By the Numbers: Indigenous and Community Land Rights

This fact sheet from the World Resources Institute provides key statistics on Indigenous and community land rights, highlighting the gap between the amount of land held by these groups and the amount they legally own, as well as the environmental benefits of secure tenure.

• Indigenous Peoples and local communities hold between 50% and 65% of the world's land, though they only have formal legal ownership of 10%. An additional 8% of land is under government-recognized management rights. This implies that one-third to one-half of the world's land is held informally through customary tenure, leaving these populations vulnerable to displacement and expropriation.
• Approximately 2.5 billion people, including over 370 million Indigenous people, depend on collectively held land, natural resources, and ecosystems such as wetlands, rangeland, and forests for their livelihoods. This represents about one in three people globally.
• Collectively-managed lands of Indigenous Peoples and local communities store at least 24% of the above-ground carbon in tropical forests, totaling at least 54,546 million metric tons of carbon (MtC). This is four times the total global carbon emissions recorded in 2014. Furthermore, Indigenous lands alone contain 80% of the planet's biodiversity.
• Secure land tenure for Indigenous Peoples correlates with lower deforestation rates. In Brazil, the deforestation rate inside tenure-secure indigenous lands was 0.06% compared to 0.15% outside. In Bolivia, the rate was 0.15% inside versus 0.43% outside, and in Colombia, it was 0.04% inside versus 0.08% outside (data for Bolivia covers 2000 to 2012).
• In Amazonian countries, the cost of securing indigenous lands is less than 1% of the total environmental benefits derived from them. In Bolivia, Brazil, and Colombia, these benefits are estimated between $679 billion and $1,530 billion over the next 20 years, while investment costs are relatively low: $18.21 per acre in Bolivia, $27.52 per acre in Brazil, and $2.43 per acre in Colombia.

APA

World Resources Institute (2017). By the Numbers: Indigenous and Community Land Rights. https://www.wri.org/insights/numbers-indigenous-and-community-land-rights

Chicago

World Resources Institute. By the Numbers: Indigenous and Community Land Rights. 2017. https://www.wri.org/insights/numbers-indigenous-and-community-land-rights.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Resources Institute |title=By the Numbers: Indigenous and Community Land Rights |date=20 March 2017 |url=https://www.wri.org/insights/numbers-indigenous-and-community-land-rights |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldresourcesinstitute2017numbers, author = {{World Resources Institute}}, title = {{By the Numbers: Indigenous and Community Land Rights}}, institution = {World Resources Institute}, year = {2017}, month = mar, url = {https://www.wri.org/insights/numbers-indigenous-and-community-land-rights}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }