News on Land

Tribespeople say individual ownership could lead to fragmentation of land

Edamalakudi’s Oorukkoottam — assembly of people in the tribal hamlet and officials — arrived at an unusual decision last month: no individual household in the panchayat would individually own forestland as guaranteed by the Forest Rights Act.

The event, titled “Honduras: The Fight for Reparations,” is scheduled to last for 12 days.

A delegation of six Garifunas from Belize are scheduled to travel to the Honduran Caribbean coast on Sunday to learn about Garifuna struggles and victories for land repossession, reparations and other ancestral fights.

23 June 2017 – Whether they are single, married, separated or widowed, women must be able to enjoy the inviolable right that they are not dependent on anyone, the United Nations has said, marking International Widow's Day.

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Each week, at least four men and women vanish without trace or are found dead, cut down in a hail of gunfire.

In Cambodia, a single mother is separated from her two children, arrested and locked up in prison.

On the dry savannahs of Brazil's Mato Grosso do Sul, farmers shoot dead a 26-year-old indigenous man in broad daylight.

In Bangladesh, a university professor receives death threats from an al Qaeda-inspired militant group.

Women from lakeside communities in Phnom Penh are leading a fight against the lake's destruction - but have faced a brutal crackdown by police

The average annual rate of deforestation is nearly 600,000 acres, and deforestation rates in the forested areas re higher than that in non-forested areas, said Tin Tun, director of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation, at a workshop on knowledge-sharing among ethnic minority groups in programme to reduce emissions and deforestation in Asia. The workshop was held at the Horizon Lake View Hotel in Nay Pyi Taw yesterday.

Many cash-strapped Maasai have become landless after subdividing and selling swathes of land to the south of Nairobi

NAIROBI, June 20 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Kenya's opposition leader has raised tensions weeks ahead of elections by criticising the Maasai community's sale of ancestral land to other ethnic groups in an area hit by political violence in the 1990s, land rights experts said.

Religious and indigenous leaders appealed on Monday for better protection of tropical forests from the Amazon to the Congo basin, with a Vatican bishop likening current losses to a collective suicide by humanity.

Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and Daoist representatives met indigenous peoples in Oslo to explore moral and ethical arguments to shield forests that are under threat from logging and land clearance for farms.

The Amazon basin faces irreversible environmental disturbance on an enormous scale due to hydroelectric dam development. Hundreds of existing and planned dams in both the Amazonian lowlands and the Andean headwaters are already impacting, and will continue affecting, waterways, floodplains and the estuary by disrupting sediment and nutrient flows.

This is the message of a new study, published in Nature, which quantified the impacts of dams on the hydrology and geography of each of the Amazon’s 19 major sub-basins.

 

 

On June 2, Guatemalan police and military carried out the eviction of Q’eqchi Maya residents of the community of Laguna Larga in the Laguna de Tigre region of the country. Days later, the refugees from the eviction arrived in the Mexican state of Campeche.

Statement of the Network of Indigenous Peoples in Thailand (NIPT) at the 7th AWG-SF Conference held in Chiang Mai, Thailand

ASEAN Working Group on Social Forestry (AWG-SF) Chairperson, distinguished delegates from the ASEAN Member States, distinguished guests, participants, CSOs and indigenous brothers and sisters, I bring greetings on behalf of indigenous representatives, forest dependent communities and civil society organizations (CSOs) from Thailand who were part of the 6th CSO Forum on Social Forestry in ASEAN (9-10 June 2017) held here in Chiang Mai.

Jose Maria Lemus' murder adds to the growing list of recently assassinated social, Indigenous and human rights activists in Colombia.

Jose Maria Lemus, president of the Tibu Community Board in Colombia’s North of Santander state, has been killed, the Peoples’ Congress reported Wednesday.

His murder adds to the growing list of recently assassinated social, Indigenous and human rights activists in the South American country.