I write this blog as our project team embarks on a fifth year of work on women’s land tenure security (WOLTS) with pastoral communities in mining-affected areas of Mongolia and Tanzania. Just before Christmas 2019, we were in Mundarara village in northern Tanzania. Exceptionally heavy rains made getting around much more challenging than usual. Locals travelling on foot had to make wide detours to avoid getting bogged down in waterlogged grazing land, and it took everyone much longer to get to the village primary school for our long-planned training day.
Last week the World Cocoa Foundation, a membership organization of more than 100 cocoa companies, held its annual partnership meeting in Berlin, Germany. The aim of the meeting is for governments, cocoa companies and farmers to identify and tackle the sector’s largest sustainability challenges. A 90-minute session was devoted to the topic of land tenure. The prominence of the session, as well as the seniority of the presenters – the Head of Sustainable Sourcing for Hershey’s and the Deputy Director General of Cote d’Ivoire’s Land Agency among them – is a powerful signaling effect.
Na Indonésia e Sudeste Asiático, produção de arroz sofre com a mudança no padrão de chuvas e entidades internacionais temem que uma das bases da alimentação mundial possa passar por problemas, com um impacto social e na violência. IPCC apela para que governos escutem povos tradicionais e indígenas na gestão de terras.
Banks must stand with Indigenous and local communities in respecting their land rights
In 2018, every week more than three people were murdered, defending their land and environment from destructive industries like mining, logging and agribusiness. These killings represent the extreme end of a spectrum of violence and threats directed at land rights defenders.
Heat waves, floods, hurricanes, starvation these are the ‘rewards’ Mother Earth has for years of neglect, overuse, misuse, and abuse. The earth’s natural resources support life. Trees, soil, natural gas, coal, fresh water, and oil- life wouldn’t exist without oxygen, without food, medicine, and power. However, if natural catastrophes are anything to go by, we have gone way past the red natural these resources, creating a life-sucking ecological debt.
What will be our fate if natural resources run dry?
Granting forest dwellers legal rights to their traditional lands helps fight deforestation and climate change, but the vast majority of the world's forests remain under government control with limited access for communities, researchers said.
Only about 14 percent of forests, or about 527 million hectares, were legally owned or designated for local communities in 58 countries surveyed by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group.
Large scale land grabs are often sites of immediate and sometimes violent mobility, as people are evicted and obliged to move elsewhere. The term “grab” signals abruptness.
Moderated by Kalpana Giri from RECOFTC, the panel on "Land Governance and Gender" featured a diverse round of gender experts discussing the inseparability of gender equality and good land governance. With talk of gender more prominent than ever, the session was certainly an interesting and poignant way to close out day two of the Forum!