Logging companies have “acquired” roughly 1m hectares of Indigenous peoples’ territory in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 2000, according to a new study.
This is part of a wider trend in which companies and governments take advantage of weak or unclear land rights to lease out swathes of communal land in the global south.
Many of these deals involve foreign companies using the land for logging, intensive agriculture, fossil-fuel extraction and mining. Increasingly, firms are also seeking land that they can use to sell carbon offsets.
The research, published in Land Use Policy, identifies around 18m hectares of land in Cambodia, Colombia and the DRC that have been acquired in large-scale deals.
Overall, around 6% of the acquired land overlaps with areas that are either legally recognised as belonging to local and Indigenous communities or, in the case of the DRC, are traditionally managed by Indigenous groups.
‘Vast land resources’
Large swathes of land in the global south have traditionally been managed by local communities and Indigenous people. However, their claims to these areas – their land tenure rights – have long been under threat.
Between the 15th and 20th centuries, European powers seized territory from many Indigenous people across the global south. During decolonisation, many of these “land grabs” were never reversed and much of the formerly communal land passed straight into the hands of newly created countries, particularly in parts of Africa and Asia.
There has been growing recognition of traditional ownership in recent years. Over 2015-20, 103m hectares of communal lands in 73 countries were given legal status, according to analysis by the Rights and Resources Initiative, a global coalition of groups that advocates for the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities.
This brings the legal recognition of traditional ownership to around 1,265m hectares, or 19% of land in the countries assessed, as of 2020.
However, this legal recognition has frequently not stopped companies from entering these regions to harvest or extract a range of commodities, from palm oil and timber to copper and gold. The study authors say communal land is often viewed as an untapped resource, writing:
“The lack of private ownership and intensive production systems probably led to the notion that countries in the global south still harbour vast land resources suitable for commercial production.”
Officials in global-south nations lease out “vast tracts of land” to these companies – many of which are based overseas – without seeking communities’ consent or guaranteeing them benefits, the authors say. These rental agreements can last for several decades.
Study co-author Dr Christoph Kubitza, a research fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, says that even in nations where communal lands are legally recognised, such claims are sometimes poorly enforced by central governments. He tells Carbon Brief:
“You have some element in [national] legislation that speaks to communal lands, but implementation just does not work.”
In order to understand the scale of conflict between communal land rights and the transfer of land to companies, Kubitza and his colleagues merged data on the location of “large-scale land acquisitions” from the Land Matrix monitoring initiative with maps of communal land ownership assembled by LandMark and Open Development Cambodia.
(The definition of “large-scale land acquisition” varies, but Land Matrix broadly defines it as an attempt to buy, lease or otherwise acquire an area of land that is 200 hectares or more in size.)
They used data covering the period 2000-22 from Colombia, Cambodia and the DRC – three rainforest nations where governments provide varying levels of protection for communal lands.
‘Alarming’
The researchers identified 18.1m hectares of land that have been targeted for large-scale acquisitions in Cambodia, Colombia and the DRC since 2000.
The vast majority of this land – 14.2m hectares – is in the DRC, amounting to roughly 6% of the nation’s surface area.
In Cambodia, 2.3m hectares – roughly 13% of its land – has been involved in these deals, whereas in Colombia the figure is around 1.6m hectares, which is around 1% of its area. In total, most of the acquisitions in these three nations were by international companies.
The researchers also found that the DRC has the largest amount of communal lands under threat.
Of the 14.2m hectares targeted for large land acquisitions in the DRC, they estimate that roughly 1m hectares – 7% of the total – is land managed by Indigenous groups in the north and west of the country. These lands have predominantly been infringed by logging companies, with around 75% of these deals being struck with international entities.
The blue areas in the map below indicate Indigenous peoples’ lands and the green areas show the locations of large-scale land acquisitions in the DRC. Red indicates the areas where there is a risk of overlap between the two.
In Colombia and Cambodia, where there are more legal protections in place, the areas of communal land infringed upon are lower – 53,369 hectares and 43,150 hectares, respectively, the study says. This equates to 3% of the leased land in Colombia and 2% in Cambodia.
The authors highlight the situation in the DRC as particularly “alarming”.
