Forest Peoples: The 1.6 Billion Lives Tied to the Fate of Tropical Forests

Tropical forests are not uninhabited wilderness. They are home to, or the livelihood basis for, approximately 1.6 billion people worldwide — including at least 350 million people who are highly forest-dependent, and approximately 60 million indigenous people for whom forests are both home and cultural identity. Any serious engagement with tropical deforestation must grapple with this human reality: the people most immediately affected by forest loss are often also the people with the least power to prevent it, and sometimes the most effective guardians of the forests that remain.

The Paradox of Forest-Dependent Poverty

Many of the world's most forest-rich countries are also among the world's poorest. The DRC, which contains the Congo Basin's largest forest expanse, has a GDP per capita of approximately $550 — one of the lowest in the world. Peru, Indonesia, and Bolivia — which together contain vast tracts of threatened tropical forest — face enormous development pressures that make forest conservation a complex political challenge. Forest-dependent communities often have few economic alternatives to forest extraction, and conservation frameworks that ignore this reality are unlikely to succeed.

Community Forestry — The Evidence

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that community-managed forests — where local or indigenous communities have legally recognised rights to manage and benefit from forest resources — consistently outperform state-managed forests in terms of forest cover retention. A systematic review of community forestry programmes across 130 studies in 36 countries found that community management significantly reduced deforestation rates compared to open-access areas, and performed comparably to or better than nationally protected areas in most contexts. The mechanisms are not mysterious: communities with secure tenure have both the incentive and the capacity to manage forests sustainably for the long term.