Communities made up of fugitive slave descendants have been forced from their lands and denied their rights, a situation that may only get worse under newly elected president Jair Bolsonaro.

The elders gather in the entrance room of the matriarch's home and search in the recesses of their memory for the traditional songs they and their forebears used to sing. A woman rocks her grandson on her lap. Her husband stands silent in the doorway, as an energetic granddaughter races about his calves.

Journalist Sue Branford and social scientist Maurício Torres spent a month learning about Ferrogrão (Grainrail), one of the newest threats to the Brazilian Amazon – first meeting with government officials in Brasilia and then travelling along the proposed route, speaking to both sides in the heated debate over its construction. This the first of their reports.

Many Indians face untold hardships due to lack of good shelter including health issues. Those in cities live in a slum close-by or stay far-away where there is no livelihood and few commuting options.

According to the State of the Low-Income Housing Finance Market 2018 report, with increasing urbanization and the lack of planning for housing, there is an estimated shortage of 10-12 million low-income homes, along with 26-37 million urban poor who live in poor quality informal homes. .

BONN, Germany (Landscape News) — A new partnership urging businesses, citizens and governments to take action in the field of forest conservation, land use, food production and consumption aims to take action on climate change.

As logging and palm oil industries continue to decimate the Amazonian rainforest, the people who live in it are taking tech into their own hands to fight back.

Gujarat, one of the fastest urbanising states in India, seems to be doing so against the wishes of its people

As you move west from the crowded old neighbourhoods of inner-city Ahmedabad, the roads broaden, buildings rise taller and BMWs line the streets. Old-timers here remember watching these wealthy, modern neighbourhoods engulf the countryside – the lush fields of wheat and corn that are now gone.

Those who live in villages on the city’s fringes today fear that the same will happen to them.

Cases of double ownership of land are common in Kenya, where cartels collude with officials to create parallel titles for parcels want to acquire illegally

NAIROBI/ACCRA, Feb 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - On a recent Saturday afternoon, Joseph Njuguna received a worrying call. Without his permission, someone was excavating a small piece of land he had bought six years ago.

When he reached the site he found an excavator digging up soil, and two yellow Tata trucks waiting to ferry it away.

Successive plans excluded Delhi’s urban villages from civic control and virtually turned them into islands. Haphazard construction and unchecked commercialisation only added to the civic mess in these 135 localities spread across Delhi.

The sprawling fields in front of Sultan Chauhan’s 20-room house in Hauz Khas village doubled up as playground when he was a child. But today, the fields have been replaced by a congested row of buildings that has cropped up in the last three decades.

“We will fast for as long as we have to,” say protesting farmers who face displacement, even as the Kaleshwaram irrigation project has already received environmental clearance.

Ranga Reddy woke up at 5 am on December 1o, 2017, bathed in cold water and dressed in a white veshti and shirt. He had a busy day ahead.

• World's fist comprehensive evidence-based assessment report on land degradation will be launched in March 2018
• Best-available evidence for decision makers to make informed decisions to halt & reverse land degradation
• Prepared by more than 100 leading international experts from 45 countries over 3 years
• Draws on more than 3,000 scientific papers, Government reports, indigenous and local knowledge & other sources
• Improved by over 7,300 comments from more than 200 external reviewers, including Governments
• Examines implications of land d

11 December 2017 – On International Mountain Day, the United Nations food security agency has called for greater focus on sustainable agriculture in highland regions around the globe to better respond to climate change impacts and migration challenges.