However, they note that their finding of 1m hectares of overlap is only an estimate, based on the presence of Indigenous people in certain regions and extrapolations of total communal land use from detailed mapping in a smaller area. (For Colombia and Cambodia, the figures are based on legally defined communal lands.)
This is due to the lack of firm definitions of communal land in the DRC, as Kubitza explains:
“You don’t have exact numbers because if you don’t have any progressive legislation, you also don’t have a lot of mapping being done – so you have to rely on estimates.”
Dr Raymond Achu Samndong, a monitoring, evaluation and learning manager at the International Land and Forest Tenure Facility, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the 1m hectare figure could be an underestimate, given the size of the country and the problems it faces.
“Land grabbing is a growing phenomenon in the DRC,” he says, pointing to communities with whom he has worked where the government has allocated large tracts of land for concessions and the affected communities were not informed.
He adds that that the country’s inaccessibility makes monitoring and enforcing land rights difficult:
“You have statutory and customary law that conflicts in some areas where the government has limited access and control.”
In areas where customary local chiefs are essentially the land owners, they have also been known to participate in and profit from “land grabbing”, Samndong says.
Underestimates
The study highlights how the recognition of collective land ownership can help to insulate communities from “land grabs”. However, the researchers also acknowledge the limitations of such recognition.
As in much of Latin America, Colombia has provided clear recognition of communal rights, with roughly one-third of the nation’s land falling under Indigenous and Afro-Colombian control. Yet estimates suggest that up to 9.43m hectares of the nation’s communal lands are still not legally recognised.
In Cambodia, too, the study authors accept that their assessments of communal lands being encroached upon by business interests are likely to be underestimates.
A UN report in 2020 found that despite Cambodia being home to 455 Indigenous communities, only 30 Indigenous land titles had been handed out by the government.
Luciana Téllez Chávez, an environment researcher at Human Rights Watch who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that while the legislation exists to recognise communal ownership in Cambodia, “the implementation of that legislation is lagging and the process is onerous”. She adds:
“Any study that is only assessing overlap between formally recognised Indigenous territories and land acquisitions would be missing most of the picture, as most territories have not been formally recognised.”
The new paper notes this shortcoming. The researchers also use data on officially recognised Cambodian Indigenous groups and find that around one-third of them are based within the sites of large land acquisitions.
They note that while “more extensive and detailed data are missing”, the impact of land acquisitions on communal areas could be larger than their initial results suggest.
Kubitza and his colleagues highlight that frameworks for states and companies to guide their use of land already exist. They stress that global supply chain regulation – of the kind being rolled out for forest products in the EU – could help to protect communities from land grabs if properly enforced.
In the DRC, Samndong says there have been “baby steps” towards progress from the central government, with the development of a community forest law and a new land law in the works.
Carbon offsets
The study also highlights the mounting pressure placed on communal lands by foreign governments and companies seeking to meet their climate goals by purchasing carbon offsets from overseas.
Carbon offsetting involves an entity paying for emissions to be reduced somewhere else, for example by preserving trees that can absorb carbon dioxide (CO2), while it continues to produce its own emissions.
The researchers point to specific carbon-offsetting projects in Cambodia and the DRC that have infringed on forest communities. These communities often have little understanding of the projects and derive few, if any, benefits, the researchers say.
Téllez Chávez, whose own work has identified human-rights violations at a forest offsetting project in Cambodia, says the research is “right to note carbon-offsetting projects as a potentially important driver of large-scale land acquisitions”. The Cambodian government plans to expand offsetting projects across much of the country’s protected areas.
Kubitza says this trend does not sit well with a vision of a global “just transition”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“It cannot be that people who conserve forests for centuries don’t receive anything and investors just come in and make money with these kinds of business models.”
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Loggers have ‘grabbed’ around 1m hectares of Indigenous land in DRC
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Rudecindo Espíndola’s family has been growing corn, figs and other crops for generations in the Soncor Valley in northern Chile, an oasis of green orchards in one of the driest places on Earth – the Atacama desert.
Perched nearly 2,500 metres above sea level, his village, Toconao, means “lost corner” in the Kunza language of the Indigenous people who have lived and farmed the land in this remote spot for millennia.
“Our deep connection to this place is based on what we have inherited from our ancestors: our culture, our language,” said Espíndola, a member of a local research team that found evidence that people have inhabited the desert for more than 12,000 years.
