The United States government announced on Monday it will invest another $160 million in Colombia’s ongoing peace process.

The announcement came during an event with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), where Director for International Development Administrator Mark Green told reporters in Bogota that the funds are meant for the “implementation of peace” and to formalize land ownership of small farmers.

Abrupt climate change some 8,000 years ago led to a dramatic decline in early South American populations, suggests new UCL research.

The study, published in Scientific Reports, is the first to demonstrate how widespread the decline was and the scale at which population decline took place 8,000 to 6,000 years ago.

The right of foreign investors to sue governments in international tribunals is one of the most extreme examples of excessive power granted to corporations through free trade agreements and investment treaties.

For decades now, corporations have used this power to demand massive compensation for public interest regulations and other government actions that may reduce the value of their investments. Widespread outrage over this “investor-state dispute settlement” system is among the key issues in the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The Global Landscape Forum (GLF) Kyoto event will explore landscape-based solutions for the climate challenge on 13 May. Sign up online or register for the free digital edition. 

Through collective action, environmental protection can be achieved. This is what the Kalinga indigenous people in the Philippines demonstrated to the world when they stopped the famous Chico River Dam Project from being constructed, and it is what inspired Joan Carling to make her lifelong mission fighting for human rights in land development.

• Last week on May 4, two bodyguards were wounded when armed gunmen tried to storm a meeting of Afro-Colombian activists that included 2018 Goldman Prize winner Francia Márquez.
• The community leaders had been meeting to discuss future actions following a massive land rights protests last month in Colombia’s Cauca region in which one protester was killed by armed forces.
• In March and April, Afro-Colombian activists participated in an indigenous-led protest with 20,000 people against the government’s environmental and social policies.

The findings of the first-ever Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services are important in the light of the ongoing Supreme Court case against Forest Rights Act

Biodiversity is declining everywhere at an unprecedented rate, but this rate is lower in areas where indigenous people own land, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’ (IPBES) Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

Myrna Cunningham is the first Miskitu woman to study at a university. In 1973, she received a degree in medicine and returned to her home region in the isolated northeast of Nicaragua, where she was born in a small village surrounded by lush forest. Working as a surgeon, she served in more than one hundred remote villages.

Far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s personal crusade to extinguish indigenous rights and devastate indigenous territories just hit a wall. Two, actually. Both Brazil’s Supreme Court and Brazil’s top congressional leaders handed Bolsonaro setbacks over his executive decision to move control of protecting indigenous lands to the agriculture ministry, which is controlled by members of the agribusiness lobby known for its opposition to indigenous land rights.

BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Guatemala’s subsistence farmers and indigenous people living in poor rural communities are most affected by rising temperatures and unpredictable rainfall linked to climate change, a leading researcher said on Friday.

Poverty makes the Central American country highly vulnerable to the impact of global warming that damages harvests and causes food shortages, said Edwin Castellanos, lead author of a report by the Guatemalan System of Climate Change Sciences (SGCCC).

MIRI: A group of Malay villagers in Kampung Usahajaya Tukau near Miri held a peaceful demonstration Sunday (April 28) to highlight their fears over their fate.

The villagers said they have received news that a private developer had acquired a parcel of land for development and that their village will be partially affected.

Sarawak PAS commissioner Jefri Jaraiee said the villagers had approached the party to raise their concerns.

"The residents want the village to be protected. They said they have received notices that a developer had taken over their land.

SANTIAGO: With songs like “We’ll Beat the State,” Chilean rappers Wechekeche Ni Trawun are on a mission to support the Mapuche indigenous people’s fight for justice and land rights.

Before the Spanish arrived in 1541, the Mapuche – or “people of the earth” in the Mapudungun language – controlled a territory that stretched 500km south of central Chile’s Biobio River.