Indigenous communities can prove useful allies if brought on board with programmes to plant and safeguard trees

NAIROBI - Initiatives to restore African forests, decimated by loggers and land-hungry farmers, must include indigenous people if they are to succeed, experts said on Wednesday.

Analysis shows that forest-dwelling communities often sabotage efforts to plant or safeguard trees when they are excluded from them, whereas they can prove valuable allies if they are brought on board, they said.

On the rainy night of Friday, August 3, the community of Chácara do Catumbi had much to celebrate: after 17 years of struggle, 17 of the community’s 22 families were the first in Rio de Janeiro history to receive land titles through the legal instrument of collective adverse possession.

Kenya’s Ogiek people are optimistic of returning to their ancestral forests as the government has pledged to honour a landmark ruling ordering reparations for forced eviction.

Evictions have ceased and the Ogiek are rehabilitating parts of the Rift Valley’s Mau Forest one year after Africa’s highest human rights court told Kenya to compensate the forest-dwellers for violating their land rights, an Ogiek campaigner said.

A 300-year-old community in Bangkok will have its homes demolished as part of the city's modernisation plans

BANGKOK  - For more than two decades, a community of more than 300 people living next to an old fort in Bangkok staved off drug dealers keen to extend their turf, and city officials eager to tear down their homes and build a park to draw more tourists.

European Union Ambassador condemns the killing of a member of the Sengwer community and underlines that both indigenous people's rights and Kenya's water towers need protection

Today, the European Union Ambassador to Kenya Stefano A. Dejak condemned the reported killing of a member of the Sengwer community and shooting of another by Kenyan Forest Serviceguards yesterday in Kapkok Glade.

After decades of violent forest evictions, the Forest Department has announced it is making a U-turn to embrace the forest dwellers as partners in forest conservation. If you think this is too good to be true, you're absolutely correct.

BU has lost more than 100 acres while Kuvempu University, more than 40 acres to encroachments

After attempting to reclaim public land from land sharks, the state government has now set its eyes on the higher education institutes.

Alarmed by the large-scale land grabbing in and around universities, the higher education department has now cracked the whip on land sharks. Among all the universities, Bangalore University tops the chart with the highest extent of land being encroached upon.

ROME, Aug 28 2017 (IPS) - Indigenous Maasai people in Loliondo region,Tanzania have been facing new cases of forced evictions and human rights violations, a major international organisation supporting indigenous peoples’ struggle for human rights and self-determination warned.

Post-colonial land reforms in Uganda leave many issues unresolved, while evictions, land conflicts and dispossession remain common 

Land is an essential asset to the people of Uganda. With a rural population constituting over 83% of the total population and an economy dominated by smallholder farming, Uganda must prioritize responsible land governance to achieve sustainable development.

Thousands of pastoralists in northern Ngorongoro district made homeless as homes torched to protect wild game

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania

Simat Rotiken and his family are braving cold nights huddled under a tree after their homestead was burned down in a scheme to protect a disputed wildlife corridor.

They were driven from their pastures by security forces in a government policy aimed at securing the Loliondo Game Controlled Area next to the Serengeti National Park.

(Ecofin Agency) - In an open letter sent to the president of Madagascar on August 17, the Tany group exposed its concerns about land grabbing by foreign investors in the country. For the civil society group, whose objective “is to support the development of Malagasy farmers and citizens and defend their lands and natural resources”, it is urgent to boost land tenure and establish a stricter framework for land related transactions.