This distant outpost is at the heart of the global rush for lithium, a silvery-white metal used to make batteries for electric vehicles (EV) and renewable energy storage that are vital to the world’s clean energy transition. The Atacama salt flat is home to about 25% of the world’s known lithium reserves, turning Chile into the world’s second-largest lithium producer after Australia.
For decades, the Atacama’s Indigenous Lickanantay people have protested against the expansion of the lithium industry, warning that the large evaporation ponds used to extract lithium from the brine beneath the salt flats are depleting scarce and sacred water supplies and destroying fragile desert ecosystems.
Espíndola joined the protests, fearing that competition for water could pose an existential threat to his community.
But last year, he was among dozens of Indigenous representatives who sat across the table from executives representing two Chilean mining giants to hammer out a governance model that gives Indigenous communities living close to lithium sites a bigger say over operations, and a greater share of the economic benefits.
A pioneering deal
The agreement is part of a landmark deal between state-owned copper miner Codelco and lithium producer the Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile (SQM) to extract lithium from the salt flats until 2060 through a joint venture called NovaAndino Litio.
The governance model that promises people living in Toconao and other villages around the salt flats millions of dollars in benefits and greater environmental oversight is the first of its kind in mineral-rich Chile, and has been hailed by industry experts as the start of a potential model for more responsible mining for energy transition metals.
NovaAndino told Climate Home News the negotiations with local communities represented an “unprecedented process that has allowed us to incorporate the territory’s vision early in the project’s design” and creates “a system of permanent engagement” with local communities.
The company added it will contribute to sustainable development in the area and help “the safeguarding of [the Lickanantay people’s] culture and environmental values”.
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For mining companies, such agreements could help reduce social conflicts and protests, which have delayed and stalled extraction in other parts of South America’s lithium-rich region, known as the lithium triangle.
“Argentina and Bolivia could learn a lot from what we’re doing [here],” said Rodrigo Guerrero, a researcher at the Santiago-based Espacio Público think-tank, adding that adopting participatory frameworks early on could prevent them from “going through the entire cycle of disputes” that Chile has experienced.
Justice at last?
As part of the governance deal, NovaAndino has pledged to adopt technologies that will reduce water use and mitigate the environmental impacts of lithium extraction.
It has also committed to hold more than 100 annual meetings with community representatives to build a “good faith” relationship, and an Indigenous Advisory Council will meet twice a year with the company’s sustainability committee to discuss its environmental strategy, company sources said. The meetings are due to begin next month.
To oversee the agreement’s implementation, an assembly – composed of representatives from all 25 signatory communities – will track the project’s progress. In addition, NovaAndino will hold one-on-one meetings with each community to address issues such as the hiring of local people and the protection of Indigenous employees.
Espíndola said the deal, while far from perfect, was an important step forward.
“Previously, Indigenous participation was ambiguous. Now we talk about participation at [every] hierarchical level of this process, a very strong empowerment for Indigenous communities,” said Espíndola, adding that it did not give local communities everything they had asked for. For instance, they will not hold veto power over NovaAndino’s decisions or have a formal shareholder role.
But after years of conflict with mining companies, a form of “participatory justice is being done”, he said.
Not everyone is convinced that the accord, pushed by Chile’s former leftist government, marks progress, however.
“Not in our name”
The negotiations have caused deep divisions among the Lickanantay, some of whom say greater engagement with mining companies will not stop irreparable damage to the salt flats on which their traditional way of life depends. Others fear the promise of more money will further erode community bonds.
In January 2024, Indigenous communities from five villages closest to the mining operations, including Toconao, blocked the main access roads to the lithium extraction sites. They said the Council of Atacameño Peoples, which represents 18 Lickanantay communities and was leading discussions with the company, no longer spoke for them.
Official transcripts of consultations on the extension of the lithium contracts and how to share the promised benefits reveal deep divisions. Tensions peaked when communities around the mining operations clashed over how to distribute the multimillion-dollar windfall, with villages closest to the mining sites demanding the largest share.
Eventually, separate deals establishing a new governance framework over mining activities were reached between Codelco and SQM with 25 local communities, including a specific agreement for the five villages closest to the extraction sites.
