The Borneo Project brings international attention and support to community-led efforts to defend forests, sustainable livelihoods, and human rights. Protecting human rights and environmental integrity in Borneo is a critical component of the global movement for a just and peaceful world.
In the late 1980s, indigenous communities in Malaysian Borneo made world headlines when they staged a series of blockades in resistance to logging companies who were illegally encroaching on their lands. International observers– including The Borneo Project’s founder Joe Lamb– came to bear witness to the gassing and mass arrest of protestors. Upon his return to America in 1991, Joe founded The Borneo Project with the immediate goal of providing support to those fighting to protect their rights and the critically important rainforests of Sarawak.
Since its founding the project has trained dozens of indigenous activists in community mapping, enabling communities to map areas of ancestral land claims and win legal cases and negotiations. We have supported paralegal education and mobile legal aid clinics that have helped over 200 longhouse communities hold off destructive logging and industrial plantations. The Project has coordinated over $500,000 in grants from international sources for community reforestation, organic gardening, territory demarcation, indigenous education, and other village projects.
Mission:
The Borneo Project brings international attention and support to community-led efforts to defend forests, sustainable livelihoods, and human rights. We believe that protecting human rights and environmental integrity in Borneo is a critical component of the global movement for a just and peaceful world.
Goals:
- To support indigenous-led campaigns to secure legal land rights, and to support actions and activists to preserve indigenous land rights.
- To support communities acting to preserve and conserve local ecosystems.
- To support cultural conservation efforts for indigenous and forest-dependent communities in Borneo.
- To educate the American public about the importance of Borneo, indigenous rights, and the role of forests in climate change and biodiversity conservation.
Read a timeline of the project’s activities here.
Linking Local and Global Movements
The Borneo Project links grassroots indigenous campaigns with the global fight for climate action. The project works to bring aligned communities together across borders to strengthen these movements and influence policy at the international level.
Securing Land Rights to Fight Climate Change
Our local work supporting indigenous communities to secure land rights is a crucial part of the global fight to combat climate change.
Loss of forests contributes as much as 30 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions each year–rivaling emissions from the global transportation sector. Protecting forests, while also reducing fossil fuel emissions, is critical in order to stabilize the climate, preserve global biodiversity, sustain the global economy, and protect the livelihoods of billions of people.
Securing indigenous land rights is a proven way to protect forests. In a recent study, the World Resources Institute (WRI) found that in the Amazon regions of Bolivia, Brazil, and Colombia, in territories where indigenous peoples held titles to their land, deforestation rates were two to three times lower than in areas with similar forests. Forests under the control of indigenous communities tend to be healthier, storing more carbon than similar lands without the same protection. Forests protected by indigenous communities are also associated with lower rates of deforestation, resulting in fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
Clearly, the well-being of forests makes a difference to all the world’s people, whether we live on forested land or far away from it. Over the years the Borneo Project has supported indigenous communities in Sarawak in their fights to gain legal rights over their land through legal aid grants and mapping projects. We also connect grassroots movements in Sarawak to global indigenous rights movements, strengthening the ties between communities to influence domestic and international policy.