Data completeness
LandMark is a work in progress. The current community-level and national-level data layers have gaps in coverage, which the LandMark team is continuously working to improve upon as more Indigenous Peoples' and Local Communities' lands are mapped and available.
Photo by Ian Macharia on Unsplash
Estimated global area of Indigenous and community lands
A considerable amount of the world’s land is held and used by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, but only a fraction of this land is legally recognized or registered by the state. Recent estimates include:
Up to 65%
The estimated percentage of the world's land under customary, community-based tenure systems, which represents more than 8.54 billion hectares of land globally.
Source: Alden Wily, L., 2011.
18%
The percentage of the world's land that is legally owned by or designated for use by Indigenous Peoples, Afrodescendant Peoples, or Local Communities.
2.5 billion people
The estimated global population of Indigenous Peoples, Afrodescendant Peoples, and Local Communities.
The benefits of secure tenure
A growing body of evidence indicates that when Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities have strong land rights, the environmental and economic benefits both locally and globally are significant. Recent research includes:
36%
The proportion of the world’s last remaining intact forests that are held or managed by Indigenous Peoples.
Source: Fa, et al. 2020
293,061 million
The metric tons of carbon sequestered in forests held or managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities in 52 countries for which data were available, which represents 17 percent of total forest carbon in those countries.
Accounting for the map gap on LandMark
Global coverage of community-level maps is the long-term goal for LandMark, but there is still more work to be done to close the "map gap". Geospatial data for many indigenous and community lands does not exist or is not yet available to the LandMark platform. The national-level map layer on the ‘Percent of Country Held by Indigenous Peoples and Communities’ seeks to address the issue of missing community-level maps by showing how much of a given country is held or used by Indigenous Peoples and communities, as determined through research and literature review. This estimate can be thought of as a "baseline" for how much area could be expected to be mapped if such community-level data were available and complete. But even though a country may not have national- or community-level data displayed on the platform, Indigenous Peoples and local communities may still hold or use land in that country. Always note that the absence of data does not indicate the absence of indigenous or community land.
Closing the map gap
LandMark is continuously seeking new data to fill in the gaps in data coverage. Help us close the map gap by contributing data to LandMark.