Theme: Smart Cities in Africa for the 21st Century

One of the main aims of the Land Dialogues series is and has been to highlight Indigenous knowledge and wisdom as a solution to pressing global challenges.  The series does so by creating a virtual space that bridges that gap, where the term “expert” is not limited to academics or researchers, in an effort to both decolonize and democratize knowledge.  In particular, the Land Portal’s role is to highlight Indigenous Peoples’ need for agency and control over the data that is about them, recognizing that data can either amplify equality or exacerbate unequal power structures.

NASA’s Applied Remote Sensing Training Program (ARSET) has opened a new open, online webinar series: Large Scale Applications of Machine Learning using Remote Sensing for Building Agriculture Solutions. Remote sensing data is becoming crucial to solve some of the most important environmental problems, especially pertaining to agricultural applications and food security. Participants will become familiar with data format and quality considerations, tools, and techniques to process remote sensing imagery at large scale from publicly available satellite sources, using cloud tools such as AWS S3, Databricks, and Parquet. Additionally, participants will learn how to analyze and train machine learning models for classification using this large source of data to solve environmental problems with a focus on agriculture. 

Building on the successful collaboration in last year’s Annual Conference, the IoS Fair Transitions Platform (UU) and LANDac are pleased to launch this Call for a second joint Conference, which will have a somewhat different set-up from what you are used to and end with a Summit. We welcome your suggestions for panel sessions and round tables for the first two days. Building on your input, we will conclude on the last day with an experiment of democracy – a more-than human Summit. There will be limited hybrid options for participation in the Conference and the Summit.

This webinar will explore what access to remedy might look like for communities in the global carbon market system, with a focus on issues of land and resources tenure. Hearing from communities impacted by carbon markets and experts in grievance mechanism design, the webinar will highlight the key features necessary for accessible, dependable, and credible grievance mechanisms. The discussion will offer critical input to the proposed grievance mechanism for markets established under Article 6.4 of the UNFCCC Paris Agreement. 

This session brings together a range of actors to discuss ways to improve land use and set in motion a renewed agenda on the critical role that land tenure security and land access play in climate action.

The UN’s past two global climate summits have been big on promises for Indigenous Peoples. At COP26 in 2021 governments and private philanthropies pledged nearly $2 billion for Indigenous Peoples and local communities to fight deforestation. Last year’s COP27 led to the creation of a new “loss and damage” fund to help vulnerable communities respond to climate disasters.

On the opening day of #COP28, we hosted a thought-provoking webinar that delved into the intricate relationship between land governance and climate resilience, a critical area of immense importance in the context of global climate challenges and sustainable land use practices. This event aimed to unpack the crucial role of inclusive land governance in building climate resilience.

Climate-change induced disasters and communities’ responses to protect themselves and design solutions have become a top priority on the climate agenda. At the center of mitigation and adaptation discussions have been urban populations, particularly in informal settlements. At the same time, the rural poor with limited or no secure access to land tend to be overlooked.

NASA’s Applied Remote Sensing Training Program (ARSET) has opened a new open, online, intermediate webinar series: Transforming Earth Observation (EO) Data into Building Infrastructure Data Sets for Disaster Risk Modeling. This three-part training, presented in English and Spanish, is open to the public and will cover the basics of natural hazard risk modeling and exposure development with a focus on fusing data from multiple datasets expressly for the purposes of risk assessment.  We will also present examples applying the techniques to applications related to flood risk assessment, climate adaptation, and earthquake modeling.

The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC, more commonly referred to as COP28, will be the 28th United Nations Climate Change conference, held from November 30 until December 12, 2023, at the Expo City, Dubai. The conference has been held annually since the first UN climate agreement in 1992. It is used by governments to agree on policies to limit global temperature rises and adapt to impacts associated with climate change.