Cape Town, South Africa faced a crippling drought between 2016 and 2018. The widely reported “Day Zero” crisis, wherein the city faced the real possibility of the taps being turned off, presented an acute shock and highlighted major vulnerabilities in the city’s water supply system, which relies largely on six large dams.

The Netherlands Enterprise & Development Agency (RVO) is looking for a program advisor in the team that manages the land governance support program LAND-at-scale. All applications should be submitted before April 1st. See the Dutch vacancy text below:

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Binnen het team Mondiale Vraagstukken Voedselzekerheid zoeken wij een Programma Adviseur Landrechten voor 'LAND-at-scale'.

Tropical Cyclone Gombe has killed at least 53 people since it hit Mozambique a week ago, a sharp rise from earlier estimates.

According to the National Institute of Disaster Management (INGC) on Thursday, another 80 people have been injured and 400,000 affected since the cyclone swept into northern and central areas of the country, flooding towns and destroying houses.

The initial death toll in the southern African country was estimated at seven.

Drought is a global problem that affects an estimated 1.5 billion people, particularly those in the Southern Hemisphere. Between the 1970s and the early 2000s the percentage of the earth’s landmass affected by severe drought has more than doubled.

• For years, people have settled illegally in national parks around Indonesia, clearing the land and farming it in the hope they will eventually be granted legal title to it.
• While the authorities’ default response has been to evict them, a new government program is taking a more collaborative approach that aims to be a win-win for both the parks and the people.
• Under the “conservation partnership” program, the settlers acknowledge that they cannot lay claim to the land and must work to restore damaged ecosystems.
• In turn, they’re

• An investigation by El País/Planeta Futuro has found evidence of irregularities in the allocation of “conservation concessions” and carbon-trading schemes in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
• The investigation uncovered allegations that concessions covering millions of hectares were illegally reassigned in 2020 and converted to carbon credit projects without public oversight. The Portuguese-owned titles overlap with a protected area and Indigenous lands.

Main photo: Dushanbe, capital city of Tajikistan. Image: Shutterstock/Vershinin89

The World Bank has approved $45 million (£33.6m) in grant financing to help Tajikistan to protect its natural resources and increase climate resilience.

There have been a lot of discussions on the urgency of climate change. But it’s universally accepted that the steps that have been agreed to stop global warming are too little too late.

Why is this?

• The Indonesian government’s decision to revoke permits for plantation firms to operate in forest areas could lead to lawsuits filed by the companies, environmental law experts say.
• The permits were rescinded at the start of the year, not because of any environmental violations, but rather because the concession holders were deemed to be moving too slowly in exploiting the resources.
• But the unilateral revocations have set up an unprecedented legal mess, observers and industry representatives say, with no clarity over whether a company that has lo

With over 1000 licenses issued across the country, a diverse range of mineral extraction operations are transforming Mongolia’s rural cultural landscape. The Gobi region is crowded with both mega mines and smaller-scale operations. The Gobi also has excellent conditions for renewable energy and is poised to be a site for significant investment in this industry.

• The Indonesian government has rejected a proposal made by a prominent university to reclassify oil palms as a forest crop.
• The proposal was ostensibly meant to resolve the problem of illegal plantations operating inside forest areas, and would have redefined plantations as forests, and new plantings as reforestation.
• The environment ministry says it has no plans to adopt such a plan because it has its own program, the social forestry scheme, to get local communities to switch from illegal oil palm plantations to more sustainable, and profitable,