 Foundation, the tenure facility, and the Tulsa Writers Foundation. This initiative promotes the importance of recognizing legal ownership of Indigenous peoples and local communities' land rights as a prerequisite for achieving national and international goals for forest governance, food security, climate mitigation, economic development, and human rights. This land dialogue series will run across four webinars from May to November, with which webinar tackling a different topic. I'm Fabio Teixeira. I'm a journalist at the Tulsa Writers Foundation. Today we are talking about pandemic, social unrest, and war echoing in the Amazon. Recent global events have had dire impacts on the world's remaining forests, particularly in tropical regions. Disease outbreak, war, and social insecurity may have originated in other parts of the globe. However, there are effects ripple and affect the most vulnerable regions and people. This ripple effect has brought unwelcome impacts that have become apparent in the Amazon. Despite these threats to the Indigenous territories, hope does remain, which has been reflected politically in various countries in the region. For example, via the coming to power of Francia Marquez, the first Afro-Colombian vice president in the country's history. This is a monumental step in addressing inequality, as Marquez has been advocating for Indigenous rights and racial justice. This webinar will thus reflect on global events which have impacted the Amazon region, but will place a specific accent on the solutions and progress for a more secure future for Indigenous populations in the Amazon region. I'm joined today by a terrific panel to discuss those issues. I'll hand over to each one of them for some opening remarks. We'll then have a discussion for about an hour and finally take questions from the audience, which should take us about 90 minutes. The webinar would take place in English and be simultaneously interpreted to Spanish, French and Portuguese. To access the interpretation, please see the channels located at the bottom of your screen. If you do have a question, please post them using the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen and not the chat box feature. And I will then field those questions to the panelists so we don't have to go through the altimeter pains of people muting themselves and then muting themselves. Feel free to tweet using the hashtag land dialogues and file live tweeting from land portal and tenure facility Twitter accounts. Finally, in the interest of transparency, I should add that today's session is being recorded and you will be receiving a link afterwards. I will introduce our expert panel and ask them to talk about their experiences. First of them is Silvana Balovino. She is a lawyer who graduated from the University of Lima with a specialty in environmental law and natural resources from the difficult Catholic University of Peru. She has more than 18 years of experience in both the public and private sectors designing and implementing public policies and strategies in different aspects related to the environmental issues of indigenous peoples with an emphasis on the conservation of biodiversity and the promotion of innovative options for its sustainability. Currently, she is the director of biodiversity and indigenous peoples program of the Peruvian Society of Environmental Law and an institution she has worked at since 2006. Then we have Marcio Hala. He leads the territorial governance facility, an economic indigenous governance projects in the, sorry, start that again. Marcio Hala leads the territorial governance facility and economic indigenous governance projects in the island and not for forest strengths communities and territorial governance initiative. Prior to joining forest trends, Marcio was implementing several sustainable development projects working closely with traditional communities and indigenous peoples in the Atlantic rainforest and Amazon region. Since 1997, he has actively managed projects on natural forestry, organic agriculture, sustainable forest value chains, community-based eco-tourism and forest management and certification. He graduated from Sao Paulo State University in agronomy and has a master's degree in territorial planning from Santiago de Compostela University in Spain. Then we have Alexandra Naravais. She's part of the indigenous squad of the I, sorry if I pronounced that wrong, I co-fund community of Senegal. As an indigenous person, she takes care of the territory alongside her community. She's also president of the Chameco Women's Association, working very hard to achieve the dream of living in a free and unproductive legacy for the children. Sorry if I mangled the pronunciation there, Alexandra, of several of your titles. Aztolofo Aramburu is an African-Colombian leader from the Urum-Mungi River and is part of the process of Black communities in Bogota. Aramburu recognizes the importance of law 70 in the recognition of Black communities as collective subjects of law and the impetus it has given to the immobilization of urbanizations in Colombia. It also analyzes how the peace negotiations have affected Black communities. And finally, we have Barbara Fraser. Barbara is a freelance journalist based in Lima, Peru. With 20 years of experience in Latin America, she puts a human face on her defects and public policy. She offers research, writing, editing, and photography services with particular expertise in environmental, public health, and social issues. Barbara is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, the National Association of Science Writers, and the Foreign Press Association of Peru. Okay, now that everyone's introduced, let's start. Alexandra, let's begin with you. Various threats have been presented to Indigenous territories in the last few years, from COVID-19 to the award in Ukraine. Can you tell us about the situation within your community with regards to land rights and how this has changed in the past few years? Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Alexandra. I am from the Icofinae in Ecuador. I am a defender and advocate and mother. I come from nature itself. Therefore, to tell you a little bit how it has changed since COVID arrived and saw these diseases, big diseases, came to our country, to our territories. Well, we have lived, we lived in a healthy territory before where we raised ourselves, running around, washing ourselves in the river without any threats. And now currently in these last few years, we see ourselves threatened with these extractive companies of timber as well. In this last year in our my territory, we have seen threats by the mining companies because due to COVID, we couldn't go to work. And lately, our territory has suffered a lot of destruction in this case because of the mining extractive activities because it didn't have any job. They crossed towards our territory. They were looking for food, damaging our own river, putting traps in our river to catch animals. So we feel hugely impacted because we couldn't leave our