Nearly five years into the implementation of the ground breaking global commitments of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, the time is upon us to consider what has been accomplished so far and to set the tone for action that will enable the world to meet its ambitious goals.

Our latest WOLTS publication is a fascinating photo essay from one of our pilot research communities, Mundarara, in Tanzania. The piece by Jim Grabham, titled “Are rubies undermining Maasai culture”, shares insights gleaned from in-depth interviews with two participants in a one-year training programme on gender, land and mining that has been developed and carried out by the HakiMadini and Mokoro WOLTS project team in Tanzania.

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.

Human rights groups say about 60,000 settlers are being targeted, in the latest effort to halt the destruction of what is referred to as Kenya's key water tower

NAIROBI - Thousands of people are being removed from Kenya's largest forest, a senior official said on Thursday, in a controversial move aimed at saving the country's most important "water tower", which has been decimated by decades of corruption.

n September 2019, the UN Environment Programme will honour Champions of the Earth, outstanding environmental leaders from the public and private sectors, and from civil society who have had a transformative positive impact on the environment. Here we meet previous winners of this prestigious award and find out how they still are making a difference in their communities and across the globe.

Around 80 million hectare of common lands in India provide livelihood to around 350 million people, finds studies conducted by a Gujarat-based non-profit

Common lands like pasture lands or prayer sites should not be treated as wastelands and must be provided land tenurial security, according to Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), a Gujarat based non-profit. The organisation raised this matter at the ongoing United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification's Conference of Parties (CoP) 14 on September 2, 2019.

Their claims were rejected, raising concerns whether due process was followed

The recent Amazon wildfires brought everyone to a choking standstill as the world’s largest tropical rainforest and the lungs of our planet were going up in flames. Environmentalists blamed the far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who pushed for development of the protected land reserves and is against environmental fines. Speculation is rife that the fires started with a deliberate attempt by loggers and farmers to clear the forests.

Fires have been reported in protected indigenous reserves of the Brazilian Amazon, raising fears that loggers and land grabbers have targeted these remote areas during the dramatic surge in blazes across the world’s biggest rainforest.

MANILA, Aug 28 2019 (IPS) - With the record rate blaze in the Amazon that struck Indigenous communities, the world is confronted by a humanitarian crisis in the midst of an ever-worsening political-economic condition.

The International Indigenous Peoples Movement for Self-Determination and Liberation (IPMSDL) joins the international chorus of condemnation and call for immediate actions to put an end to the unfolding crisis that jeopardizes the lives of Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon and planet’s survival.