FRONT LINE DEFENDERS has documented 821 human rights defenders (HRDs) who have been killed in the four years since we started producing an annual global list in cooperation with national and international NGOs. Seventy-nine percent of this total came from six countries: Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and the Philippines. The vast majority of these cases have never been properly investigated, and few of the perpetrators of the killings have been brought to justice.

Much of the world’s rural landscapes are technically managed by national governments with limited recognition of, or support for, the rights and management responsibilities of the rural poor who live in these areas. In an era of large-scale land acquisitions for global commodity production, this has led, in some cases, to governments allocating vast tracts of land and resources to companies with limited or no consultation of the people affected.

For hundreds of years, pastoralists in Ethiopia’s lowlands have relied on strong customary land tenure systems to survive. Historically, legislation has failed to clearly define communal rights to rangelands, and the specific roles and responsibilities for both communities and local government to administer and manage these resources. This legislative deficiency prevented pastoral communities from fully exercising their constitutional rights to land (Ethiopia’s Constitution broadly recognizes pastoral communities’ right to access land and prevents their involuntary displacement).

2018 could be transformative for the indigenous and community land rights movement, with unprecedented opportunities for scaling up rights recognition around the world.

By Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Chairman of the Advisory Board of CCSI, University Professor at Columbia University, and Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network

By Nicholas Tagliarino, Land Portal Foundation

On Nov. 13 in Bahrain, the Inter-Agency Expert Group on the Sustainable Development Goal Indicators voted to reclassify SDG Land Indicator 1.4.2 from Tier III to Tier II status.  This is a significant win for the property rights community, and a validation that a coordinated effort from many different players can indeed make a difference.

However, the road there was not easy.

On 12^th November 2017, the 6^th meeting of the Inter-agency and Expert Group on Sustainable Development Goal Indicators (IAEG-SDGs) reached a major decision to reclassify tenure security Indicator 1.4.2 from Tier III to II in Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain. This decision marks the beginning of a global journey to monitor tenure security for all, using comparable land indicators for globally comparable data.

The 6th meeting of the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on the Sustainable Development Goal Indicators (IAEG-SDGs), is very important.

By Andy White, Coordinator of the Rights and Resources Initiative

By Yuta Masuda and Brian E. Robinson

I’m sitting in a Mongolian yurt, listening to and trying to emulate Bataa’s* songs about love for the grasslands and the wide, treeless plains of the Mongolian Plateau. Our host sings with consuming passion. I might have brushed his enthusiasm off as a show two weeks ago. But after living and working in these grasslands, the feeling of freedom that comes from unobstructed, far-off distant horizon is infectious.

Autora: Tatiana Mendonça