-led approach to REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) to protect their biodiverse and carbon rich forests and following a decade of successful […]
Creating the Foundations for Successful Community Based Conservation
As the Carbon Tanzania operations specialist, I have just had the privilege to participate in a whirlwind tour of the 12 villages and 2 districts that make up the new Yaeda-Eyasi Landscape REDD project, an expansion of the award-winning Yaeda Valley Project. For the eight year lifetime of the Yaeda Valley REDD Project, Carbon Tanzania […]
The Power of People Led Conservation
Think globally, act locally – the power of people led conservation We have said it before, and we will say it again, nature conservation is not about large charismatic animals and endlessly beautiful wild spaces, it’s about people and communities. This is especially true in Africa where people live out their lives in close proximity […]
Can Indigenous Peoples be part of true conservation?
Can Indigenous Peoples be part of the solution to wildlife conservation challenges in the 21st Century? Every August we celebrate the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples which aims to highlight the diversity and unique nature of 5000 or more cultures around the world. The UN estimates that there are over 370 million indigenous […]
Why REDD is like a Democracy
A newspaper article was recently brought to my attention. It is a well-researched critique of a conservation project in Kenya that threatens the forced eviction of 15,000 indigenous people from their ancestral forested homeland – the Sengwer of the Cherangy Hills. If you know anything about Carbon Tanzania you would know that the mention of […]