On 24 and 25 September 2019, Heads of State and Governments will gather at the United Nations Headquarters in New York for the summit Accelerating the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This is a crucial event for evaluating progress towards the 17 goals and 169 ambitious targets countries have set to eradicate poverty, achieve food security, empower women, secure the planet and foster peace and stability.

Our online discussion “Open Land Data in the Fight Against Corruption” is well underway with many interesting contributions so far. We are discussing whether Open Data can be a key tool to increase transparency, support innovation and increase civic engagement, in the fight against corruption. One of the key questions which reverberates throughout the open data debate in the land sector, however, is how much transparency is too much?

This blog has originally been published by CABI at https://blog.cabi.org/2015/09/25/new-report-reveals-the-true-cost-of-land-degradation/

A conversation with Annie Signorelli, Project Manager for Renewable Energy and Human Rights at the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre

This is the first interview in the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment's Climate Crisis, Global Land Use, and Human Rights Interview Series.

Increasingly, governments and citizens in developing countries as well as development agencies are using information technology to improve governance, shape government-citizen relations, and reduce corruption. Despite this, we continue to be at the first phases of understanding how to best use these new data sources in anti-corruption work, as well as appreciating the challenges and limitations inherent in them.  

Banks must stand with Indigenous and local communities in respecting their land rights

In 2018, every week more than three people were murdered, defending their land and environment from destructive industries like mining, logging and agribusiness. These killings represent the extreme end of a spectrum of violence and threats directed at land rights defenders.

For the first time, women from informal settlements in the Municipality of Bonito, State of Pernambuco, Brazil will be granted with land titles in which they have lived in for decades

The climate crisis will reshape our relationships to land around the world. Journalist David Wallace-Wells warns that, once the planet warms 2°C above preindustrial levels — the target set by the Paris Agreement — “major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable,” and 400 million more people will suffer from regional water scarcity.

At the Land Portal, we are always trying to align with other open initiatives, and Wikidata is one of them. Wikidata was created as a central collaboratively edited knowledge base, adding semantics to the pieces that conforms it so computers can understand the relationships between these pieces. This solution is addressing the issue of updating/creating the same knowledge in different language’s wikipedias, where you had to go one by one in order to edit and change it.

Knowing the "where" is important for so many companies and projects today. A business might want to know what path you take to work to send you targeted ads about coffee shops you pass. Augmented reality platforms might map out interior spaces of your home and offices to create a dancing critter in your living room. Self driving cars need to map their environment, and satellites map out the Earth below.

Pouring several colors of paint into a single bucket produces a gray pool of muck, not a shiny rainbow. So too with discussions of financing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Jumbling too many issues into the same debate leads to policy muddiness rather than practical breakthroughs. Financing the SDGs requires a much more disaggregated mindset: unpacking the specific issues, requiring specific resources, in specific places.

For the past six months, Resource Equity has been working with our partner Associates Research Trust to implement our Starting With Women approach with subsistence mining associations in Karamoja, Uganda.