By Kathleen Buckingham

Trees have become an iconic image of environmentalism, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we should plant millions of them.

This year's Goldman Environmental Prize winner says the battle for land rights in Liberia is just getting underway.  Alfred Brownell is the recipient of the 2019 Goldman Environmental Prize and founder of Green Advocates an NGO and academic at Northeastern University School of Law

Author: Ahmadou Aly Mbaye

Editor's Note: 

There is a strong and compelling environment and development case to be made for securing indigenous and community lands. Securing collective land rights offers a low-cost, high-reward investment for developing country governments and their partners to meet national development objectives and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Securing community lands is also a cost-effective climate mitigation measure for countries when compared to other carbon capture and storage approaches.

Imagine a world where sustainable development is no longer an oxymoron, one where the Earth is economically and ecologically stable and food and energy needs are met. It’s a place where habitats are preserved and pollution is limited.

Don’t worry – you’re not alone if you can’t.

But according to a recent study published in The Ecological Society of America, this vision is not just imaginable, but it’s attainable. And by 2050 no less.

• Nearly five years after Friends of the Earth U.S. reported about escalating conflict between farmers in the village of Lunjuk on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and palm oil company PT Sandabi Indah Lestari — or PT SIL — those communities remain in conflict with PT SIL, which supplies Wilmar International, the world’s largest palm oil trader.

By 2050, two thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas. How cities develop will determine whether we can reduce economic and racial inequality, effectively address climate change, and meet many of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development goals. The human rights movement can help move cities in the right direction, through more engagement in municipal-level policy and advocacy, and through greater attention to the growing corporate influence within our cities.

The Sengwer are an indigenous hunter-gatherer people living along the slopes of the Cherangany Hills in the western highlands of Kenya. Their estimated population is 33,187.

We cannot restore tropical forests without restoring the rights of their traditional owners.

Implementing a coordinated global response to curb demand for energy and eliminate further deforestation would reduce the need to deploy artificial carbon dioxide removal technologies, according to a decisive report from the U.N. scientific panel on climate change.

Thousands of farmers from across India will march to the parliament in New Delhi on November 30, to demand action on the deepening agrarian crisis that has left a trail of heavy debts and suicide in its wake.

The 2015 U.N. climate change conference was a historic moment in which the world agreed to limit global warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Through the Paris Agreement, parties consented to a long-term pathway of climate-resilient development.

After decades of being the elephant in the room of global development, only now are we seeing increased recognition of land rights

Fred Nelson is executive director of Maliasili and Michael Taylor is director of International Land Coalition 

Land rights have finally been invited to the party - sitting at the intersection of some of the world’s most urgent development, environmental, and human rights priorities.