Global Forest Coalition

It is with profound sadness that the Global Forest Coalition (GFC) has learned of the passing of Mr. Frank Muramuzi, Executive Director and founding member of the National Association of Professional Environmentalists (NAPE) in Uganda.

Frank was a pioneering environmental and human rights defender whose leadership and vision transformed environmental advocacy in Uganda, East Africa, and beyond. Over the course of his life, he served in many roles, including Chairperson of the Uganda Chapter of East African Community Organizations for the Management of Lake Victoria Resources, Board Member of the Uganda Coalition for Sustainable Development and the National Association for Women in Development Uganda, founding member of the African Rivers Network, and East African Coordinator of the Oil Watch Network. He was among the pioneer activists who founded Friends of the Earth and served as the first Chair of its Membership Development Board.

Frank’s legacy is one of unwavering commitment to protecting forests, rivers, and communities. He spearheaded national campaigns to save the Mabira and Bugoma forests, defended the rights of those affected by the Bujagali Dam, promoted alternative energy in Uganda and East Africa, and mobilized grassroots movements such as NAPE’s Community Green Radio and the women-led environmental movement in Uganda. His advocacy extended across continents, making him a widely respected figure in the global environmental justice community.

He was a leader as well as a friend, mentor, and inspiration to many in the GFC network. His voice resonated far beyond Uganda—across Africa and the world—through the media, in community gatherings, and in international forums, always speaking truth to power and standing firmly for justice.

On behalf of GFC’s members and partners, we extend our deepest condolences to Frank’s family, friends, and colleagues at NAPE. We stand with you in grief, and we honor his remarkable life by continuing the struggles he so passionately led.

May his memory continue to guide and inspire the fight for environmental and social justice everywhere.

The post Condolence Message on the Passing of Mr. Frank Muramuzi of NAPE Uganda appeared first on Global Forest Coalition.

By Inés Franceschelli, Heñói Centro de Estudios / Global Forest Coalition 

July 22, 2025

More than 30 women peasant and Indigenous leaders and activists in defense of the environment participated in the second in-person meeting of the Women’s School of the Continental Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Latin America and the Caribbean (known as EMA in Spanish).

From July 18 to 21, we engaged in an intense debate on how to strengthen women’s political participation in defending the right to adequate food and nutrition.

The Women’s School aims to strengthen the activist struggles of women in its networks to advance the search for a new food paradigm that overcomes the current global, capitalist, colonial, racist, and patriarchal agri-food system.

The discussions were focused on two main themes: 

• The need to converge and unify our approach in order to influence our own networks and decision-making spaces at the local, national, regional, and global levels.
• Care work—generally undertaken by women in all their diversity—as a fundamental part of the fight against extractivism and a source of strength for resistance.

The participants represented the various networks that make up the Continental Alliance: CLOC-La Vía Campesina, Latin American Agroecological Movement (MAELA), FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN), Continental Network of Indigenous Women (ECMIA), World March of Women, Friends of the Earth Latin America and the Caribbean (ATALC), International Indian Treaty Council (CITI), Movement for the Right to Health, World Forum of Fisherfolk, Global Forest Coalition (GFC), among others. Voices were heard from Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Brazil, Panama, Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, Guatemala, Colombia, and Ecuador.

Some of the participants will carry the voices of the region to the Third Nyéléni World Forum of the International Movement for Food Sovereignty, to be held in Sri Lanka in September 2025. This forum will bring together Indigenous peoples, peasants, fisherfolk, workers, pastoralists, feminists, grassroots environmentalists, migrants, nomadic peoples, impoverished urban populations, social and solidarity economy activists, popular health activists, consumers, researchers, and artists. Together, they are organizing to build a common political agenda for popular power and the transformation of the capitalist, patriarchal, imperialist, colonialist, racist, classist, and supremacist system. 

The Nyéléni Forum is part of a process of movements and organizations that share values and a political vision that encompasses food sovereignty and agroecology, popular feminism, sovereignty and self-determination of peoples over their territories, social, economic, environmental, and health justice, feminist economics, and internationalist solidarity. It is a process free from discrimination and harassment that seeks to build unity for action from diversity, based on knowledge sharing. It recognizes the indivisibility of society and nature and embraces the spiritual principle underlying the perspectives of Indigenous peoples, for whom the protection of Mother Earth is fundamental.

Latin America has a lot to contribute to global grassroots movements for food sovereignty, and our movements will in turn be nourished by the many examples of women’s struggles for collective liberation and wellbeing at Nyeleni.

The post Sowing Life and Resistance appeared first on Global Forest Coalition.

By Valentina Figuera Martínez and Andrea Echeverri, Global Forest Coalition

8/8/2025

Letícia Tura, the executive director of the Brazilian non-profit organization FASE, speaks with lucidity and nuance about false solutions to climate change. Before taking the podium at the Rosa Luxemburg Auditorium at the Florestán Fernándes School of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), she listens attentively to colleagues from more than 40 organizations across Latin America and the Caribbean. She takes notes in a small notebook with a picture of a jaguar on the front, its menacing eyes a reminder of the power of the jungle.

With a critical take on today’s socio-environmental crisis, Letícia addresses the issue of false solutions in official climate change negotiations and provides a frank assessment of the structural causes of biodiversity loss, deforestation, and forest degradation.

Tura’s talk was part of the Meeting on Nature Markets, organized by GRAIN and the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo (CLOC)/Vía Campesina, with social movements and organizations from around 20 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean. It was held in Guararema, not far from the Brazilian capital city, from July 21 to 24, 2025. 

