• A report by Global Witness has found that more than 100 Indonesian palm oil mills supplying agribusiness giants ADM and Bunge have been accused of land and human rights violations and environmental destruction.
• Global Witness found that neither company is addressing the majority of these allegations through their formal grievance processes, and effectively passing on this “conflict” palm oil to major consumer brands such as Nestlé, Unilever and PepsiCo.
• ADM and Bunge have denied any failure to police their suppliers, but have also pledged to look

UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre vigilant on potential impacts of oil and gas exploration in Namibia and Botswana on the Tsodila and Okavango Delta World Heritage properties.

Seeking quick returns, Chinese investors are driving a scramble for plantation land in parts of northern Myanmar.

• Top Indonesian ministers who pushed for the passage of a deregulation bill that benefits the mining and “dirty energy” industry have links to some of those very companies, a new report shows.
• The report by a coalition of NGOs highlights “massive potential for conflicts of interest” in the drafting and passage of the so-called omnibus bill on job creation.
• Under the new law, coal companies can qualify for an exemption from paying royalties, as well as be absolved of criminal and financial sanctions for mining in forest areas.
• Act

Coordination, data and inclusivity key to move ahead, says study

Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) embraced REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) a decade ago, becoming an early adopter of the initiative in the region. However, the country’s rate of emissions from forest loss continues to be among the highest in the Congo Basin due to unsustainable logging, fuelwood collection, agricultural expansion and mining.

A Korean palm oil giant has been buying up swathes of Asia's largest remaining rainforests. A visual investigation published today suggests fires have been deliberately set on the land

Petrus Kinggo walks through the thick lowland rainforest in the Boven Digoel Regency.

"This is our mini market," he says, smiling. "But unlike in the city, here food and medicine are free."

UNDP-supported project to benefit close to one million vulnerable people in a nation where climate change is threatening natural resources and fragile ecosystems  

Main photo: The yak (Bos grunniens and Bos mutus) is a long-haired bovid found throughout the Himalaya region of south Central Asia, the Tibetan Plateau and as far north as Mongolia and Russia. (Used under Creative Commons license) Flickr/Arian Zwegers

An innovative community-based forest management policy has resolved a long-simmering land-use conflict between migratory yak herders and sedentary residents in a remote area of Bhutan.

Land is essential to our lives – we grow food on it and rely on it for economic growth and development. In sub-Saharan Africa approximately 83% of people depend directly on land for survival.

The Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism (MENT) through the Department of Forestry and Range Resources (DFRR) has embarked on a project to restore degraded land and soil in order to achieve land degradation neutrality (LDN) in Botswana.

Intensive farming makes future pandemics such as Covid-19 more likely as wild animals carrying diseases known to infect humans are forced into increasingly close contact with us, a research report showed on Wednesday.

Writing in the journal Nature, a team of researchers from University College London (UCL) warned that animal pathogens are increasingly likely to make the leap to humans as land-use changes benefit animal hosts.

The UN estimates that three-quarters of land on Earth has been severely degraded by human activity since the start of the industrial era.