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

Working on and with open data means that we are avid believers in the notion that pathways of information should be opened up, that we are building the proper technological infrastructures for information to be appropriately shared, thereby creating connections.  Networks such as the International Land Coalition serve this very same purpose; with the exchange of information and knowledge being one of the Coalition’s main missions.  

FRONT LINE DEFENDERS has documented 821 human rights defenders (HRDs) who have been killed in the four years since we started producing an annual global list in cooperation with national and international NGOs. Seventy-nine percent of this total came from six countries: Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and the Philippines. The vast majority of these cases have never been properly investigated, and few of the perpetrators of the killings have been brought to justice.

In June 2018, SciTech Europa travelled to Brussels, Belgium, to attend the 2018 instalment of European Development Days (EDD) as the event’s media partner. Organised by the European Commission, EDD brings the development community together each year to share ideas and experiences in ways that inspire new partnerships and innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.

Montenegro is preparing another millennial nationalization, as land grabbing becomes a country’s law, with 293 million square metres of seacoast territories to be seized. Private property is being treated as a money machine, leaving owners deprived.

Large scale land grabs are often sites of immediate and sometimes violent mobility, as people are evicted and obliged to move elsewhere. The term “grab” signals abruptness.

Yet processes that change peoples’ access to land, and the diverse processes of human mobility that land transformations generate, often take decades to unfold.  Research on Indonesia's large scale oil palm plantations shows the importance of attending to these long term processes.

As Singapore dredges sand out from beneath Cambodia’s mangrove forests, an ecosystem, a communal way of life, and one woman’s relationship to her beloved home are faced with the threat of erasure.

Over the last 10 years, a clear consensus has emerged: investments in land should be done responsibly. However, understanding tenure-related risk in the context of land-based agricultural investments in emerging markets can be complex.

For individual women and men within communities, these complexities can have severe and negative effects on their land and livelihoods. This is especially true for more vulnerable members of the community: widowed or divorced women, youth, and ethnic minorities.