houses freely. We couldn't leave our kids to go and have a shower bath in the river because there are a lot of people, unknown people in our territory. And now, however, this also helped us to strengthen ourselves as a community. And we were able to organize ourselves to do rounds. We're doing these rounds to strengthen and to take care of our own territory and to leave and check the area. And with this crisis, we understand the situation, but we want everybody else to understand and to respect our territory or waters. We don't want to contamination or pollution in our rivers. This has been very hard in our communities and for the indigenous communities that have suffered so much lately. We had to deal with it. We had to strengthen ourselves to learn communication strategies and to grab our phones and cameras and to record those evidence materials. We as women also, we feel greatly impacted or threatened. We felt alone because the state itself wants to steal from us also by giving some permits to the mining companies without our consent. And we felt alone practically because the state must defend or be an advocate for our rights and it's not the case. We haven't uttered any word about it, about our territories, about our rights. And we as a community had to stand up with a lot of strength and power. And we as women, besides of all the fear and nervousness, we have to learn to say that our territory is our life and has to be respected. Our territory is our mother earth, has to be respected. And that is why we as indigenous communities, we are raising our voices and standing up and we say to all the world because this problem is not just for the indigenous communities. This is a problem for, because without territories, we won't be able to live. This applies to the entire world. Everybody is endangered and the future is endangered. Without territories, the whole world will be destroyed. There will not be a future for our kids. And we very strongly go and become an advocate for our territory and for our earth and for our rights to be respected in our modes of living. So we can be as we did before. We can leave our homes without feeling fear. We can drink the water without feeling fear. But here we are and we continue with this script that it's our territory. It's our decision and the community is here to continue with the fight for our lives, for our territory and for the mother earth because this depends on us. The respect towards mother earth depends on us and also the respect towards our indigenous communities. And also we're being threatened by the same government itself. Here the Kofan people is a natural reserve but the government doesn't even take care of it. That is also why people are coming into the territory without even consent without our permission. And we are asking the government to have the land rights. We are requesting that to provide entitlement for our lands as well because we need to demonstrate with paperwork that this is our own territory and we are having that fight. We are demanding our rights and the entitlement of our land. So we strongly can say this is our territory, you must respect it. This is the earth of everybody. That's what we are saying as leaders, as community, as Kofan peoples for our rights to be respected and the life to be respected as well because without the earth where are we going to live? And that is my feeling, my thoughts. This is what I wanted to share. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Alexandra. Masio, now we move to you. The war in Ukraine has caused serious disruptions to the global timber trade and these impacts are echoing the Amazon rainforest. The Brazilian government has claimed that allowing mining in the Amazon and subsequently in indigenous territories, Korean, Brazil's dependence on imported fertilizers from countries such as Russia and Belarus. Can you tell us more about this? Yes, of course. Thank you, Fabio. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. So we have many languages here. I can add a bit of German and also, forgive me, Dutch because there are 300 languages in the Amazon, indigenous languages and five European languages. Dutch is one of them, of course, from Suriname. This is part of this incredible social and biological biodiversity of the Amazon, which for 500 years has been threatened. These threats have been faced by local communities and indigenous peoples historically and we are witnessing in recent years these tensions, these conflicts becoming more intense because of the context of the pandemic, the Ukraine war and so the forest borders are extremely conflictive and tense at the moment, the forest frontiers I should say and this setting of tension has been worsened due to the context we're experiencing here in Brazil of the sort of disassembly of institutions, the gutting of institutions and the guarantees of rights. So unfortunately, lamentably, we had to go through this dramatic situation in recent years with a government such as the one we have right now, which works precisely to do away with the guarantees of rights to weaken institutions, to destroy the systems of management and environmental control and so government that was elected stating, we will not demarcate another centimeter of indigenous land, they said so openly and said they were going to do what they ended up doing, which is to degrade, to destroy the systems of environmental enforcement and public participation, consultation and consent of indigenous peoples and traditional communities and this is something that was already fragile before and became even more difficult and this is expressed very clearly by the minister of the environment of the current government who said in a ministerial meeting in a cabinet meeting that the pandemic was an opportunity to really, while everyone's attention was focused on the pandemic to really gut the environmental legislation and he phrased it as the herd of cows of cattle can go through the farm gate. So even before the current government took over, there was a decade of reduction of deforestation in the Amazon between 2003 and 2012, the rate of deforestation was reduced by six times and from 2016-17 to the present, this situation was reversed with an exponential growth and constant growth in the rates of deforestation, which made it much more complicated for communities and indigenous peoples to be able to tackle the pandemic and with the worsening of the food security situation. So there was a lot of uncertainty, a lot of difficulty for people to maintain their ways of life. So the current government has worked intensely to made a constant effort to regulate certain activities in indigenous lands. So for example, we know how much illegal activities such as logging, such as gold mining and diamond mining, small-scale mining, also agriculture, especially ranching, are directly associated to land lease and land grabbing and so we are witnessing bills and legislative efforts to try to regulate all of these things, in other words to legalize them and also to regulate