BANGKOK - In a rare rebuke of another government agency, India's Tribal Affairs Ministry has sent a letter to the forest ministry warning that its proposed policy would lead to the "privatisation" of forests and undermine indigenous rights.

The draft National Forest Policy 2018, released by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change in March, suggests allowing plantations of teak, eucalyptus and bamboo in forest lands under public-private partnerships.

A new study makes a significant contribution to the growing body of research showing that recognizing the land rights of and partnering with indigenous peoples can greatly benefit conservation efforts.

BONN, Germany (Landscape News) — Thanks to an initiative by the International Center for Forestry Research, (CIFOR) women in Uganda’s Lake Victoria Crescent are not only working to reforest degraded land but are also making significant strides toward greater gender equality.

The Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources in collaboration with the Forestry Commission and other stakeholders will hold this year’s International Day of Forests on June 26.

A statement signed by the Chief Executive of the Forestry Commission, Mr Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie, said this year’s celebration, the seventh since its inception, would be held at Sakora Wonoo Roman Catholic School Park, in the Kwabre East District of the Ashanti Region.

Europe - Governments around the world have pledged over 150 million hectares of forested land for restoration, but only five million have been subject to such interventions so far.

BONN, Germany (Landscape News) — A new partnership urging businesses, citizens and governments to take action in the field of forest conservation, land use, food production and consumption aims to take action on climate change.

LOKOLAMA, Democratic Republic of Congo — Sometime in March, I found myself trudging forward in a remote swamp in the heart of the Congo rainforest. As I worriedly tried to keep my boots from getting sucked in by the soft, brown mud, I wondered how far we could go on. It was our final day. In the two weeks prior, our team of British and Congolese researchers, together with men from the local village of Lokolama, had cut a 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) trail into this dense, swampy forest. It had proved to be painstakingly slow work.

Kenya’s Ogiek people are optimistic of returning to their ancestral forests as the government has pledged to honour a landmark ruling ordering reparations for forced eviction.

Evictions have ceased and the Ogiek are rehabilitating parts of the Rift Valley’s Mau Forest one year after Africa’s highest human rights court told Kenya to compensate the forest-dwellers for violating their land rights, an Ogiek campaigner said.

In recent years, Peru's sprawling jungle has been cleared for palm oil and cocoa plantations. Conservationists say the land is controlled by private companies who acquired it through corrupt means.

By the Program on Forests (PROFOR) team at the World Bank.

BANGKOK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The brutal rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in India, that has triggered massive protests, highlights nomadic tribes’ vulnerability and lack of land rights, activists said.

According to the police, the girl was kidnapped, gang raped and killed in the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir as part of a plot by Hindu residents to evict her nomadic Bakkarwal community from a village where they had temporarily settled.

On an alarming note, forest degradation continues even though the global rate of deforestation have halved over the last two decades—from a net annual forest area loss of 7.3 million hectares in 2000 to 3.3 million hectares in 2015.