For the first time, anyone with an internet connection can see exactly how much money is flowing to Indigenous peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant peoples who protect the world’s forests — and, crucially, how much is not reaching them at all. The Path to Scale dashboard, launched by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) and Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN), pulls together funding data from 133 donors dating back to 2011 C.E., offering an unprecedented window into one of conservation’s most persistent blind spots.
At a glance
- Path to Scale dashboard: The interactive tool aggregates publicly reported funding data from 133 donors since 2011 C.E., allowing users to filter by geography, keyword, and community type to identify gaps and opportunities.
- Direct funding gap: Despite growing global commitments, only 2.1% of funds allocated for these communities in 2023 C.E. reached them directly — down from 2.9% in 2021 C.E., according to the Forest Tenure Funders Group’s annual report.
- Forest stewardship scale: Studies estimate that Indigenous territories contain up to 36% of the world’s remaining forests and as much as 80% of its remaining biodiversity, making secure land tenure central to any serious climate or conservation strategy.
Why this tool matters now
The timing of the launch was deliberate. At the COP26 U.N. climate conference in 2021 C.E., a coalition of donors pledged $1.7 billion to support the tenure rights and forest guardianship of Indigenous peoples and local communities by 2025 C.E. A year later, the U.N. biodiversity conference set a goal to protect 30% of Earth’s land and waters while explicitly respecting Indigenous rights and territories.
Those are large promises. The dashboard exists, in part, to measure whether they are being kept.
“I believe it’s difficult, especially for the more locally rooted organizations, to understand who the acting donors are and what kind of funding they are providing to which actors,” said Torbjørn Gjefsen, RFN’s senior forest finance adviser. “So, this tool can help fill that information gap.”
The developers estimate that at least $10 billion is needed by 2030 C.E. to formally recognize an additional 400 million hectares of tropical forest under Indigenous, local, and Afro-descendant stewardship — a threshold they say is essential to meeting global climate and biodiversity targets.
What the data already reveals
Building the dashboard required processing thousands of dense project documents. RRI used large language models to scan the text and identify funding trends across geographies and thematic areas — one of the first large-scale applications of AI to Indigenous land-rights finance tracking.
The picture that emerged is mixed. Funding to these communities in Africa and Southeast Asia increased in recent years, while Latin America — historically the largest recipient — saw a decline. Multilateral organizations like the World Bank accounted for 42% of total disbursements in 2023 C.E. Funding from private foundations nearly doubled as a share of total funding between 2016 C.E. and 2019 C.E., rising from 8% to 17%.
But the most striking finding may be the stubbornly low rate of direct funding. Despite a growing number of Indigenous-led funding mechanisms designed to channel money straight to communities, existing structures have been able to meet at most 30% of community-led funding proposals.
The structural problem of who can access the money
The low direct-funding numbers are not accidental. Many major funds — including the Green Climate Fund — set requirements that systematically exclude the very organizations they are meant to support.
Kimaren ole Riamet, a Maasai leader from Kenya and founder-director of Indigenous Livelihoods Enhancement Partners (ILEPA), helped develop the dashboard and described the problem plainly: requirements like demonstrated prior funding portfolios or 10 years of audited accounts effectively lock out young community-based organizations doing active conservation work on the ground.
“If you look at the Green Climate Fund or the World Bank funding arrangement historically, they have state-driven ownership in accessing resources, and these arrangements certainly will not be optimal for Indigenous people because they are excluded and marginalized by the very structures of the state,” Riamet said.
In Kenya, where 75–80% of the country’s total area is pastureland, woodland, and bushland, the problem is compounded by donor focus on tropical forests tied to carbon markets — leaving dryland ecosystems and the Indigenous communities managing them chronically underfunded.
Transparency as a tool for accountability
Rukka Sombolinggi, an Indigenous Torajan leader from Indonesia and secretary-general of the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN), framed the dashboard’s value in direct terms: communities already know how much money they receive. What they need is to know how much is being disbursed in their name — and where it goes before it arrives.
“When donors and NGOs collaborate with us directly, their funding makes greater impact than when disbursed through intermediaries — the Path to Scale dashboard can accelerate this trend,” she said.
Kevin Currey, program officer for natural resources and climate change at the Ford Foundation, acknowledged both the progress and the distance remaining: “Donor funding for these communities’ tenure and forest management has increased significantly in recent years, partly driven by increasing scientific evidence of these groups’ vital role in conserving ecosystems. But gaps remain in donor coordination and reporting.”
The dashboard has real limitations. Its data is constrained to what donors choose to make publicly available, and it can only trace the first transaction — not how funds move through intermediaries to the final recipients. Those gaps are not minor. They reflect the same opacity the tool was built to address. But Gjefsen believes direct funding is likely to grow as community-led organizations build the administrative infrastructure donors require — provided donors also adjust their own systems to make that possible.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Mongabay
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights get a major boost ahead of COP30
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
- The Good News for Humankind archive on indigenous rights
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