West Africa's native rosewood was listed as endangered last year following a huge increase in trade driven by Chinese demand

GAMAMADU, Guinea-Bissau - Before the ban, Chinese loggers drove straight through Gamamadu village to harvest its most important resource: the rosewood forest.

"So many Chinese came here. We were praying for a means to stop it," said Braima Djassi, a small, white-haired farmer in the village in central Guinea-Bissau, a tiny country in West Africa.

• The now-concluded investigative series “Indonesia for Sale” examined the corruption underpinning Indonesia’s land rights and climate crisis in unparalleled depth.
• The series was a collaboration between Mongabay and The Gecko Project, an investigative journalism initiative founded at Earthsight in 2017.

• In Niger, where agriculture is the main source of income, the message is simple: Losing your soil means losing your livelihood.
• The ability to grow food is inextricably linked to the productive capacity of the soil. In the case of Niger’s soil, the picture is bleak: The soils hold poor structural stability, low nutrient holding capacity, low water retention capacity… the list goes on.
• How can soil management be improved in a region that has little to no resources?

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.

Monrovia – A civil society organization, the Foundation for Community Initiatives (FCI), has begun a project to assist rural communities in Liberia to legalize their customary ownership of their lands.

The Protection of Customary Collective Community Land Rights (P3CL) project, which began since January this year and will end in December next year, targets 24 communities in Bong, Grand Bassa, Lofa, River Cess, Nimba and Sinoe Counties.

Kampala. Advocates for Natural Resources and Development, an advocacy organisation, have blamed government for licensing quack Chinese investors who have invested in mineral extraction activities that have caused environment destruction and affected surface rights of people whose land falls within licensed areas.
This was revealed during a training of judicial officials at the Judicial Training Institute (JTI) in Kampala yesterday to equip them with knowledge on how to dispense justice in cases relating to extractive activities and environment.

Indonesia - In Kalibiru, a national park in the Menoreh mountains to the west of Yogyakarta, tourists scale precarious-looking ladders up timber trees to take Instragrammable photos of themselves on treetop wooden platforms overlooking lakes and lush forest.

What makes a daring woman? Lack of fear, commitment and vision for a great cause.

And why do we need more daring women? From gaps in paychecks, to domestic violence, to underrepresentation in political sphere, women face plenty of challenges and the time to act is now.

‘Slum clearance’ or ‘city beautification’ drives accounted for nearly half of the evictions.

New Delhi: Over two lakh people were forcefully evicted from their homes in the year 2018, a new study by the Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN) has found. The HLRN documented the demolition of 41,730 homes in 2018 that impacted the lives of 2,02,233 people. That is 554 people every day or 23 people every hour.

A two-day meeting of the Transboundary Law Enforcement Technical Committee for the Tai-Grebo-Krahn-Sapo forest landscape from March 26-27, 2019, sponsored by USAID through the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation (WCF) and the West Africa Biodiversity and Climate Change ( WABiCC), has successfully ended in Monrovia, an FDA release has said.

• Technically this means results-based payments for forest-related carbon reductions can be rolled out, but there is no framework for such a system yet.
• Some forestry experts remain skeptical of REDD+ and its approach to forest management.

March 29 (UPI) -- Native protests over land rights in Colombia spread Friday while natives in Peru clashed with officials over pollution at a copper mine.

In southwest Colombia, dialogue between the natives and government were suspended after President Ivan Duque visited the Cauca region to discuss reopening the blocked Pan American Highway, El Tiempo reported.