The division caused by the separate deal for the five villages “will cause historic damage” to the unity of the Atacama desert’s Indigenous peoples, said Hugo Flores, president of the Council of Atacameño Associations, a separate group representing farmers, herders and local workers who oppose the mining expansion.
Sonia Ramos, 83, a renowned Lickanantay healer and well-known anti-mining activist, lamented the fracturing of social bonds over money, and for the sake of meeting government objectives.
“There is fragmentation among the communities themselves. Everything has transformed into disequilibrium,” said the 83-year-old.
“[NovaAndino] supposedly has economic significance for the country, but for us, it is the opposite,” she said.
The company told Climate Home News it has “acted consistently” to promote “transparent, voluntary, and good-faith dialogue with the communities in the territory, recognising their diversity and autonomy, and always respecting their timelines and forms of participation”.
A one-off deal or a model for others?
The NovaAndino joint venture is a pillar of Chile’s strategy to double lithium production by 2031 and consolidate the copper-producing nation’s role in the clean energy transition as demand for battery minerals accelerates.
Chile’s new far-right president, José Antonio Kast, who was sworn in last week, promised to respect the lithium contracts signed by his predecessor’s administration – including the governance model.
Still, some experts say the splits over the new model highlight the need for legislation that mandates direct engagement and minimum community benefits for all large mining projects.
“In the past, this has lent itself to clientelism, communities who negotiate best or arrive first get the better deal,” said Pedro Zapata, a programme officer in Chile for the Natural Resource Governance Institute.
“This can be to the detriment of other communities with less strength. We cannot have first- and second-class citizens subject to the same industry,” he added.
The government is already negotiating two more public-private partnerships to extract lithium with mining giant Rio Tinto, which it said would include a framework to engage with Indigenous communities and share some of the revenues. The details will need to be negotiated between local people, the government and the company.
Sharing the benefits of mining
Under the deal in the Atacama, NovaAndino will run SQM’s current lithium concessions until they expire in 2030 before seeking new permits to expand mining in the region under a vast project known as “Salar Futuro” – a process which will require further mandatory consultations with communities.
Besides the participatory mechanism, the new agreement promises more money than ever before for salt flat communities.
Depending on the global price of lithium and their proximity to the mining operations, Indigenous communities could collectively receive roughly $30 million annually in funding – about double what SQM currently disburses under existing contracts.
When taking into account the company’s payments to local and regional authorities, contributions could reach $150 million annually, according to the government.
To access these resources, each community will need to submit a pipeline of projects they would like funding for under a complex arrangement that includes five separate financial streams:
- A general investment fund will distribute funding based on each village’s size and proximity to the mining sites
- A development fund will support projects specifically in the five communities closest to the extraction sites
- Contributions to farmers and livestock associations
- Contributions to local governments
- A groundbreaking “intergenerational fund” held in trust for the Lickanantay until 2060
For many isolated communities in the Atacama desert, financial contributions from mining firms have funded essential public services, such as healthcare and facilities like football pitches and swimming pools.
In the past, communities have used some of the benefits they received from mining to build their own environmental monitoring units, hiring teams of hydrogeologists and lawyers to scrutinise miners’ activities.
Espíndola said the new model could pave the way for more ambitious development projects such as water treatment plants and community solar energy projects.
Competition for water
The depletion of water resources is one of local people’s biggest environmental concerns.
To extract lithium from the salt flats, miners pump lithium-rich brine accumulated over millions of years in underground reservoirs into gigantic pools, where the water is left to evaporate under the sun and leaves behind lithium carbonate.
One study has shown that the practice is causing the salt flat to sink by up to two centimetres a year. SQM recently said its current operations consume approximately 11,500 to 12,500 litres of industrial freshwater for every metric ton of lithium produced.
NovaAndino has committed to significantly reduce the company’s water use by returning at least 30% of the water it extracts from the brine and eliminating the use of all freshwater in its operations within five years of obtaining an environmental permit.
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Cristina Dorador, a microbiologist at the University of Antofagasta, told Climate Home News that reinjecting the water underground is untested at a large scale and could impact the chemical composition of the salt flats.
Continuing to extract lithium from the flats until 2060 could be the “final blow” for this fragile ecosystem, she said.
