News on Land

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

SINGRAULI, India -- After years of developing the thermal energy sector to meet the demands of a nation prone to outages, India is now facing a power glut with over 30 such producers teetering on bankruptcy. Yet the government shows no letup in its drive for more coal power and the effect of oversupply is rippling out to other sectors such as banks.

India's embrace of coal has allowed it to triple power generation over the past 15 years to 344 gigawatts, surpassing Japan to become the world's third largest electricity market.

NAIROBI, Kenya – Burkina Faso and Tanzania announced at the just-concluded 2018 Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) Africa Conference that they are committed to restoring 5 million and 5.2 million hectares of their degraded forest landscapes, respectively, by 2030.

India's $7.5 bln plan to turn 100 urban centres into Smart Cities by 2020 does not address structural issues and ignores the needs of low-income and marginalised groups, experts say

LAVASA, India - When David Cooper and his wife were looking for somewhere to retire, they wanted a place by a river or a lake, away from Mumbai's congested streets, worsening pollution and vanishing green spaces.

For more than half a century, the indigenous Kaiowá and Guarani people of Brazil have been deprived of their ancestral lands, and consigned to small reserves where it is impossible to maintain their traditional livelihoods. Generations of these indigenous peoples’ lives have been marked by violence and vulnerability as they have tried to reclaim what, according to the Brazilian constitution, is rightfully theirs.

Dar es Salaam — Access to potentially-productive land is crucial to combating discrimination against females. When they are denied access, they are disadvantaged, economically powerless.

Tanzania is among developing nations where gender inequality denies women the right to access land for economic production.

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.

New UN report highlights drastic increase in violence and legal harassment driven by rapid expansion of development projects on indigenous lands