Leaders from international indigenous and forest communities gathered in London to address the violation of human rights and land grabbing associated to the global trade of palm oil. A report last year from Fern showed that 18% of palm oil produced from illegal tropical forest destruction ends up in the EU. The community leaders are calling for the London Stock Exchange to stop trading with companies who act outside of the law as well as improvements in certification schemes in responding and investigating community complaints.

The Global Canopy Program is promoting the use of smartphones by indigenous communities to protect their forests. The strategy would see smartphone apps used to collect geographic data and photographs. This local data would then be linked to remote sensing data to enhance the monitoring of forest management. Up until now the effectiveness of community forest management projects in halting deforestation has been brought into question. The hope is that smartphones would play a significant role in helping local communities to manage their forests though there are some concerns that this would reduce the role of communities to simply collecting data without having input using their local knowledge on how their forests should be managed.

CIFOR highlighted the need for a new approach to enabling smallholder and community-managed forests to achieve certification in a side event organised by FSC at the RIO+20 Conference. They used an example in Bolivia where cases of theft were reported among the members. CIFOR believe that one of the reasons for this is due to insecurity as a result of formalising property rights which have cut some community members off from their traditional harvesting area. Additionally, the requirement to rotate no-take zones could lead to conflict within the community. CIFOR is in the process of collaboratively developing a new paradigm for smallholder and community forest management which will take into account the differing uses community members have for the forest and acknowledge that collective decision-making in a community may not be feasible.

Washington-based NGO Rights and Resources Initiative have published a report claiming that there is a vital link between forest dwellers having rights over their land and preventing deforestation. It points to examples in China, India and Brazil where locals have had a say over how their forests are managed. Conservation groups are hoping to get land rights firmly on the agenda at the Rio 20+. The summit takes place on 20-22 June and will discuss poverty reduction, advancement of social equity and environmental protection.

The Surui Forest Carbon Project (SFCP) is the first UN Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) project to directly pay indigenous tribes to protect the rainforest. It provides carbon income to tribes protecting the Amazon against illegal loggers. However, Surui leaders claim that loggers have increased their threats and are trying to bribe dissenting members of the tribe with firearms. The tribe hopes that calling in the police will send a clear message to illegal loggers and also encourage other Amazonian tribes to adopt the SFCP model.

Article covering the new campaign by Survival International, backed by Colin Firth, which looks at the plight of one of the last remaining nomadic hunter-gathering Amazonian tribes whose existence is under threat from the activities and violence carried out by illegal loggers and cattle ranchers. Despite the overall decrease in the rate of deforestation in Brazil, the state which is home to the threatened tribe has recorded a sharp rise in deforestation.

Feature on the state of illegal logging in Cambodia looking at how villagers are making efforts to protect their forests against deforestation in the face of corruption, inactivity from the government and threats from illegal loggers. It also draws attention to the concessions the government has begun giving to private investors on protected areas, legalising unsustainable cutting. The World Bank estimates that 94% of logging in Cambodia by volume is illegal.