Since the Scotland-based HALO Trust started work in Afghanistan in 1988 and Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA) cleared its first mine in Cambodia in 1992, the two NGOs have cleared and destroyed several million landmines and explosive weapons from conflict zones around the world. Their total haul in Myanmar? Zero.

“It is very frustrating,” says Henry Leach, HALO Trust representative in Yangon. “We are the biggest operator in the world but have not cleared a single mine in Myanmar in three years of being here.”

Qufu and Zoucheng are two neighboring
county-level cities in Jining Municipality, a poor area in
the South-West of Shandong Province. The area was home to
some of China's earliest civilizations, and rich in
cultural heritage assets. Cultural heritage assets in the
project area include the Confucius temple, Kong family
mansion, and burial grounds complex, a United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

This Incident Report describes the death of a home guard on January 24th 2014 after he stepped on a Tatmadaw landmine whilst hunting for birds in the forest. Home guards are villagers who provide security for communities of civilians in hiding. Widespread displacement occurred in Lu Thaw Township during Tatmadaw offensives in 1997 and between 2005 and 2008. Since then, many of those displaced have lived in make-shift, temporary housing in the jungle and mountainous areas with inadequate health and education facilities and without access to land on which to grow food for daily consumption.

About 50 countries have prepared interim
and full Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). In this
context, this paper examines Millennium Development Goal
(MDG)7: Ensuring Environmental Sustainability, its targets
and indicators, and responds to three questions: To what
extent do PRSPs define and adopt targets and indicators that
align with those of MDG7? To what extent do the available
data allow tracking of progress with respect to MDG7? When

This chapter examines overarching
mineral policies and mining laws to identify current trends
in mineral development that contribute towards sustainable
development. From those trends key components are defined
that, if embedded in overarching policy and legal
instruments, becomes tools of sustainability.

Biodiversity offsets can be an important tool for maintaining or enhancing environmental values in situations where development is sought despite negative environmental impacts. There are now approximately 45 compensatory mitigation programs for biodiversity impacts worldwide, with another 27 programs in development. While offsets have great potential as a conservation tool, their establishment requires overcoming a number of conceptual and methodological hurdles.

Villagers in Tenasserim Division’s Dawei District announced they will file a legal complaint against a Thai company and a Burmese government firm operating the Heinda tin mine, in order to seek compensation for severe environmental damage to their farmlands caused by the mine’s wastewater.

Groundwater comprises 97 percent of the
worlds readily accessible freshwater and provides the rural,
urban, industrial and irrigation water supply needs of 2
billion people around the world. As the more easily accessed
surface water resources are already being used, pressure on
groundwater is growing. In the last few decades, this
pressure has been evident through rapidly increasing pumping
of groundwater, accelerated by the availability of cheap

This guide is an aid for companies to achieve positive and resilient rapports with their host communities. It provides accessible information to understand factors that have an influence on community support and how this can be measured.

The framework provides guidance to policy makers on how to approach the question of shared use. It highlights the operational models that are necessary for implementation, the key-success factors, the enabling conditions and how to ultimately better coordinate major investments in physical infrastructure by privately-owned natural resource concessionaires with national infrastructure development plans. The framework also equips policy makers with a set of questions that should help conduct the negotiations on shared use with companies.

El propósito de esta publicación es identificar buenas prácticas en proyectos mineros que afectan a comunidades indígenas y compartir las lecciones aprendidas con empresas mineras, entidades públicas con injerencia en el sector, organizaciones indígenas y otras organizaciones de la sociedad civil, y el público en general.

In conformity with its objective of
functioning as a local Government, Kathmandu Metropolitan
City (KMC) sought the assistance of the World Bank for the
preparation of a City Development Strategy (CDS). The
various sectoral as well as integrated strategies presented
in this document seem to be an overwhelming demand on KMC
with its limited manpower and money. A CDS is essential if
KMC is to focus its development potential. The optimism lies