Banner image: Aerial photo taken on June 27, 2022 shows villagers working in terraced fields in Huojiagou Village of Shimen Town in Lulong County, north China's Hebei Province. Recent years Lulong County has implemented the land transformation of barren hills and wild grass land into terraced fields. Farming facilities including field paths and drainage channels have been constructed to improve agricultural production conditions. (Xinhua/Yang Shiyao)

The National Assembly (NA) on June 24 adopted the Forest and Nature Conservation Bill of Bhutan 2021 with 38 ‘Yes’, and two “ No” votes and two abstained.

Chairperson of the Environment and Climate Change Committee, Gyem Dorji, said that the Act, which was enacted in 1995, was not amended for more than two decades.

“During these years, the forest department was guided by executive orders and notifications, which were incorporated into rules, regulations, and guidelines,” he said.

The controversial River Club site in Cape Town, where giant international retailer Amazon plans to build a South African headquarters, has been embroiled in a protracted legal battle – with rival indigenous groups campaigning for and against the development. Here are the voices of indigenous communities against the development.

International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (Nairobi)

How could it be that we possessed and protected this land for millennia and this sacred link is in danger of disappearing from Tanzania's history in merely 60 years?

The island nation of Cabo Verde is facing record levels of food insecurity due to drought, the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine, affecting some 181,000 people, or 32 per cent of the country, the World Food Programme (WFP) reported on Thursday. 

Recent hard-won gains in food security and nutrition are at risk, the UN agency said, forcing the government this week to declare a social and economic emergency. 

Just over a decade ago, Shajahan Bepari made a living by farming paddy and jute on a small scale and selling poultry reared on his 0.15-acre land in Shariatpur's Zajira.

But then, the government came calling as plans for the construction of a hitherto elusive bridge over the Padma gained steam.

Shajahan soon parted with his land and a place to call home for a sum that was one and a half times higher than its market value.

Known as the rice basket of the country, the delta now sees houses tumbling into rivers and livelihoods lost

When a riverbank subsided and gave way, Tran Van Bi’s house collapsed into a river in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta four years ago. Everything his family had accumulated over 32 years was gone in an instant.

Tensions are spiking once again in the chronically turbulent eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The M23 rebel movement — widely thought to be long dead — has dramatically resurrected. And DRC president Félix Tshisekedi has accused Rwandan president Paul Kagame of again backing it with military support.

Solo ramas y pedazos de troncos tirados en el suelo quedaron donde antes había bosque. Eso fue lo que dejaron los taladores ilegales que, entre 2008 y 2011, entraron a la zona forestal de la comunidad de Cherán, en la región purépecha de Michoacán. En tres años, la devastación alcanzó a cerca de 7133 hectáreas.

Main photo: Sri Lanka facing worst economic crisis (file photo-representational photo). Photo by AP/PTI.

Sri Lanka’s army established its Green Agriculture Steering Committee (GASC) to supplement and promote the food security programme in the country facing worst economic crisis.

The Sri Lanka Army will take part in a farming drive aimed at cultivating over 1,500 acres of barren or abandoned state land to multiply food production and avert any shortage in the future, according to a media report.

Sub-division of ancestral land has all but wiped out farming in Kisii, driving poverty and malnutrition and pushing the population into migration in search of greener pastures.

When my father died in the early 1990s, my mother and my two siblings moved to Kisii in Southwest Kenya. Widowed in her early 30s, my mother inherited about four acres of my father’s ancestral land on which to eke out a living for her young family.