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Indonesia expands IPLC land recognition — but the pace is too slow, critics say

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JAKARTA — President Joko Widodo recently issued Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) in Indonesia more than 1 million hectares (2.47 million acres) of land titles, under his flagship social forestry program. As a result, the government has recognized IPLCs’ rights over 8 million hectares (19.77 million acres) of lands in Indonesia. These include various forms of social forestry titles, such as village forests, community forests, plantation forests and ancestral or customary forests. But the pace of recognition for IPLCs’ rights to their lands is not fast enough compared with the size of Indigenous lands that have been mapped, activists said. In response to the government’s slow progress in recognizing ancestral land rights, a group of NGOs established an initiative called the Ancestral Domain Registration Agency (BRWA) to guide Indigenous groups in mapping their own territories, including forests, rivers and sea. So far, the BRWA has mapped 30.1 million hectares (74.4 million acres) — an area more than twice the size of Java — of land claimed by IPLCs. The pace of formal recognition is particularly sluggish for customary forests, which is the strongest category of land rights in Indonesia, as it means the government is completely relinquishing state lands to Indigenous communities, the BRWA noted. The frankincense forest of the Pandumaan-Sipituhuta Indigenous community in North Sumatra, Indonesia. Image by Barita News Lumbanbatu/Mongabay Indonesia. Customary forest As of July, the government had recognized only 265,250 hectares (655,400 acres) of ancestral forests, lagging behind the 23.2 million hectares (57.3 million acres)…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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