In their quest to bolster economies battered by the pandemic, governments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere have set aside social and environmental safeguards in favor of destructive development projects that are harming Indigenous communities and the forests they care for, according to a report released today by Forest Peoples Programme.

Threats against indigenous people and rainforests have risen during the coronavirus pandemic as governments have rolled back social and environmental safeguards to boost economic growth, land rights activists said on Thursday.

Governments in five countries with tropical forests have weakened legal safeguards to aid economic recovery, while expanding projects near native land, said a study by Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) and two universities.

A tree planting ceremony was held along a stretch of road leading to Badas Dam as part of the Badas Tree Planting 2021 project yesterday.

It is a collaborative research project between Universiti Brunei Darussalam’s (UBD) Institute for Biodiversity and Environmental Research (IBER) and Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) aimed at supporting Brunei Darussalam National Climate Change Policy (BNCCP) particularly in increasing forest cover.

Improving tenure of forests by Indigenous and Tribal Peoples can lower deforestation rates and biodiversity loss, avoiding C02 emissions, but more investment is urgently needed to address rising threats.

On social media, global indigenous leadership addresses South African magnate Elon Musk, who has launched a global award for carbon sequestration projects. Up-to-date technological solution is the same it has always been: ancestral wisdom

Patches of forest cleared and tended by Indigenous communities but lost to time still show more food bounty for humans and animals than surrounding forests.

On April 26, 2021, the Decree amending several provisions of Mexico’s General Law of Sustainable Forestry Development was published in the Federal Official Gazette (DOF). The Decree is effective as of April 27.

In relevant part, the Decree’s amendments include the following:

• Changes to land use of forest land will be subject to analysis of carbon storage capacity, in addition to the existing requirements set forth in the current law.

Current estimates of land-use change may be capturing only one-quarter of its true extent across the world, new research shows.

Bonn, 17/06/2020 - World leaders are rallying support for a coordinated and coherent approach to reverse the loss of healthy land in light of the role it can play in the global efforts to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and to deal with the crises of climate change and the loss of biological diversity.

 

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.