large-scale hydroelectric power generation and mining within indigenous lands. It's in the constitution but has never been regulated and the government has been doing its best precisely as the minister of the environment said to make the cattle herd go through the gates, in other words, to free up all these activities and we've been doing our best with the judiciary to put the brakes on these activities. So when the president says these things, regardless of it being passed as law or not, it sends the signal people involved in these illegal activities feel emboldened, feel empowered, that they have the authority to the moral authority to go into indigenous land, invade them and enhance their illegal activity. So precisely with the issue of fertilizers, it's interesting to say something about this because in 2020 the government, the current government put a bill to Congress to authorize mining in indigenous lands and in their words, the Ukraine war was an opportunity to approve this bill, to pass this bill in Congress and so it was presented to Congress with an expedited system talking about the importance of potassium for Brazilian agriculture and agribusiness. 85% of fertilizers used in Brazil are imported from Russia, mainly from Russia and so the argument used by the government was that we needed to be able to mine potassium and a lot of the indigenous lands had deposits of potassium and so outside of the Amazon region the potassium reserves that we have we have enough until 2089, 78% of these reserves are outside of the Amazon region and what is inside the Amazon region only 11% are inside indigenous lands. So this means that beyond 2089 if we explore these ores in the Amazon region we can have another 11 years until 202100 so and in this century only 1% of the demand would be from indigenous land but that doesn't matter for their argumentation. They want to use these arguments to put into practice to put into effect their plan to bring indigenous lands into this mining system or to mine indigenous lands. So I have a more specific question about the data that is there is out there about how mining is affecting indigenous territories. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yes, with pleasure. The issue of mining is important to differentiate that there is large-scale mining like we heard Alessandra talking about Ecuador. We know that in Ecuador and Peru the impact of mining activities particularly regarding oil and gas and how they affect indigenous lands and the Brazilian Amazon it's a little different. It's not the same reality. We have major mining projects that impact directly on indigenous lands but they are outside. Mining cannot be licensed in indigenous lands but outside of indigenous lands but also in the Amazon yes there are many indigenous people that are affected nevertheless and so they are involved in the conditions of the licensing of these mining projects so that's a reality but I want to devote more attention to the increase in small-scale mining mainly for gold. We have data that shows that in 10 years the small-scale mining increased by five times in other words 500 percent it existed before of course it's a reality that indigenous peoples are familiar and have been dealing with for some time but after 2017-2018 this exploded and it was greatly enhanced so the structures of enforcement of inspection were destroyed and with the pandemic the indigenous peoples shut themselves off in their own territory and in the context of extreme food insecurity of major difficulties and challenges they had to also face this increase tackle this increase in the invasion of their territory because of this disassembly of the enforcement agencies a very emblematic case with major repercussions all over the world is the case of the Yanomami people in three years there the the amount of gold mining in their territory triples and that that directly affected half of the people the Yanomami people about half of the population was directly impacted by this increase something similar of the Munduruku people in the Tapajos river basin that was even more intense the increase there and this type of mining the Bolsonaro government passed a bill in congress to authorize small-scale mining gold mining in indigenous lands this is a polemical subject with a lot of institutional fragility and there's no licensing which they use mercury to separate the gold from other ores i live in the Tapajos region myself and i've been contaminated because of of eating fish that was that had mercury in it so i've become a vegetarian because of that so it's dramatic the situation and it takes place with any kind of effort to restore to recover to reforest so just to conclude my answer i want to stress that in the last 30 years more than 1 million hectares of vegetation native vegetation have been lost in brazil and 1.6 of that was inside of indigenous land so i want to stress the importance of the indigenous ways of life and the governance capacities of their territories that the indigenous peoples have and that must be recognized and so in this context of climate change a major climate change happening globally it's very important that this should be seen as an opportunity to recognize the role of indigenous peoples and ensure that their governance their territorial governance can be strengthened thank you very much Fabio the interpreters can catch up but uh thank thank you marsu astofu let us go to uh can you tell us uh how the territorial rights of afro colombian communities have been affected by the major political geopolitical shifts in the last few years feel free to add on to what your colleagues have already shared perfecto y muchísimas gracias perfect thank you very much first of all i think it's important to say for the context is that for the black community in colombia from 1852 slavery was prohibited and until 1991 the black community it's the time when it was recognized and their rights their constitutional rights so 170 years passed after the end of the slavery without the black people having their constitutional rights their collective rights so from that moment we are talking about 1991 1991 so from then we have had 31 years with the recognition of constitutional rights for our communities the constitution of 91 the current one in colombia recognized that colombia it's a plurie technical country also the right to equality it also recognizes the people who have been invisible the vulnerable groups so all this appears in the constitution of 1991 and in that constitution there was just one article for black people number 55 and what we see in that article is that the government had two years to make a law recognizing the rights of the black communities so the constitution it's the beginning for that so in 1993 two years after that it's the moment where we have the law of black communities the law number 70 so we have been talking we haven't been talking of 30 years but it was after 1993 when we have a right that recognizes our rights and the law 70 that i mentioned before recognizes the