News on Land

NAIROBI (Landscapes News) – Rangelands cover almost half the world’s land surface. Consisting mainly of grasses, and plants, they have often been considered barren lands that should be converted to agriculture.

Indonesia has been slow in granting forest tenure to indigenous peoples and local communities after an historic court ruling five years ago mandated that the government recognize their tenure rights.

A study released by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) on Monday revealed that the total amount of land designated for indigenous peoples and local communities only grew from 0.22 million hectares  in 2002 to 0.79 million in 2017. The total areas owned by local peoples only reached 0.01 million ha last year.

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Women sitting in verandahs and pounding oil palm fruits, while chewing betel nuts, is a common sight in Saikaa village in Mizoram’s Kolasib district. Small plastic bottles of palm oil line the houses adjoining the roads that weave their way across the forests in this mountain village. Five years ago though, before Kolasib was declared India’s first oil palm cultivation district, the scenes here were different.

Although they are often the actual cultivators, the lack of land rights among women farmers in Odisha has resulted in chronic distress because they are unable to get government loans or compensation over crop loss

As global warming continues to outpace the tepid international response, a range of environmentalists are raising their collective voice to demand full rights and recognition for those long associated with land stewardship connected to climate mitigation: indigenous peoples.

If Liberia will remain peaceful and stable, it means that President George Weah needs to prioritize the Land Rights Bill that has already been passed through the Legislature, the Civil Society Oraganizations (CSO) Working Group on Land Rights Reform has said.

On September 4, the House of Representatives concurred with the Senate to pass the  2014 Land Rights Bill. With the decision by both houses, the bill is now expected to be presented to President Weah for approval to finally complete the enactment process.

Opponents say the proposal would validate a cause of the fighting throughout the Balkans in the 1990s - so-called ethnic cleansing

BUJANOVAC, Serbia (Reuters) - Shaip Kamberi, the mayor of Serbia's municipality of Bujanovac, will start living a long-time dream if Serbia reaches an agreement to swap some of its territory with neighbouring Kosovo.

NAIROBI (Landscape News) – Land tenure rights are widely recognized as being central to advancing sustainable development goals, but they are only one part of the picture.

As it happens, tenure rights to trees are entangled with, but different from, those to land, meaning both must be acknowledged to incentivize stewardship of the landscape by local communities, said delegates at the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) in Nairobi.

Would you sign a lease that gave your landlord “sole discretion” in deciding on how any disputes you have with them would be resolved? Would you spend months or years negotiating a contract with a business partner only to have it include a clause saying it is not legally enforceable?

Today, the High Court of Australia will begin hearing the most significant case concerning Indigenous land rights since the Mabo and Wik native title cases in the 1990s.

New maps show indigenous peoples are custodians of 40% of Earth’s protected and ecologically intact landscapes

The world’s remaining ‘wild places’ are often envisaged to be packed full of biodiversity, and bereft of one troublesome species: Homo sapiens. But a new global study shows that about 40% of protected and ecologically-intact landscapes are actually under indigenous peoples’ custodianship.