Observers marked 2023 as a “make-or-break” year for voluntary carbon markets and a key “inflection point” for their role in addressing climate change and global deforestation. Proponents highlight that forest carbon projects channel much-needed funds towards forest protection and are pivotal to climate change mitigation. However, critics emphasize that carbon deals set incentives for over-crediting. Moreover, carbon offsetting allows the biggest emitters to simply outsource their climate mitigation efforts with potentially adverse impacts for affected communities.

Under the umbrella of the Land Dialogues series, the last  webinar of this year’s series “Navigating Loss and Damage : A Path to Justice for Indigenous Peoples” took place on December 5th, 2024. The webinar drew in a little over 250  participants. The series is organized by a consortium of organizations, including the Land Portal Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Tenure Facility and this particular webinar was  

India Land and Development Conference, ILDC is back with its eighth episode at the picturesque FLAME University in Pune this week. It has been quite a journey for this collaborative convening. Despite its 8th edition, it has emerged as a globally recognized land convergence event, drawing attention from far and near. 

Just thinking of a conference on a topic like ‘Land’, in a country like India, is in itself a big challenge, forget organizing it year after year, for eight years - setting a stature that has grown every year!  

India has made significant strides in empowering women over the past few decades, starting with self-help groups (SHGs) that became powerful vehicles for social inclusion. Government and NGO efforts later expanded to skilling and livelihood initiatives, helping women increase their income and build small businesses within their communities. Yet, despite this progress, the urgent need remains for a long-term, sustainable solution to women's empowerment.

Reliable tamper-proof records with a real time link between Registration, Survey and Revenue departments with common shared textual and spatial data that are geo-referenced and ground-truthed so that there is no need for repeated universal ground survey.

Inclusive land governance at the local level allows for the community’s broader governance ‘muscle’ to be exercised in a constructive and practical way. This can reduce conflict and spark transformative social change.

Defending the rights of nature represents a big step forward in the fight against climate change.

Speaking truth to power is an art, but increasingly a lost art. This goes as much for academia as for the rest of the world. Indeed and unfortunately, much of academia reflects the world in which it functions and often makes the challenge of deepening social justice harder rather than smaller. To put it bluntly, much of academia has resorted to instrumental and naïve beliefs in innovation, technology and efficiency (which dominate the natural sciences) or (as in much of the social-economic sciences) increasingly arcane niche debates that too often revolve around virtue-signalling, methodological-theoretical wizardry or apolitical pragmatism. What we seem to have lost to a good degree – though to be sure: it was never a dominant endeavour and at the same time it has never been absent either – is the art of speaking truth to power.