land that in an ancestral way we have occupied the black communities and it says that those lands should be of their owners of the people who live there so in 1995 we have another law for that and we have the process of recognizing the land then in that context we create the politics that recognizes our land we are talking about 1995 so we are not talking of 29 years but 26 27 of territorial rights if we continue taking out some years that process was created in 1995 but we didn't have the money to start functioning so it was in 1997 more or less in 1998 when we have the resources and it starts being implemented the rights of the black communities so from 1998 we are talking of 24 years of this politics this legislation of the territorial rights of the black communities these 24 years we can also mention some problems that we have encountered some rules that they didn't ask the people about that and finally they had to be rejected so that rules in the end we couldn't implement them so there was a pause in the implementation of the politics so I'm talking about this because I want to make sure that you understand that we have been fighting for that for many years for recognizing our rights in the pacific region of our country Colombia is where major steps have been taken and there we have 5.7 million of hectares recognized for the black communities so we have moved forward however we have to remember that black people arrive in a slavery situation and in the beginning they occupied all the country in the pacific region that I have just mentioned but also in the Andean region in the Caribbean region and also in the amazon region but it's especially in the pacific region where we have reached some something we still have to work in the other regions of the country where there are also many black communities so in that sense this is the first and most important challenge but I also want to mention that the law number 70 doesn't just refer to the rights the territorial rights but also it's the main law regarding the environment the mining resources the cultural identity and personal development so these are the elements that I have just mentioned they haven't moved forward in these 20 30 years in our political life as black communities in Colombia as a follow-up to this I would like to know what has to be the impact of Francia Marquez being made recently the first afro-columbian vice president can you tell us more about the opportunities that this shift brings perfecto Marquez is for us is the mirror of a very important part of the colombian society Francia Marquez is a woman she's poor she's mother she got pregnant very young and she had to work in the domestic service to get some money and it was it's very difficult her path she could finish her studies she's discriminated and she grew in the periphery of the society so her case is very important it's very beautiful for everything that has happened with her and her life her case however is the case of the majority of the people in Colombia so that's why I say that Francia is a mirror for many of the colombian people who see themselves reflected in that reality in Francia's reality so the popular sectors of this society of every cities in Colombia cities very poor and in the main cities where economy has been concentrated the economy of our country in the periphery part is where the purple sector lives so they continue to be this popular sector the vulnerable people and also the people in the countryside see themselves reflected in Francia the indigenous people the black people we all see ourselves identified in Francia's life the young people even the LGBT community see themselves reflected in Francia so there it's a very beautiful case of how things are changing our reality is changing and for the first time people can see themselves reflected in the government people the base of the society in Colombia yesterday I was hearing the news and Colombia has the third place of the more corrupt countries of the world and this corruption is an historical thing and it's the one that has stolen the dreams of our people corruption is what hasn't allowed the progress the resources disappear and get lost so we don't get opportunities so the development that we have lived has ignored the interests of the community so the interests have been extraction mining projects of big infrastructures for moving different boats but they ignore the dreams and the protection of the community what do we get with Francia so for the first time we have the opportunity that these dreams these beds these visions different visions they can see all these reflected in a country model it's the first time that left wing government that we have a left-wing government in Colombia and we have much hope last week I saw in Twitter that the vice president for the first time meets the women partera from Colombia and I was very sad to see the comments on Twitter because people don't value these they don't understand that because what they only know about medicine it's the occidental medicine and we don't value what we know so this is just one example this government is giving visibility so to these beds that have never had these opportunities so we are working to get good results with that so let's go to you from the legal perspective what do you think are some of the challenges but more importantly the opportunity that that exists in the amazon region right now when it comes to addressing indigenous land rights hola buenas muchas gracias so there are many subjects that are challenges for us basically the pandemic in Peru brought the corruption and incrementation of corruption illegal activities in indigenous territories also the prices of oil and gas have been incremented and this puts in risk the indigenous territories so the challenge is that we need to have more security to have more rights to bring those rights to the community and to protect that territories in recent years with the pandemic and all these global contexts there are many advocates environmental advocates who have been murdered in the amazon and most of them are indigenous and regarding subjects of uh territory so in the legal context we need to protect these rights give more rights help the to manage that territory and then also in a general way we have to to get legal context to manage and to protect ourselves of corruption so we need to get this justice and we also have to change our vision we can just get rid of the poverty and we can use the natural resources in a sustainable way so this is the way in which we see it the indigenous communities the indigenous community suffered a lot with the extraction and Astolfo was mentioning it because also because of the of not knowing mechanism of health we didn't know how to protect ourselves also regarding education so the the communities started to protect themselves to close themselves and so we need a national mechanism a next strategical vision to protect the amazon region and to empower our communities and to have more tools to manage the territory so in