Ahead of the upcoming Climate Change Conference (COP 30) and People’s Summit in Belém this November, it was a valuable opportunity to build common understandings about the impacts of projects aimed at the financialization of nature, which destroy thousands of acres of tropical forests and communities across the region.

Participants included civil society groups FASE of Brazil (Federação de Órgãos para Assistência Social e Educacional) and Centro de Estudios Heñói of Paraguay, both of which are members of the Global Forest Coalition, a network for rights-based forest protection that turns 25 this year. At the meeting, they offered critiques of mechanisms like REDD+, the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), biodiversity markets, and carbon markets, the latter of which includes what’s known as carbon farming. GFC members and campaigners spoke up to expand on the critical assessment of schemes for the financialization of nature and defined strategies for territorial defense throughout the region.

Organizations and social movement representatives at the opening session of the Meeting on Nature Markets. Photo: Andrey Martínez, CLOC/La Vía Campesina.

“The climate change debate isn’t just technical; it’s also political: it has to do with the class struggle, gender injustices, and disputes over the development model. The logic behind the debate can’t just be about emissions reductions and market ‘solutions.’ This debate is political, it’s about the type of society we want to build, and it’s in conflict with the business sector that tries to impose its vision of the world on us,” Tura said.

The region of Latin America and the Caribbean has the highest concentration of carbon market projects in the world, partly due to the region’s rich ecosystems, such as the Amazon, the Gran Chaco, and the Mata Atlántica (Brazil’s Atlantic Forest), biomes that are coveted by those seeking to implement false climate solutions. Such projects typically involve greenwashing, fraud, land grabbing, rights violations, and deforestation; however, they are frequently the focus of negotiations on climate and biodiversity finance.

In 2024, in the Brazilian Amazon alone, more than half of the carbon credit projects—which occupy a total of 78,000 square miles—overlapped public lands. Among the companies that bought these carbon credits to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions are Netflix, Air France, Delta Air Lines, Airbnb, Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., Spotify, and Boeing. 

In addition to rigorous critiques of the most well-known false climate solutions in the region, the meeting also raised the alarm about other carbon credit schemes associated with monoculture tree plantations and so-called carbon farming. According to a report by GRAIN, carbon markets based on afforestation and reforestation have gobbled up 9 million hectares across the Global South, and have given a boost to the territorial expansion of commercial reforestation companies, whose impacts have been widely denounced.

Carbon farming is based on the false premise that carbon can be accumulated in soils through agricultural practices such as zero tillage (no plowing) or pasture rotation and new varieties with deep roots, which are linked to industrial livestock farming. Corporations like the meat giant Minerva, which, through its Renove program, promotes “carbon neutral meat” and also sells credits, have been denounced for their ties to deforestation and land grabbing in the Brazilian Amazon.

A case study of Hacienda San José in Colombia published by GFC demonstrated the repercussions for the Indigenous Sikuani community—and particularly women—of a project that is in the process of obtaining carbon credits and aims to produce 450,000 cattle in a way that is certified “carbon negative.”

The reality is changing, and organizations and social movements are adapting their strategies for the defense and care of the territories and communities. 

“These days, we see that the debate isn’t just about carbon markets in a strict sense,” Tura said. “Rather, there are different forms of appropriation of forests and nature’s common goods, such as the datafication of agriculture and the digitalization of territories. However, we see powerful new forms of resistance. Women play a key role; they’re on the front lines of resistance. We’ve heard some upsetting stories at the meeting, but also tales of resistance in the face of market-based projects and reproduction of the communitarian societies that we want to build. Agroecology, the management of nature’s common goods, community funds, saving and exchanging seeds—these are some of the forms of living resistance in our region.” 

Letícia Tura of FASE at the Meeting on Nature and Markets in Guararema, Brazil. Photo: Valentina Figuera Martínez.

Omar Yampey, the executive director of Centro de Estudios Heñói, leads struggles against big agribusiness and monocultures in Paraguay. A careful and eloquent speaker, he is an expert on the forestry business that has caused social and environmental harm in that country at the hands of companies like Forestal San Pedro and Forestal Apepu, which together control over 17,000 hectares of monoculture eucalyptus plantations in Paraguay. They are both part of Fondo Arbaro, a Green Climate Fund program.

Omar Yampey of Centro de Estudios Heñói. Photo: Mombú Audiovisual.

“False solutions contain elements of classical forms of extractivism and agribusiness. The Paraguayan government has a policy of widespread exploitation of eucalyptus monocultures. In northern Paraguay, the indigenous communities are asking for our help to understand the murky proposals on carbon markets. It’s not a moral issue in the sense of judging communities that do accept carbon markets, but rather, it’s a political issue. We have to position ourselves in response to this scenario,” Omar said.

When the Global North justifies its destruction, the perpetrators won’t be able to claim that the peoples of the South stayed silent. They won’t think we went down without a fight. We’re speaking out, resisting, and enduring, with our real solutions. Let’s keep it that way.

Translated from the Spanish by Megan Morrissey.

The post The struggle to halt climate change is political, not just technical appeared first on Global Forest Coalition.

Real solutions to forest degradation, climate change, and biodiversity loss come from the ground up—here’s a powerful example from Zambia, where a group of women has been working with joy and determination to restore forests and food security, bringing agroecological methods to future generations to ensure a healthy environment and community. Check out their inspiring work and the power of women’s leadership in this photo essay:

Produced by the Global Forest Coalition, Zamsof, and the Kapangya Women Association, with thanks to Andrea Echeverri, Valentina Martínez Figuera, and Gershom Kabasho.

The post PHOTO ESSAY | Ubuntu in Action: Zambian Women Leading Agroecology and Cultural Revival appeared first on Global Forest Coalition.