People and Communities

Girls and women often play a central role in natural resource management and use—collecting forest products for food, medicine and firewood, and water for their families. Yet they are often excluded from participating in community decisions about resources, due cultural, legal and other barriers. We help them gain better access to education and economic opportunities so they can improve their lives and help lead environmental change in their families and communities. We also ensure women have leadership roles in community and natural resource management. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, we successfully joined rural women in advocating for and securing dedicated roles on local leadership committees, and the right to manage their own land.

Only when people’s basic needs are met can they effectively steward nature. By securing health services such as improved drinking water, sanitation, and access to medical attention, we bolster conservation. This includes building community health centers in Nepal and the Central African Republic, where a mobile clinic delivers regular medical care to remote Indigenous communities in Dzanga-Sangha National Park. We promote energy security, including by providing villages in Nepal with small, local dams to provide clean energy, eliminating the need to cut down wildlife-rich forests for fuel. In Guatemala and Honduras, we work to protect natural water reserves—high altitude forests and waterways—that provide reliable water sources for drinking and agriculture downstream. And we try to make sure all people where we work have enough to eat—both by protecting people’s right to harvest subsistence food from forests and farmed lands, and through direct agricultural guidance, such as through our alliance with CARE.

WWF supports collaborative conservation approaches that affirm and secure customary land and legal rights of local communities and Indigenous peoples. In places like the Congo Basin, Zambia and Peru for instance, we work to secure land rights for local people. We also we work ensure people keep or regain access to their land, including through a historic government policy in Cameroon. We ensure Indigenous people are heard through processes like Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC). And we ensure they’re granted their rights as citizens by helping to secure legal documentation such as birth certificates. In Colombia, where WWF helped broker a commitment to vastly expand the country’s protected areas, we made the peace process, and community input, central to that plan.

WWF addresses governance and ensures Indigenous peoples and local communities have a meaningful seat at the table that enables them to benefit directly from conservation efforts. Conservation approaches designed in collaboration with communities can help mitigate negative social impacts while providing lasting incentives – and benefits – for sustainable management of natural resources. This includes the establishment of Communal Conservancies in Namibia, where communities set their own economic, cultural, and environmental priorities—with guarantees of leadership roles for women and direct economic benefits from the tourists coming to see the wildlife they protect.