“Local initiatives for sustainable development through community-based resource governance necessarily imply a struggle for greater control over resources and institutions by those hitherto excluded from such control. Such struggles for self-empowerment are inevitably highly conflictive”

Human civilization has played a role in forest destruction for millennia. However, in the recent decades this devastation has become commonplace, and has reached a scale and pace of destruction that is unprecedented.

Primary forests are the home and foundation for the rich cultures and lifestyles of more than 1 billion Indigenous people. Another four billion live in communities adjacent to, or dependent in some form or another, on forests.