$5,000 to support documenting traditional practices and local wisdom and conducting participatory mapping in South Sulawesi, Indonesia as part of the Last Forest campaign and land rights initiative in 6 key regions of critical forest areas throughout the country where large blocks of rainforest have been well-managed by Indigenous communities but are now under threat of mining, palm oil, and pulp and paper plantations.
$2,500 to support an Amazonian Women’s Congress and March for International Women’s Day. These activities provided an opportunity to refine strategies for protection of Indigenous territories and to prioritize sustainable alternatives to meet local needs in alignment with the vision of Indigenous women leaders who are steadfast in their demands for no industrial extraction within their communities’ traditional territories.
$2,500 to support a mobilization to Ecuador’s capital city of Quito by communities impacted by large-scale mines. This mobilization sought to revoke illegally granted concessions with primary participation coming from the Intag area in the northwest of the country which is home to a biologically diverse and unique cloud forest ecosystem. Intag communities have stopped two previous attempts by multinational mining companies to develop a major open-pit copper mine and are currently fighting to do so again.
$1,500 to support in coordination with Amazon Watch a delegation of Indigenous youth and leaders from the Kichwa territory of Sarayaku from the Ecuadorian Amazon to participate in the United Nations Framework Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties 23rd convening (COP23) in Bonn, Germany to advocate for the protection of their ancestral territories and keeping oil in the ground in the Amazon.
$3,000 to support a grassroots campaign to protect ancestral Eyak homelands in Alaska, through efforts to stop the proposed Shepard Point deep water port and road, which would bring a cascade effect of development threats to the Copper River Delta, Prince William Sound, old growth forests and vital wild salmon habitat.
$4,000 to support strengthening efforts to monitor and patrol traditional Yawanawa territory covering nearly 500,000 acres of largely intact rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon, including training new members to expand the patrol team that to date has successfully stopped logging and other industrial activities.
$5,000 to support legal defense, advocacy, and organizing related to efforts to stop a planned copper mega-mine on the lands of the Shuar Indigenous people in the southern Ecuadorian Amazon that has been approved by the government without seeking the consent of – let alone properly consulting with – the Shuar, despite the fact that international and Ecuadorian law require such consultation.
$2,000 to support efforts to auto-demarcate the traditional territorial boundary of the of Montanha-Mangabal communities along the Tapajós River in the Brazilian Amazon as a strategy to identify areas of illegal invasion, render visible the territorial limits to illicit loggers and miners and support overall monitoring and protection efforts, including efforts to stop the construction of the Jatobá dam, one of a series of 43 hydroelectric dams planned in the Tapajós River Basin.
$8,000 to support training members of several villages in key areas of West Kalimantan, Indonesia to build a community-based monitoring system to track the implementation of APP and APRIL’s forest and social responsibility commitments, while also providing additional trainings and support related to capacity building towards decreasing the large-scale deforestation and marginalization of local communities occurring in the region.
$7,500 to support work with 5 villages on Bengkalis Island, Riau, Indonesia, impacted by pulp and paper plantations and related fires that have not previously had any support to gather data regarding impacts on their customary lands and livelihoods and to engage in community organizing with the goal of protecting peatlands from conversion and securing the return of land rights.
