News on Land

Far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s personal crusade to extinguish indigenous rights and devastate indigenous territories just hit a wall. Two, actually. Both Brazil’s Supreme Court and Brazil’s top congressional leaders handed Bolsonaro setbacks over his executive decision to move control of protecting indigenous lands to the agriculture ministry, which is controlled by members of the agribusiness lobby known for its opposition to indigenous land rights.

Myrna Cunningham is the first Miskitu woman to study at a university. In 1973, she received a degree in medicine and returned to her home region in the isolated northeast of Nicaragua, where she was born in a small village surrounded by lush forest. Working as a surgeon, she served in more than one hundred remote villages.

• In Niger, where agriculture is the main source of income, the message is simple: Losing your soil means losing your livelihood.
• The ability to grow food is inextricably linked to the productive capacity of the soil. In the case of Niger’s soil, the picture is bleak: The soils hold poor structural stability, low nutrient holding capacity, low water retention capacity… the list goes on.
• How can soil management be improved in a region that has little to no resources?

PRESIDENT John Mangufuli has smelt a rat in the distribution of 5,975 hectares of land repossessed from Kaunga and Mbarali rice farms and directed Mbeya regional authorities to submit the names of all beneficiaries to his office. The land in question meant for ditribution to villagers in the area but President Magufuli suspected that it could have landed in wrong hands. 

BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Guatemala’s subsistence farmers and indigenous people living in poor rural communities are most affected by rising temperatures and unpredictable rainfall linked to climate change, a leading researcher said on Friday.

Poverty makes the Central American country highly vulnerable to the impact of global warming that damages harvests and causes food shortages, said Edwin Castellanos, lead author of a report by the Guatemalan System of Climate Change Sciences (SGCCC).

We cannot talk about traditional knowledge without talking about the right to land, territories and resources – for us, it is ecosystem-based and language-based – they are linked to each other, environmental activist Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim told Landscape News.

• Widespread use of fuelwood and charcoal for cooking and heating is a notable barrier to achieving development and conservation goals in sub-Saharan Africa, yet previous attempts at introducing better fuel technologies have largely failed.
• To address energy use at the source, recent efforts are underway that seek to improve adoption of new technologies, such as solar-powered equipment or efficient cookstoves, in rural communities.

Gender and Land Rights Phase II Project to highlight and support initiatives that enhance rural women’s participation in land related decisions has yielded results at Nanton in the Northern Region.

The project was executed by the Network for Women’s Rights (NETRIGHT) Ghana, in partnership with the Grassroots Sisterhood Foundation (GSF), a Northern Region based NGO.

It also aimed at strengthening rural women’s control over their livelihood options in the context of the increasing commercial pressure on land and natural resources in the country.

Kenya is experiencing changes in its weather patterns. This includes changes in temperatures and wind and rainfall patterns – particularly shifts in the timing and length of rainy seasons. This has led to more droughts and floods. These changes have increased the vulnerability of pastoralists households whose livelihoods come from livestock like goats and cows.

The project may prove to be biggest effort so far to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

NEW YORK - A Dublin-based company plans to erect "mechanical trees" in the United States that will suck carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, it said on Monday, in what may prove to be biggest effort to remove the gas blamed for climate change from the atmosphere.

“When invaders come from the outside, they bring hunger and death,” said Jair Seixas Reis, chief of the Maraguá people in Brazil’s state of Mato Grosso. “We don’t know what to do other than resist. It’s very dangerous. I’m asking for help. The world needs to speak out. Amazonia is the lungs of our earth and if the lungs don’t work, the world will die.”