For a long time sub-Saharan Africa has been considered to have abundant and underutilized land than any other continent. On the contrary, recent studies show that many rural Africans live in increasingly densely populated areas where all arable land is allocated or under cultivation. This has led to a long-term decline in farm size and reduced fallows.

As the Government of Kenya treads the path to economic recovery, every Kenyan should be at home with the fact that many forms of economic development activities damage the natural resources upon which the economies are based. Nationally and internationally, a major environmental and development challenge is how to maintain the equilibrium between population, ecosystems and development.

The Government of Kenya through the Ministry of Lands and Housing (MOLH) has finally embarked on the process of developing a National Land Policy (NLP) that is envisaged to be in place by June 2005. It has been a tortuous journey for many in the civil society and other stakeholders. The NLP will come, as a gratifying culmination of a battle well fought and the win will hopefully be savoured for a very long time to come. The Minister of Lands and Housing, Hon.

Although The National Land Policy Formulation Process is concentrated on addressing land issues, the reform agenda requires inter- alia that there are policy directions for establishing an equitable framework for economic growth and access to natural resources. The natural resources in question include water, forests, minerals, mineral oils, wildlife, marine resources, fisheries, pastures, and wetlands.

The report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the Illegal/Irregular Allocation of Public Land is finally out! Popularly known as the ‘Ndung’u’ Report, the publication of this three-volume document is important to the Kenya Land Alliance for two major reasons. Firstly, the appointment of the Coordinator of the Kenya Land Alliance to the Commission marked a threshold in the relations between KLA and the Government of Kenya.

This report, which focuses on Kenya, constitutes one of four country-wide assessments produced under the overall project. It draws on a literature review conducted by the Kenya Land Alliance (KLA) with additional inputs from IIED, as well as on primary field research conducted by KLA in April 2016 (see Section 1.2 for further information about the research methodology).

The illegal and irregular allocations of public land as chronicled in the Ndungu Report amount to a rip-off that dwarfs the Goldenberg and Anglo-Leasing scandals. Our analysis in this first issue in the series covers Karura, Ngong Road and Kiptagich forests and suggests a loss of public resources in excess of Ksh.18.4 billion. The Ndungu Report covers ten other forests as well as other public land, ranging from road reserves to cemeteries to public toilets and even State House land. As we cover these in future issues of the series, the cumulative loss will certainly be astounding.

This document sums up part of the presentations given during the first part of the LandVoc Community of Experts workshop, held on June 8th, 2020.  This workshop focused on the origins of LandVoc, how LandVoc is being used, future uses of LandVoc and the promotion of LandVoc uptake.  

Environmental activism, with decades of relevant presence already, is a fundamental element for the preservation of natural and cultural values. Theories around their bases, protagonists, methods, instruments and results proliferate in a period of obliged ecological transition. Here, we present an investigation in the region of Girona (Catalunya, Spain), with the main objective of reflecting on environmental activism and its singular impact on the territorial reality of this area.

This report provides a summary of a two-part online workshop in June 2020 to explore the creation of a community of experts to support the ongoing development of the LandVoc concept scheme, and to support ongoing contributions from the LandVoc community to AGROVOC. The workshops brought together 35 experts mprove awareness of the importance of controlled and multilingual vocabularies, and of value of semantics to management. of agriculture and land related knowledge.  

In recent history, Indonesian forest policies have been dominated by deforestation in the name of economic progress. Many actors have expressed concerns about this trend and have tried to reverse it in favour of a more sustainable pathway. From 2004–2017, non-governmental environmental organisations fought for the case of the coastal Tripa peat swamp rainforest in the province of Aceh, Sumatra. Unique in Indonesian history, they managed halting and reversing the deforestation of an area.