During the Conference for Land Policy in Africa (CLPA) which took place in Addis Ababa in November 2023, LAND-at-scale organised the side-event ''Climate-Resilient Land Use Planning as a Tool for Addressing Land Degradation''. The LAND-at-scale (LAS) project partners and their government constituencies from Mozambique, Rwanda and Uganda participated in person. The set-up of the session was dynamic with each country first ‘pitching’ how land use planning processes were important in their LAS interventions, and then the government representatives adding to that a perspective from government. In each of the countries, the LAS partners consisting of NGOs and UN organizations, work closely with national or district land use planning officers of the government in carrying out project activities.

As part of a scoping study titled Land Governance for Climate Resilience: A review and case studies from LAND-at-scale projects headed by Richard Sliuzas, Emeritus Professor, University of Twente, CTV explored the links between climate and land governance in the LAND-at-scale project “Scaling Community Legal Literacy, Land Rights Certification and Climate Resilience in Mozambique”. This case study focusses on experiences from the Búzi District, where Cyclone Idai (March 2019) showed the need for proactive interventions in the land sector aimed at preparing districts and local communities to face and plan for severe climatic phenomena and their impacts, but also the challenges at making this link explicit. 

There is an immense pressure on land in Uganda. The country has a rapidly growing population and is host to the world’s third largest refugee population. Particularly poor people struggle to get access to healthy food. Agriculture practices need to become more efficient and focused on the domestic market. The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (EKN) in Uganda works to improve food security in selected areas in the country. Among several food security projects, the EKN works with the LAND-at-scale program to improve land governance.

Last week the World Cocoa Foundation, a membership organization of more than 100 cocoa companies, held its annual partnership meeting in Berlin, Germany. The aim of the meeting is for governments, cocoa companies and farmers to identify and tackle the sector’s largest sustainability challenges. A 90-minute session was devoted to the topic of land tenure. The prominence of the session, as well as the seniority of the presenters – the Head of Sustainable Sourcing for Hershey’s and the Deputy Director General of Cote d’Ivoire’s Land Agency among them – is a powerful signaling effect.

Introduction

The Deforestation and Forest Degradation in the Amazon Biome map was produced by Imazon in order to contribute towards monitoring in the region. The methodology applied simultaneously generates mapping of deforestation and forest degradation [caused by logging activity and forest burning] using Landsat satellite images. Existing methods individually detect and map those processes, which can lead to overlaps in the results and increasing uncertainty in estimates of annual deforestation rates.