The importance of land manifests in various components of the everyday lives of people insocieties: cultural heritage, livelihood, the environment, economy, and community, among manyothers. Land is a factor of development. It is the most influential determinant of developmentbecause women, youths, and men (and households) depend on it for their livelihoods and formaintaining their living conditions in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas.

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) work with nature to benefit both natural ecosystems and the people that depend on them. By putting nature at the centre, NbS address a range of societal challenges: protecting, sustainably managing or restoring natural or modified ecosystems and supporting their health, function and biodiversity.

The research collated in this brief confirms that NbS deliver simultaneously multiple benefits and shows the wide-ranging beneficial impacts of scaling up their implementation across Europe.

Informal settlements represent a challenging operational context for local government service providers due to precarious contextual conditions. Location choice and land procurement for public infrastructure raise the complicated question: who has the right to occupy, control, and use a piece of land in informal settlements? There is currently a dearth of intelligence on how to identify well-located land for public infrastructure, spatially and with careful consideration for safeguarding the claimed rights and preventing conflicts.

Issues relating to land are specifically referred to in five of the United Nations’ (UN) 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and UN-Habitat’s Global Land Tools Network views access to land and tenure security as key to achieving sustainable, inclusive and efficient cities. The African continent is growing in importance, with climate change and population pressure on land. This review explores an interdisciplinary approach, and identifies recent advances in geo-spatial technology relevant to land governance in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

The webinar Rolling back social and environmental safeguards in the name of COVID-19, organized by Forest Peoples Programme, the Tenure Facility,  Middlesex University, the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and the Land Portal Foundation, took place on Thursday, February 18, 2021.

Global leaders increasingly recognize that land rights for indigenous and local communities are a prerequisite for achieving national and international goals for forest governance, food security, climate mitigation, economic development and human rights.

Opening up land-related administrative data, combining it with data from other sources  and processing and making this data available as easily accessible information for women and men equally could be a means to counteracting land corruption in land management, land administration and land allocation. But does open data and enhanced data transparency indeed help to counteract land corruption?

This practitioner’s guide explains how to promote gender-responsive forest tenure reform in community-based forest regimes. It is aimed at those taking up this challenge in developing countries. There is no one single approach to reforming forest tenure practices for achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment. Rather, it involves taking advantage of opportunities that emerge in various institutional arenas such as policy and law-making and implementation, government administration, customary or community-based tenure governance, or forest restoration at the landscape scale.

El propósito de este informe es dejar en claro la importancia y urgencia para la acción climática de proteger a los bosques de los territorios indígenas y tribales y a las comunidades que los cuidan. Con base en la experiencia reciente, se propone un conjunto de inversiones y políticas para ser adoptadas por los financiadores climáticos y decisores gubernamentales, en coordinación con los pueblos indígenas y tribales.

Indigenous and tribal peoples control about one third of Latin America and the Caribbean’s forests. Supporting their efforts to control, sustainably manage, and benefit from these forests can greatly help to solve the problems of climate change, loss of biological and cultural diversity, rural vulnerability, and food insecurity.

From 2013 to 2016, Oxfam's Behind the Brands campaign called on the world’s 10 biggest food and beverage companies to adopt stronger social and environmental sourcing policies and spurred significant commitments on women’s empowerment, land rights and climate change. Now, as the coronavirus pandemic worsens inequality and food insecurity around the world, we assess whether the companies have taken meaningful steps to implement the commitments they made in response to the campaign.

New research by CCSI and the Centre pour l’Environnement et le Développement (CED) on transparency of land-based investment in Cameroon. 

In the report, CCSI and CED find that:

• Communities continue to be excluded from decision-making around investments.
• The government pursues a top-down approach to concession allocation and remains reluctant to recognize all legitimate tenure rights.