LifeMosaic supports indigenous peoples to defend their rights, territories and cultures. We do this by producing popular education resources for indigenous communities, and by facilitating the widespread distribution of these resources.
Projects focus on the impacts of large-scale land-use changes, and on self-determined strategies for development. Projects are demand-driven, useful to a wide number of communities, and developed in partnership with communities, indigenous peoples organisations, and other movements for positive social and environmental change.
Resources are primarily based on community testimonies; they present complex issues in an accessible and engaging way; and support indigenous peoples right to free, prior and informed consent. Grass-roots dissemination approaches ensure that resources reach thousands of communities, and inform critical conversations, and land-use decisions.
Over the past 5 years LifeMosaic has worked with Friends of the Earth, Sawit Watch (Oil Palm Watch) and 20 local Indonesian NGOs on the ‘Human Rights Impacts of Oil Palm Expansion in Indonesia’ project. LifeMosaic produced a community video, a facilitators guide, an advocacy video, and a report into the human rights impacts of plantation expansion. LifeMosaic helped coordinate the dissemination of these resources (to date 7,000 copies of the community video) to over 1,000 Indonesian indigenous communities in 17 provinces. The films are also available in French and Spanish and have recently been converted as in a radio format.
After viewing the video, communities in several provinces decided to halt over 60,000 hectares of oil palm plantations, including 10,000 hectares of peat swamp forest in Riau. The carbon savings of this avoided deforestation were at least 6.5 million tonnes CO2e, or 1% of the UK’s annual emissions. Other communities who viewed the video developed economic alternatives; negotiated better deals with companies; lobbied for local policy change; set up organisations to monitor plantation development; and recruited new members to their oil palm smallholders union.
Dozens of stories have emerged from the dissemination process: a women’s group in West Kalimantan demonstrating outside the district chief’s office and successfully defending their forest gardens; West Java paddy farmers downstream from a proposed plantation halting 3,000 hectares of oil palm after complaining to local government about threats to their water resources; communities in Kapuas Hulu making and disseminating 40 copies of the video themselves. Most recently communities in the Mentawai islands off the coast of Sumatra, and in Central Sulawesi have rejected oil palm plantation expansion as a result of watching the video.
LifeMosaic also develops and disseminates resources for use in international advocacy, bringing voices from the grassroots to decision-makers. Recently this has included screenings at local and national government meetings, international conferences, in universities, at the UN and at film festivals,
Over the next 3 years, LifeMosaic will focus on the dubbing and widespread dissemination of its climate literacy films. In addition LifeMosaic is developing further projects to empower indigenous communities faced with large-scale land use changes. In coming years we hope to also focus on organising skill-shares and gatherings of practitioners to share our approach and learn from others.