the legal context we have a lot of work to do so the challenges they are major challenges mostly now with the illegal activities and murders to the environmental advocates let's move to you Barbara as we mentioned the start of the webinar we would like to spend the bulk of our time today focusing on opportunities and solutions Barbara we know that you have an immense amount of solutions reporting expertise in the amazon can you tell us a little bit about your about how land rights and indigenous people in the amazon has evolved the last in the past few years using this solution journalism lens sure thank you very much first for the invitation and warm greetings good morning good afternoon good evening to all from Lima Peru where I am based first just to clarify what the term solutions journalism means it's it's basically it basically means examining when writing stories that raise issues that raise problems examining also the solutions that have been implemented in efforts to address those problems so it's not just talking about proposed solutions or possible solutions it looks at actual things that people are doing on the ground and and examines what works and why it works but also what the limitations are and what the problems have been and it looks for insights into how others might be able to learn from those experiences or implement them the idea is to spread around spread the word about to help spread the word about some of these solutions but I'd like to take a step back and look at the roots of some of the issues that I think need to be examined more closely through this kind of lens in 2018 I visited the Tigray River in northern Peru which is in one of Peru's largest and oldest oil fields and talked to the women there about what they remembered from when the oil companies first arrived in that area in the 1970s and it was interesting when I asked men what they remembered they tended to remember the answer tended to be well the the engineers the the oil men came and either they offered us work or they didn't offer us work depending upon the situation of the community but when I asked the women they said things like I was down at the river washing clothes and these strangers came out of the forest or I was in my home and this strange thing came down from the sky this helicopter came down from the sky and I was afraid and then after the oil drilling started it's the women who gather who collect the water who wash the clothes who wash their children in the in bathe their children in the rivers and this was a time when Peru did not have environmental legislation oil spills just washed down the rivers they were not contained or cleaned up the hot salty produced water that comes out of the well with the oil also just went down the river and in a little community called vista legre sometime in the 1980s something happened I had heard that there was some sort of epidemic that happened and I wanted to hear the story from from one of the women so I asked about that and she took us she took us across the river into the forest where the cemetery used to be the person who had first told me about this told me that he had gone in the 1990s and had seen many small graves in the cemetery and when we walked into the forest where the cemetery used to be because after this event happened the community moved out of that place we could feel the little depressions in the earth and lend out a chuche the woman who who led us stopped she followed a path that we couldn't see into the forest and she stopped beside a very simple grave marker just a stake a carved stake in the ground she put her hand on it and she said this is my first daughter and there she told us that there had been a day when the lake that they where they fished and where they where they fished mostly turned black with oil and oil came down the stream that led from the lake to the river and sometime after that the children in the community became ill they vomited they vomited blood and within a day or two they died almost all of the children in that community died in this epidemic that may have it might have been hepatitis it's hard to say hard to say what this this this many years afterwards it's hard to say what the effect of the exposure to that pollution would have been but she told us this story and she put her hand on the marker and she said this is my first daughter she would be 35 now and it still breaks my heart when I think of that because there are there is this historical trauma in the amazon region that dates back probably dates back to the arrival of european settlers but there have been very very brutal incidents the slave trade that estolfo mentioned you know he's he mentioned the rights of the the struggle of afro columbians to to gain their rights and the intergenerational trauma of the slave trade is something that really hasn't been examined in latin america I don't think in the amazon there's the intergenerational trauma of the genocide and the uprooting of communities from during the rubber boom era and more recently the the oil industry the extractive industries oil mining logging all of these things have multi-generational impacts that really haven't been explored and they have a lot to do with land rights and they have a lot to do with with persistent colonial attitudes toward the use of land in the amazon that's related to the land trafficking that's going on the land speculation the mining the with a wildcat gold mining the illegal gold mining and and these newer these newer proposals for bio you know bio for a bio economy for example an economy based on on non timber forest products or or carbon schemes carbon credits using using offering carbon carbon offsets especially in indigenous territories I think a lot of gains have indeed been made um indigenous people now have a seat at the negotiating table for bio on the biodiversity convention and on the the climate the climate convention but they also complain that their proposals aren't necessarily being heard particularly proposals that have to do with land rights and with and with demarcation of territories there there's a recent study that shows that indigenous lands and well there are a lot of studies that show that indigenous territories and protected areas officially national protected areas or regional parks or whatever in the amazon tend to be better protected than areas outside of them and indigenously and so that's definitely a gain indigenous people are protecting their territories continue to protect their territories against encroachment but the encroachment is constant and as um as Silvana mentioned resisting it can be deadly for the people whose territory who are trying to protect their territories and often it these kinds of this encroachment of agriculture or of mining or of logging leads to um leads to conflicts within the communities because some people in the community might be in favor or might be related to the people who are trying to encroach and others are are resisting so there there are a series of of gains and losses there there