Mexico and Central America
News from Ford
31 May 2012Seeing the Forest, Not Just Trees
As world leaders prepare for the upcoming Rio+20 summit, Ford Foundation President Luis Ubiñas highlights one strategy that’s helping to slow climate change and conserve biodiversity: granting ownership rights over forests to communities that live in them. In an op-ed published in the International Herald Tribune and on NYTimes.com, he points to a new report from the Rights and Resources Initiative, a Ford grantee, that shows overwhelmingly positive results in places where local communities have taken ownership of forests. Through our work on Sustainable Development, the foundation is striving to reduce global poverty while sustaining the quality of the environment.
More Information
- Read the full report from the Rights and Resources Initiative
- Learn more about the focus of our Sustainable Development work
- Get the latest information about the Rio+20 Conference
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This Forest Is Our Forest
May 31, 2012 By Luis UbiñasTwenty years ago, the world came together in Rio de Janeiro for a historic summit meeting to tackle the environmental issues that threaten the very sustainability and preservation of our planet. Now, as world leaders and thousands of other participants prepare for the Rio+20 Conference, we are facing an even more urgent set of environmental challenges.
The pace of global climate change has worsened, representing a fundamental threat to the planet’s health and environmental well-being. And there is little indication the world’s leaders are ready to meet the challenges of building an environmentally sustainable future.
But there is some good news to report — and it’s coming from the world’s forests, a critical front line in the effort to slow climate change and conserve biodiversity. In a largely unreported global movement, some 30 of the world’s most forested countries have adopted an innovative idea for protecting forests: granting ownership rights to communities that reside in them.