The blockchain technology was first developed for peer-to-peer currency transactions. Innovators are now seeking to use the technology to update and secure the land records in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Known as disruptive technology that no one can control and hegemonise, blockchain is a decentralised distributed digital ledger collectively maintained by a new work of computers, called nodes. This will not allow one person to modify without those who maintain the records agreeing to the change. 

More than 100 families in Takeo province have been given back their land after a dispute with the Sun Hour company and an individual landholder.

The move follows protests and in front of the Ministry of Land Management as families asked the government to resolve their problems.

The 137 families were told officially on Saturday that 915 hectares in Tram Kak district’s Trapaing Kranhoung commune would be restored to them.

• Brazilian president Michel Temer has twice survived National Congress votes to initiate impeachment against him on extensive corruption charges.
• Temer did so by selling out the environment, particularly the Amazon, to the ruralists who largely control the assembly.

A busload of indigenous leaders have been crossing Europe to highlight their cause before the start of UN climate talks in Bonn

Of the many thousands of participants at the Bonn climate conferencewhich begins on 6 November, there will arguably be none who come with as much hope, courage and anger as the busload of indigenous leaders who have been criss-crossing Europe over the past two weeks, on their way to the former German capital.

A Myanmar land rights activist who challenged illegal land grabs in northern Shan State was beaten to death this week by a mob of some 20 people, a fellow unionist told RFA’s Myanmar Service on Thursday.

Htay Aung, a member of the National Farmer’s Union was attacked by a mob on Wednesday in Iwine Parhe Village of Naungcho Township, northeast of the city of Mandalay and later died at Mandalay Hospital.

The 50-year civil war is over but, in the Cauca Valley, indigenous communities are on frontline of fight against drug gangs, riot police and deforestation

A green-and-red flag flies over a cluster of bamboo and tarpaulin tents on the frontline of an increasingly deadly struggle for land and the environment in Colombia’s Cauca Valley.

Santiago Maldonado was last seen alive in public in Patagonia on August 1 at a protest for the land rights of the Mapuche, a group of indigenous peoples from Chile and Argentina. Various witnesses recount seeing him being detained by military police and loaded into a van during a raid by state authorities, but there is no official record of his detention, and no information was provided to his family.

The community council in the area has repeatedly denounced human rights violations against the Afro-Colombian, Mestizo and Indigenous peasants in the region.

A Colombian social leader, Jose Jair Cortes, was murdered in a rural area of Tumaco municipality located in the southwest department of Narino. 

Jair Cortes, a member of the local council of the Alto Mira and Frontera Community, was killed in a sector called Y, located in the heart of the city of Tumaco. The social leader was one of seven community leaders to receive death threats in recent months. 

The pioneers of the Aboriginal land rights movement in the Kimberley are working off a faded photograph to try to identify people who took part in the Noonkanbah land rights protests, which galvanised Indigenous resistance in the region almost 40 years ago.

The iconic image was taken in 1978 and shows dozens of Aboriginal people marching across the dusty paddocks of Noonkanbah Station, in protest against plans by American company AMEX to drill for oil near sacred sites.

Deaths of environmental activists locked in conflict with mining, logging and agricultural companies across three continents has passed 150

• Interactive: recording the deaths of environmental activists around the world

The number of people killed this year while defending their community’s land, natural resources or wildlife has passed 150 – meaning 2017 is on course to be the deadliest year on record.

At least six people have been killed and over 50 injured during clashes between farmers and security forces in the southwestern municipality of Tumaco.

Versions of the incident that occurred on the morning of October 5 vary considerably with civil society organisations accusing police of opening fire against coca farmers in Tumaco who were protesting the forced eradication of their crops. Authorities are contradicting these statements, claiming the protest was in fact orchestrated by FARC dissidents who opened fire and launched cylinder bombs against the police and military.