are places where I think there's there has been progress there's been progress in in free prior and conformed in informed consent for example but there are also limitations there are also there's an unevenness in the way that those those consent processes are being implemented so I think all of those are things that need to be examined more more carefully not just by policymakers but also by the media I think there's a lot to be looked at in these in these these areas um the carbon schemes in particular are often you know they're often presented as a way of of providing an income to indigenous communities and yet in there are there are researchers who are also raising questions about how well the benefits are distributed within the communities and even whether the benefits reach the communities and indigenous leaders themselves are divided about those kinds of things indigenous leaders also point out that while they are protecting their territories as well as governments are protecting their protected areas the protected areas receive an income receive a budget budget funds but the indigenous territories did not because the their the protection level is the same but there's no support for that protection so I think there's a lot of room there to look at what what other kinds of protective schemes or what other kinds of financing would be possible for for indigenous territories for indigenous people and african and african communities which are largely in in columb or in the columbian amazon than other parts perhaps um no columbia and brazil certainly you know what other kinds of financing mechanisms could make it possible for those communities to help protect their forests um the same with the bio economy the whole uh that whole amazon 4.0 proposal now to to help communities support themselves with bio bio bio businesses bio business opportunities using products from their forests things things that could be bio pharmaceuticals or or foods like asai for example but again these things have or they raise a lot of questions about how well the how equitably the benefits reach the communities and even things like asai which is a great success story it's the fruit the palm fruit from brazil that became a big export crop but there are signs that the the excessive production the excessive focus on producing asai has actually changed forest compositions in places where where farmers are doing that um so i think there are a lot of questions there are a lot of places there are a lot of questions that are being raised there are a lot of things that are being tried that merit examination through the solutions lens and i hope more journalists will will take the opportunity to do that and i hope that there will be more reporting grants available for there are some now but there that there will be more in the future because i think with the the um agreements that came out of the glasco climate summit if they are actually implemented there's going to be a lot of money pouring into some of these projects and they definitely need to be examined they need to be examined by scientists but they also need to be examined by the media there needs to be an eye on them and the wild card in all of this for me is organized crime during the pandemic criminal activities expanded throughout the amazon the illegal mining the illegal logging and drug trafficking they're all related they're all related to money laundering and they're all related to corruption in the governments and that's something that i think needs to be talked about a lot more it takes a lot of courage for journalists to to look at those because it's those are extremely dangerous issues to investigate but unless unless there is you know a region wide effort to attack corruption and attack organized crime i think in a lot of places it's the local communities that are just going to be caught in the crossfire and that i think is a topic that needs a lot more discussion yeah that's um those are the those are the things that i would i would mention sort of at first glance thanks Barbara thanks thanks for this explanation uh alexandra i want to go to you first finish but this first part of our conversation can you talk a little bit about not only the other opportunities but what do indigenous communities need right now in order to come out from under these tracks well after hearing all of what has been said we are on the front line as i mentioned whoever who is uh facing all these mining situations and oil company situations we also had had a project to kick those companies out of our territory to weren't exactly inside the territory but what were affecting the river we went and thanks to angios and alliance saver alliance we received support for the fight in our communities and thanks for thanks to amazon for lives who has supported us directly they are working together with us us who are it's we who are um going through with uh moments and we want the government to respect our territories and our rights it's important because as indigenous community we must move forward and we must stand up and fight and when we do that we go to the streets we must demand we must even die in the protests that we have this year in the protests that we have in june we had a protest and many of our friends died in bed in the fight against the government why because we had to fight for our rights so the government can respect them and us we as indigenous community we must die for this so we have a little bit of attention from the government because our word our voice is our strength our our strength to continue moving forward and to continue taking care of our territory and the future for our kids the government says that we are armed groups but it's not true we are advocates for our territory for the jungle and because the nature and the forests have rights also but how can they defend themselves we must do it for them as advocates for our territories and in this way we defend the future of our kids it's it's awful that we don't receive support by the government that they don't guarantee our rights or lives that we must go out into the streets and fight for it and in this case we know that cayambe coca resurface is in our territory and we don't receive any benefits money benefits from the government considering that they have a economic reserve specifically specifically for them they don't support us with any project the we do it ourselves with our hearts because we want to leave a legacy inside the territory for our kids we work in these projects without even receiving any wages we go and we go through this our territories and take care of it and guard our territory because we want to leave again a legacy for our kids we speak about a lot of climate change and but nothing is being done nothing gets to the actual territories to our communities so we as women as indigenous women try to come up with ideas of how to deal with this fight and we have this idea to create the tourism project to explain that we as women we can actually also take care of our territory and