Indigenous people in Meghalaya have been granted full rights over land and any resources on it, and only they can grant permission for mining, following a "historic" legal victory

BANGKOK, July 4 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Indigenous people in an Indian state must be protected from illegal mining and the pollution it causes, the country's top court ruled, providing a "historic" victory to tribal groups fighting for better rights over land and natural resources.

Sociological study finds pros and cons in a REDD+ carbon credit scheme in the Brazilian Amazon that rewards small-scale ecosystem service providers in local communities.

• To safeguard the almost 90 percent of its land still covered with forest, the small Brazilian state of Acre implemented a carbon credit scheme that assigns monetary value to stored carbon in the standing trees and rewards local “ecosystem service providers” for their role protecting it.

In August 2018, the local government of Accra, Ghana, in West Africa, appropriated 1,800 homes for demolition to make way for, among others, tomato retailers. Officials had already begun plotting the land for its new use when residents of the largely poor neighborhood erupted in protest, to no avail.

The extreme usurpation of land wasn't entirely illegal—nor was it entirely legal. And therein lies a new "idiom of planning" overtaking many African cities as they navigate rapid urbanization under competing land ownership and use laws that date back to British Colonial rule.

Dolene Miller, Elba Rivera and Francisca Ramirez have spent years defending the territories of the indigenous peoples, farmers and Afro-Nicaraguans. Here are their stories.

HAVANA TIMES – Defending their lands and the environment has cost the lives of many women around the world, especially in Latin America. The year 2017 was an especially lethal one for activists from 22 countries, according to denunciations filed last year by the British organization Global Witness.

Second Call for Panels, Papers and Posters Joint XXIV International Grassland Congress and XI International Rangeland Congress

Deadline: 

01/10/2019

Research by ILC member Oxfam, and others such as the World Inequality Lab, shows that extreme inequality is rising – not falling – in most regions. Inequality is becoming one of the defining features of our economies and societies, and it increasingly shapes struggles for justice and human well-being. Struggles for land rights are no exception. In fact, land inequality is a fundamental reflection and a determinant of wider inequalities.

A regional workshop on “Strengthening the Accessibility and Visibility of Agricultural and Land Data through the Use of Semantics - AGRIS in Europe and Central Asia” was held by FAO in collaboration with the LandPortal Foundation (the Netherlands) in Moscow, 27-28 June 2019, hosted by the Central Scientific Agricultural Library (CSAL).

AGRIS, or International System for Agricultural Science and Technology, came into being in 1974 on the joint initiative of around 180 FAO member states.

Countries and regions devastated by war and civil strife remain fragile and vulnerable for decades after the fighting has ceased. In this post-conflict period, as social, political, and economic institutions are rebuilt, reconfigured or established anew, land is increasingly acknowledged as not only a key driver or root cause for conflicts, but as a critical factor for relapse and a bottleneck to recovery.

During the first week of June we held our very first Research Consortium Women’s Land Rights Grantee Workshop. Held in Geelong, in the state of Victoria in Australia, a representative from each grantee group, the submission reviewers, and representatives from Resource Equity met for three days to share, learn, and challenge each other on the draft research papers that have been produced under this grant.

Some see the ruling as a positive step toward equal access to land but others fear it undermines the traditional laws that have guided generations

KAPCHEBOI, Kenya, June 25 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A few months ago, the idea of coming home with a hoe in one hand and a sack of freshly harvested potatoes in the other was only a dream for Rachel Korir.

Hundreds of protesters gathered in front of the Borey Kang Meng construction site in the capital’s Dangkor district on Monday to demand the developer honour its promise to divide the site into plots and give them land titles.

One protester from the 140 families locked in the dispute said they had sent a letter to Kaing Yu Meng, the director of Leang Heng Trading and owner of the Borey Kang Meng gated community, demanding he explains why it was taking so long to distribute plots and issue the land titles.

Returnees in the Jonglei area have advocated the setting up of land dispute commissions to assist in arbitration and mediation that would ensure that land is returned to its rightful owners.

The former refugees and internally displaced persons were speaking at the end of a consultative workshop on creating an enabling environment for returnees in their areas of origin.