LETICIA, Colombia (Reuters) - Seven Amazonian countries on Friday signed a pact to protect the world’s largest tropical forest via disaster response coordination and satellite monitoring, amid recent fires that torched thousands of square miles of the jungle.

The presidents of Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, the vice-president of Suriname and the natural resource minister of Guyana attended the one-day summit in the jungle city of Leticia in southern Colombia.

The moratorium was first introduced in 2011 and has been renewed regularly as part of the efforts to reduce emissions from fires caused by deforestation

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesian President Joko Widodo has issued a permanent moratorium on new forest clearance for activities such as palm plantations or logging, the environment minister said on Thursday.

While likely to be welcomed by green groups, some do not think it goes far enough to protect remaining forests in the tropical archipelago.

With an ambitious target of planting 200 million trees a day, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's Green Legacy Project, if successful, will not only break the world record but go a long way in the country's fight against climate change.

Deforestation is the immediate cause of loss of biodiversity but the underlying causes are wrong development policies and plundering by local and multi-national companies over the years.

According to a report, authorising the indigenous communities’ land titles can improve forest management and carbon storage

Recognising land tenures of indigenous communities and their management rights over forests can help tackle climate change, according to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that’s yet to be made public.

At the beginning of the 20th century, 80 per cent of India was covered in thick forests. Now the forest cover has dropped to a mere 17 per cent.

Recently, Forest Survey of India (FSI) released its biennial State of Forests Report 2017 that stated that forest cover in the country has increased by about one per cent, but several other reports highlight that this increase is not due to increase in forest area but is the artefact of increase in agricultural green cover.

• The highly climate- and biodiversity-friendly agricultural practice of agroforestry is now practiced widely around the world, but its roots are deeply indigenous.
• Agroforestry is the practice of growing of trees, shrubs, herbs, and vegetables together in a group mimicking a forest, and its originators were indigenous peoples who realized that growing useful plants together created a system where each species benefited the others.
• Agroforestry is now estimated to cover one billion hectares globally and sequester over 45 gigatons of carbon from the

Recent court rulings have underlined the complexity of India's numerous land laws, which have sparked conflicts and made it harder for poor farmers and indigenous people to access justice, analysts and lawyers said.

Last week, the Supreme Court of India ruled that indigenous people in Meghalaya owned their land and its resources, and that only they could permit mining, after years of illegal mining devastated the environment and their livelihoods.

Sociological study finds pros and cons in a REDD+ carbon credit scheme in the Brazilian Amazon that rewards small-scale ecosystem service providers in local communities.

• To safeguard the almost 90 percent of its land still covered with forest, the small Brazilian state of Acre implemented a carbon credit scheme that assigns monetary value to stored carbon in the standing trees and rewards local “ecosystem service providers” for their role protecting it.

Under the theme of “Rights-Led Transformation Toward Climate-Resilient Landscapes”, this iteration of the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF), taking place this coming June 22-23, will explore the essential contributions made by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, rural women and youth to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the targets laid out in the Paris Agreement on climate change.

From the gases emitted through a car’s tailpipe to the tree biomass stored in the Amazon, carbon is no doubt the leading indicator of climate change today. But does a ton of carbon emitted by an aircraft 10 kilometers above the North Atlantic really equate to a ton of carbon stored in a mangrove forest in Indonesia – and, more importantly, can one really be ‘offset’ by another?

Sudden eviction by Forest Department leaves tribals scared

Reclamation of forest lands, especialy from the possession of poor Adivasi encroachers, has been a messy business as seen during eviction of Guthikoyas in Jayashankar Bhupalpally district in September 2017 and Kolams in Kumram Bheem Asifabad district on June 12. It is quite evident that lack of clear guidelines for resuming encroached forest lands had the Forest Department evict the encroachers rather ‘crudely’ resulting in a sudden upheaval in their lives which includes loss of shelter and livelihood.

Sourcing products from sustainable production areas and offering farmers better loans for environmentally friendly practices are just two ways to support sustainable development – ultimately benefiting millions of farmers and significantly reducing deforestation