provide and show our culture our food or dances our sacred places our people and take care of the people and the invisible people that are inside the territory that we can feel so that is our project as a community and as an indigenous community we try to look for projects that can support us as well to develop but not mining projects or oil projects that it's only making our earth bleed we want to be stronger with these big NGOs that have supported us and this has been a huge solid foundation they deleted the 52 entities that were damaged in our territory so now we're stronger and we're getting stronger because there is a lot of pain due to the government because there are no projects and nothing we hope would become stronger I really thank these big NGOs that have supported us and so many other people from the communication here in industry that are allied with us and are telling our stories and explaining the life inside the territory I live here I live day by day I I try to tell people that do not understand my life to try to respect it if they don't understand it to understand the fear that we feel from these big companies that want to destroy the future of our kids and they are only thinking about creating making money but we are requesting respect of mother earth and that's what I want with the indigenous law with the community all together because it is true that there are leaders that are sold but in my community we are not divided we are together and we want the future for our kids and we want to feel okay we want to feel united that is this basic foundation and we will always be the territorial advocates and yes there are threats to female advocates and female human rights advocates we have Linda Maria she's a lawyer who is an advocate for territory and she has worked with us she has fight she has fought with us against mining companies and she's helping so many territories also we raise our voices so the government can provide guarantees for the life of lina as well and we are here many indigenous peoples will fight for our earth and for the territories who are still the lungs of the earth thank you so much thank you so thank you guys for participation now we are going to move to the questions that the audience has I'll start with one that there is directed specifically at astofo astofo the listener is asking how are afro colombian communities organized to assert their land rights in colombia can you talk a little bit about about that yes of course with the black law the black community laws there were some legal scenarios that were created for ethnical participation ethnical community participation there for the afro colombian peoples they have a presentation in the congress of the republic and there is representation of them in different entities nationally regionally and even locally and it has to do with land access culture and with the main fundamental rights of human beings additionally speaking as a movement we have our own spaces of articulation nationally and regionally those are scenarios where we take our proposals and we try to do advocacy to nationally speaking and at this very moment we're going into a new government that is demanding us something we have this challenge because we want to be well represented in the development plan of this of this government the indigenous communities we want participation and the participation we want participation in different entities and what we have thought and what we have seen for so long is the obstacles by the government in the recognition and the dialogue in those agendas that lately we haven't actually proposed any new agendas because what we are demanding is to abide by the agendas that were previously established in the past we go back to the tables and due to a protest or a manifestation and or a march and we go back to the tables and we request the same demands that we have always requested from the indigenous communities and however they are overlooked by the regional government to sum up at this very moment we are articulated and we want the proposals that historically were made in the past to be respected the agendas depend on economic resources and we are also working on that as well directed to all panelists but specifically also to Massiu so if Massiu could start by answering then we can hear comments from whatever plan is what to talk or to comment so everyone do believe that the growth of market approaches like community business impact investing, carbon market etc can come can contribute to strengthening indigenous communities, black communities in other groups in the Amazon. Massiu if we can start with you thank you of course we work in this direction in this sense with forest trends and in a network with many other organizations support organizations so we've been working precisely in this aspect particularly as commented by Barbara with regard to the bioeconomy the social biodiversity value chains so there is a huge potential there and lots of work to be done to strengthen the initiatives of communities and indigenous peoples to make to ensure to ensure that these that this social business community business approach is strengthened and the alliances with partners with market players for these products to reach the market in other words to ensure good negotiating conditions long-term contracts according to the values and principles of the communities involved so there is a major need to level these relations with the market strengthening the visions of the communities themselves indigenous peoples themselves to make sure that these processes strengthen their internal governance as well based on agreements based on consent on norms that ensure access to opportunities to all to youngsters to women to make sure the territorial governance is strengthened this is the direction we work towards and regarding carbon we think it's important there's a this market is not consolidated yet in terms of access and recognition of these communities and indigenous peoples that keep the forest standing we also see that there's an importance in ensuring a flow of resources from public entities through agreements that ensure this recognition in other words not necessarily selling credits on the market yes the carbon market is an opportunity in a way but there are other paths which are jurisdictional paths as was commented so a lot of money has been committed since COP26 last year and surely in Egypt this will be the reason of major attention so how to ensure that these flows of resources these billions can really land on the territories arrive effectively at the government at the base level at the grassroots level so for example like alexandra said they need the resources on the ground to continue controlling and surveilling their territory thank you again maybe i know you have some thoughts about this topic i guess um no i i i think i think marcio has has talked about some of the the issues that need to be to be looked at and the the issue of equity in in benefit distribution not just the benefits are reaching the