In this What to Read digest, we review four recent articles that focus on how rural communities in the Global South are dealing with climate disasters, including cases from Bangladesh, Colombia, and India.
Rather than scaling up, I think we should be talking about scaling out and scaling over time when it comes to inclusive, community-led land governance.
This session addressed the fact that the rights implications and the social and economic consequences of current climate change and biodiversity strategies in the context of the Rio Conventions for millions of people are not sufficiently acknowledged, researched, and addressed.
This session brought together insights on land governance and climate resilience, with a specific gender focus. Women suffer from lack of access to, decision making over, and use of land. At the same time, climate change disproportionally affects women. Research indicates that ‘gender just land governance’ forms the key to use land in a sustainable, climate-proof way.
Communities in developing countries are increasingly exposed to the effects of climate change. Although they contribute little to greenhouse gas emissions, many communities are at the forefront of climate change and the associated extreme events. They are faced with events that undermine their food security, such as droughts and floods, but also increased pressure on land due to climate-induced migration. In this session, we delved into the nexus of climate change and land governance.
In the wake of global climate action, large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) for renewable energy and carbon offset projects will increase the pressure on land. In addition, deforestation-free value chains that are also intended to reduce carbon emissions will require changes in the conduct of LSLAs. This session assessed the scope of these investments and policies and reviewed their livelihood and environmental impacts in the Global South.
Land tenure security is one of the best incentives for the rural poor to adopt measures to mitigate and adapt to climate change
Under the umbrella of the Land Dialogues series, the second webinar of this year’s series “Indigenous Land Rights and the Biodiversity COP15: Six Months On” took place on May 25th, 2023. The webinar drew in a little over 350 participants and featured panelists from Indigenous women leaders to programme officers. The series is organized by a consortium of organizations, including the Land Portal Foundation, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Tenure Facility.
The WOLTS experience has given me hope for the future. Change is possible.
Two months ago, the Land Rights Standard was launched alongside the UN Climate Change Conference (CoP27) in Egypt—a first-of-its-kind document developed over the course of three years with more than 70 Indigenous, local, and Afro-descendant groups, elegantly but firmly laying out pathways for “taking into account and respecting their distinct and differentiated rights, including their autonomy, priorities, and cosmovision,” as is stated in its preamble.
One year ago, thanks to a Solutions Journalism Network LEDE Fellowship and in collaboration with the Land Portal, I started a project to find stories of responses to the damage caused to the land and environment. During this time, I affirmed that communities and people around the world are working to protect and heal the environment, even if those stories hardly make it to the mainstream media.
In the last 15 years, Paraguay lost a greater share of its forest than almost any other country on Earth. While soy farming once drove deforestation in the east, the focus of Paraguay's forest loss has since moved west to the low-lying, thorn-forested Chaco, where cattle ranching has claimed over 3.7 million hectares (9 million acres) of forest for pastureland – an area about the size of the Netherlands – between 2001 and 2015.