Indigenous peoples represent 370+ million people globally and indigenous territories cover almost 30 percent of Earth’s terrestrial surface and overlap with 80% of the planet’s biodiversity. Indigenous peoples are often the most effective sustainable land managers, yet their communities often lack access to resources and technologies that can help secure their land rights and monitor threats to their territories from outside interests.
Earth observations provide valuable information to inform mapping and monitoring of territories and strategically responding to emerging threats. That is why the NASA-funded project, Earth Observations for indigenous-led land Management (EO4IM) aims to strengthen the technical capacity of indigenous peoples to harness the power of Earth observations for enhanced sustainable land management.
Conservation International (CI) is working with the Awajun people of Peru and the Achuar Nation of Ecuador to pilot a framework that aims to first understand the sustainable land management goals and challenges for these communities and then provide technical training in GIS and remote sensing to help them achieve their goals.
To better understand these communities’ goals and challenges, CI engaged the communities in a participatory needs assessment. While we are still analyzing the data from the assessment, one key challenge that emerged for both communities was the urgent need to monitor their territories for new migrant settlements that cause illegal deforestation on their lands.
Based on these assessments, CI will develop targeted technical training materials and provide in-person training to help the communities address these and other challenges using accessible geospatial technologies. EO4IM’s framework and tools can be used to improve access to current technologies and inform the design of new Earth observation applications that are optimized for indigenous peoples to inform sustainable land management.