A one-time illegal logger grows back a forest for his people in Sumatra

Farmer associations and Indigenous and local communities across Guatemala are working together to recover ancestral agricultural practices and educate farmers in agroecology. The collective, called the Utz Che’ Community Forestry Association, is building agroecology schools that are free to attend and facilitate co-learning in which students learn from each other. Their work protects native forests and local livelihoods from the damage caused by intensive monoculture.

A community-led conservation project spurred by traditional knowledge allowed the residents of Khonoma, India, to become self-sustaining and earn additional income from ecotourism, as opposed to relying on hunting and logging.

KRAPAVIS has restored 249 sacred groves in Rajasthan through a community-led model where villages share restoration costs and appoint local custodians. They've successfully reviving water sources, wells, and biodiversity while securing a 2024 Supreme Court ruling that protects these community-conserved ecosystems across India.

Ecosia, a nonprofit search engine that uses its profits to support tree-planting initiatives, is working with the Jane Goodall Institute Austria to grow 200,000 trees in Uganda. The organizations work with communities to design the projects around their needs and then support locals through the process of growing trees.

Communities across the United States combat and adapt to extreme weather with local solutions. In California, drought-striken Orange County recycles wastewater into safe drinking water, and the Karuk Tribe prevents forest fires with controlled, cultural burns. A farmer in Iowa practices no-till farming to prevent soil erosion from heavy rain. Indigenous tribes on the Louisiana coast gather empty oyster shells and use them to create artificial breakwater reefs that slow down erosion from rising ocean waters.

Under an innovative scheme in the Democratic Republic of Congo, indigenous communities are obtaining the legal right to own and manage the forests where they reside. This ownership has shown success in slowing deforestation of the Congo rainforest and creating new economic opportunities for residents in these villages. “Rather than just being an add-on, community forestry is now being considered as a mainstream model for forest management,” says a coordinator for the Rainforest Foundation UK.

The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y) has built over 204 wildlife crossings, fencing systems, and protected corridors across a 3,400-kilometer stretch of the Rocky Mountains. Since Y2Y's founding in 1997, reports of wildlife-vehicle collisions have substantially reduced, thousands of safe animal crossings have been documented, and 9.8 million hectares of connected habitat has been protected.

Honor the Earth is an anti-data center coalition monitoring the construction of hyperscale data centers in or near indigenous land. Through their efforts, town halls, doorknocking, attending tribal council meetings and more, they’ve formed a community with people in agriculture and beyond, working to push back against data center construction and enact protections for communities. As a result of their efforts, the Tulsa City Council signed a 9-month moratorium on data centers, and the Seminole Nation also unanimously passed its own moratorium.

In recent years, California has passed legislation making it easier for indigenous tribes to perform cultural burns, including one bill establishing a claims fund to protect landowners from the financial risk of any potential damage and another allowing tribes to enter state agreements that bypass typical permitting and regulatory requirements for cultural burns. The Karuk tribe is starting with backyard burns, using the practice as an educational opportunity to pass down traditional methods and knowledge.

The creation of forest gardens—the modern term for an ancient agroforestry model that mixes shrubs, herbs, vines, fruit and nut trees, and perennial vegetables—are helping supply communities in sub-Saharan Africa with food, medicine, and animal feed. The U.S.-based NGO TREES claims to have created 38,000 active forest gardens in five countries, each comprising about 4,000 trees. This has restored 99,743 acres of degraded land, having reached 56,273 farmers and their families across 174 community projects.