In 2019, residents of the rural district of San Rafael Comac in the municipality of San Andrés Cholula, Mexico, challenged the implementation of the 2018 Municipal Program for Sustainable Urban Development of San Andrés Cholula (MPSUD), a rapacious urban-planning policy that was negatively affecting ancestral communities—pueblos originarios—and their lands and traditions.

Since the global crises in the 2000s, many foreign and domestic actors have acquired large tracts of land for food and biofuel crop cultivation and other purposes in Africa, often leading to the displacement of the African people living on customary land. The weak customary land rights of ordinary African people have been viewed as one of the main factors making it possible for various land-grabbers to exploit customary land with different purposes.

Both human activities and climate change have changed landscapes significantly, especially in coastal areas. Sea level rise and land subsidence foster tidal floods and permanent inundations, thus changing and limiting land use. Though many countries, including Indonesia, are aware of these phenomena, the legal status of this permanently inundated land remains unclear. Indonesia refers to this land legally as obliterated land. This qualification makes former landowners uncertain, as it does not recognize their previous land rights, and creates disputes during land acquisition.