Asked to comment on such concerns, NovaAndino said any new technology will be “subject to the highest regulatory standards”, and pledged to ensure transparency through “an updated monitoring system with the participation of Indigenous communities”.
High price for hard-won gains
For the five communities living on the doorstep of the lithium pools, one of the biggest gains is being granted physical access to the mining sites to monitor the lithium extraction and its impact on the salt flats.
That is a first and will strengthen communities’ ability to call out environmental harms, said Sergio Cubillos, the community president of Peine, the village closest to the evaporation ponds. It could also give them the means to seek remediation through the courts if necessary, Espíndola said.
Gaining such rights represents long-overdue progress, Cubillos said, but it has come at a high price for the Lickanantay people.
“Communities receiving money today is what has ultimately led to this division, because we haven’t been able to figure out what we want, how we want it, and how we envision our future as a people,” he said.
Main image: A truck loads concentrated brine at SQM’s lithium mine at the Atacama salt flat in Chile (Photo: REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado)
The post Landmark deal to share Chile’s lithium windfall fractures Indigenous communities appeared first on Climate Home News.
Landmark deal to share Chile’s lithium windfall fractures Indigenous communities
Diplomats will hold a series of informal meetings this year in a bid to revive stalled talks over a global treaty to curb plastic pollution, before aiming to reconvene for the next round of official negotiations at the end of 2026 or early 2027.
Hoping to find a long-awaited breakthrough in the deeply divided UN process, the chair of the talks, Chilean ambassador Julio Cordano, released a roadmap on Monday to inject momentum into the discussions after negotiations collapsed at a chaotic session in Geneva last August.
Cordano wrote in a letter that countries would meet in Nairobi from June 30 to July 3 for informal discussions to review all the components of the negotiations, including thorny issues such as efforts to limit soaring plastic production.
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The gathering should result in the drafting of a new document laying the foundations of a future treaty text with options on elements with divergent views, but “no surprises” such as new ideas or compromise proposals. This plan aims to address the fact that countries left Geneva without a draft text to work on – something Cordano called a “significant limitation” in his letter.
“Predictable pathway”
The meeting in the Kenyan capital will follow a series of virtual consultations every four to six weeks, where heads of country delegations will exchange views on specific topics. A second in-person meeting aimed at finding solutions might take place in early October, depending on the availability of funding.
Cordano said the roadmap should offer “a predictable pathway” in the lead-up to the next formal negotiating session, which is expected to take place over 10 days at the end of 2026 or early 2027. A host country has yet to be selected, but Climate Home News understands that Brazil, Azerbaijan or Kenya – the home of the UN Environment Programme – have been put forward as options.
Countries have twice failed to agree on a global plastics treaty at what were meant to be final rounds of negotiations in December 2024 and August 2025.
Divisions on plastic production
One of the most divisive elements of the discussions remains what the pact should do about plastic production, which, according to the UN, is set to triple by 2060 without intervention.
A majority, which includes most European, Latin American, African and Pacific island nations, wants to limit the manufacturing of plastic to “sustainable levels”. But large fossil fuel and petrochemical producers, led by Saudi Arabia, the United States, Russia and India, say the treaty should only focus on managing plastic waste.
As nearly all plastic is made from planet-heating oil, gas and coal, the sector’s trajectory will have a significant impact on global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Countries still far apart
After an eight-month hiatus, informal discussions restarted in early March at an informal meeting of about 20 countries hosted by Japan.
A participant told Climate Home News that, while the gathering had been helpful to test ideas, progress remained “challenging”, with national stances largely unchanged.
The source added that countries would need to achieve a significant shift in positions in the coming months to make reconvening formal negotiations worthwhile.
Deep divisions persist as plastics treaty talks restart at informal meeting
Jacob Kean-Hammerson, global plastics policy lead at Greenpeace USA, said the new roadmap offers an opportunity for countries to “defend and protect the most critical provisions on the table”.
He said that the document expected after the Nairobi meeting “must include and revisit proposals backed by a large number of countries, especially on plastic production, that have previously been disregarded”.
“These measures are essential to addressing the crisis at its source and must be reinstated as a key part of the negotiations,” he added.
The post Roadmap launched to restart deadlocked UN plastics treaty talks appeared first on Climate Home News.
Roadmap launched to restart deadlocked UN plastics treaty talks
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