IWGIA Annual Report 2022

The world opened up in 2022 as the effects of COVID-19 abated and humanity’s protection against the virus increased but it also began to grapple with a number of other factors that led to 2022 being, in many ways, a more difficult year than 2021. Russia’s war on Ukraine and a food crisis of unprecedented proportions, alongside prolonged and deadly droughts and the other effects of climate change, as well as inflation affecting many national economies, have harmed marginalised groups of society the most, including Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous women and girls. This is why we decided to focus on gender and climate in our work in 2022.

In times of a global climate and biodiversity crisis, focusing on the protection of nature is crucial. Scientific studies show that Indigenous Peoples are among the most effective guardians of nature. This has fortunately been recognised by a number of international processes, such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF). The actual implementation of conservation efforts globally tells a different story, however, one in which the rights and knowledge of Indigenous Peoples are mostly ignored.

Some international processes have also recognised the unique role Indigenous women and girls play in their communities and the world. After nearly 20years of collective actions and advocacy across the 7 socio-cultural regions of the world, the Indigenous women’s movement succeeded in getting the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women(CEDAW) to develop and adopt a specific recommendation on Indigenous women and girls in 2022: General Recommendation 39 (GR39).

GR39 promotes the voices of Indigenous women and girls as agents of change and leaders both inside and outside their communities and addresses the different forms of intersectional discrimination frequently committed by state and non-State actors. It furthermore recognises Indigenous women’s key role as leaders, knowledge holders and transformers of culture within their families, villages and communities. GR39 comes at a time when Indigenous women and girls need as much protection as possible as they continue to suffer from intersectional violence and discrimination at the hands of aggressors.

Supporting the Indigenous movement in 2022

In 2022, alongside 44 partners, IWGIA achieved important results under its 4 programme areas in 21 countries aimed at promoting, protecting and defending Indigenous Peoples’ rights. These achievements include:

engaging with climate change policies in 3 countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa, as well as at the international level with the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)and COP 27, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD) and COP15, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) AfricaProtected Areas Congress (APAC) (Read more in our Climate Change section on page 10);

• reporting on, monitoring and protesting against Indigenous Peoples’human rights violations in 18 countries of the Arctic, Africa, Asia and Latin America (read more in our Land Defence and Defenders section on page 14);
• advancing toward full recognition of Indigenous autonomies in 7 countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia and at the regional level in Latin America(read more in our Territorial Governance section on page 18);
• engaging, with partners, in 13 international and regional human rights• engaging, with partners, in 13 international and regional human rights mechanisms by organising sessions, dialogues and side events as well as submitting communications and inputs to reports (read more in our GlobalGovernance section on page 23).

We documented Indigenous Peoples’ rights through 79 publications, podcasts and videos/streams, including publication of the 36th edition of The IndigenousWorld, which was downloaded almost 23,000 times in English and 9,000 times in Spanish in 2022 alone. We also documented Indigenous Peoples’ rights and struggles and IWGIA’s activities in 144 articles, statements and appeals, including through our monthly magazine Debates Indígenas (Indigenous Debates) and continued our work with the academic world by engaging with 8 universities. Many of these materials are documented and linked throughout this report.

We also increased our media outreach in English, Spanish and Danish, as well as in other languages, and furthermore expanded into other regions, being featuredin the press over 120 times in 2022. Key topics focused on our engagement, and that of Indigenous Peoples, in climate actions at both COP 27 and COP 15.

In Denmark, we worked with Operation Dagsværk on the fundraising campaign for the project that was selected by the high school students’ organisation in the autumn of 2021. This fruitful cooperation not only provided us with a platform for good visibility of Indigenous Peoples’ rights and role in climate actions but also inspired a number of young Danish activists to further engage with Indigenous Peoples and closely follow IWGIA’s work.