community but the benefits being equitably distributed within the community i know that there are some some studies that show that women women continue to be sometimes sidelined from from the benefits of some of these these these things and i think it's really important to remember that one size does not fit all and that indigenous communities are not monoliths indigenous communities and afro communities in the amazon are not homogeneous people tend to think of the indigenous perspective on something or the indigenous way of doing something and while there are common cosmo visions there are differences of opinion among among within these traditional communities just as there are differences of opinion anywhere and i think it's it's really important to be careful that these kinds of projects don't end up dividing communities that are already having you know internal it might already be having internal tensions so i think that's um and that that's definitely something and um the the another thing that i i didn't mention that that would possibly fit into this is also we haven't really talked about how actors from outside the region can influence what's going on in the region and there's there's increasing attention to supply chains for example and how consumers in the us or in europe can influence influence events on the ground in the in the amazon by what they choose to purchase or what they know and or how they insist to suppliers that they that they make their supply chains transparent so i think there's a lot to be a lot that can be done in that area too that can also help communities on the ground in the amazon resist some of these these outside these outside influences i think you know i think this i think the whole issue of responsible can responsible consumption is something that that requires you know further further attention to whether that's you know how well these carbon offsets are really working or you know where your where your coffee comes from or where your cocoa comes from or whatever i think there's a lot more that could be done in that area to raise consumer awareness and get consumers to you know to put some pressure on companies that can then have a positive impact on local communities thanks Barbara now we have a question for all panelists it's something specific that i feel like an excellent thing can talk a little bit about the question is how many acts and rules have changed during the pandemic situation in the interest of mining companies does anyone want to pick that up alexandra maybe you should frozen sorry couldn't hear the question could you repeat the problem is how many acts and rules have changed during the pandemic situation in the interest of mining companies they have changed well as a community with our own guard our guard is moving around trying to guard our territory with these mining companies there is always the presence of our own guard they have actually been able to minimize the access of these mining companies inside our territories that they did without our consent and without our permission so our own self-determination have actually worked it's not something that the government did it was just a way that we did to defend ourselves our own community guard has been there and we try to make our rules be respected and our rights as well yes it is less now there are so many projects that we were told that we are going to be passed but we are watching over those bills and we will always be watching over our territory and again requesting that our lives have to be respected and we ask that the projects have to have to be have to be reaching the communities and as somebody said in base organizations because in this way we strengthen ourselves as women with our fights and guards it's a huge support to have projects that benefit our territories and our lives and to continue with this strengthening of our families and kids that are our future of life thank you so much thank you let's go to marcio and then to stop thank you in the case of the brazilian amazon it is very clear this pandemic context as i mentioned before was seen as an opportunity by the current government that has this idea of weakening this whole system this was dismantled there are studies that show for example environmental fines were reduced in over 70 percent during that period they were compiled over 50 laws that made licensing a lot more flexible one of them which was really serious was the one i talked about before relating to illegal mining of indigenous lands but we can also talk about the great amount of agro pesticides that were released by this government there's a really well organized strategy that is very systematic to rise as a the flexibilization of rules regarding the authorization and use of pesticides in brazil that were forbidden historically in many parts of the world and now they're they're being liberated and that's why the brazilian people is being polluted in a systemic way and this is very related to illegal to illegal mining i'm really sorry because i was talking really fast again a cell phone let's let's hear what you have today no it's uh you raise your hand uh do you want to reply to the question the question specifically was how many accident rules have changed during the pandemic situation in the interest of mining companies okay yes i was waiting for the question so what has been proven and we what we can see easily is that with pandemic of course the economic capacity the revenues of all the world have been reduced in a country as ours colombia the main part of the resources come from mining so we give access again we reactivate the economy and the government what decides to do is we're going to strengthen the mining industry we're going to accelerate the production the mining production to reactivate the economy and this as a consequence has some implications some environmental implications and human because it makes them more difficult and it's due to this political economy so in the contrary what the what the government doesn't do is that the economy of many families countryside families depends on the mining but the artisanal minor mining who practice not just the black people but also other people and that mining that was affected because of the pandemic and the government didn't help this part of society so this generates a big gap of the economic possibilities of one part of the society and the other the big companies accelerate the enterprise's societies we destroy the environment and we violate the human rights of many communities thank you so much everyone for your time and thank you to the to the panelists we're going to be wrapping up here please note that today's webinar was the third of four this year series the last and final in dialogue for this year would take place in early december and we will share more information with you shortly finally thank to the teams from the land portal and the tiny facility for their for their organization have a nice morning afternoon or evening whatever you are thank you so much thank you thank you