ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar — Cyclone Batsirai's torrential winds and rain are hammering Madagascar, after landing on the island's east coast late Saturday.

An estimated 45,000 people have been displaced by the tropical storm, the National Office for Risk and Disaster Management said on Sunday.

After gaining strength in the Indian Ocean with gale-force winds reaching peaks of 145 miles per hour, the cyclone made landfall near Mananjary, 500 kilometers (310 miles) east of the capital Antananarivo, according to the island's meteorology department.

Researching Land Reform in Zimbabwe is a new book compiling 20 articles the Zimbabwe Land Research team has published over the last 20 years. All the chapters bar one have appeared as peer-reviewed journal articles, with the material covering the period from early land invasions in 2000 to more recent developments. All the articles are available, many as open access, but there was a demand to have these all in one place.

A total of 1,315,890 plots of land from across the country have been temporarily registered to the Government, after their owners failed to meet the December 2021 deadline of registration of all plots of land in the country.

Speaking to The New Times, Grace Nishimwe, the Head of Land Administration Department at Rwanda Land Management and Use Authority said that any unregistered land in the country falls under this category.

Wetlands – land consisting of swamps or marshes – have, during the centuries, been demonised as places of pestilence, drained for agriculture or urban development, and polluted or paved over.

But today, they are emerging as crucial ecosystems in the fight against climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate, has warned of the need to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.

Residents of Macleantown near East London say wealthy outsiders are grabbing land from them, with the complicity of municipal officials. Buffalo City denies it but has launched a probe.

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Photo: Johnnie Isaac

February 2, 2022 (GLOBAL) — Six years into the establishment of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Land Portal is re-examining progress made on land-related SDG indicators. More than a dozen land-related indicators are housed over five SDG goals. The newly updated SDG Land Tracker features completely revised and updated narratives for 13 land-related indicators describing why the indicator is important and how the indicators are measured and monitored.

Public finance has a key role to play in agriculture. Instead of propping up corporate interests, it should learn from local producers

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19 January 2022, 3.13pm

Pastoralist communities are effectively losing their rights to their communal lands through an obscure and predatory engagement process that involves conservation NGOs and self-seeking community leaders

The recent arrests of staff of a Ugandan civil society organization, the Africa Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO), have been criticized as an attempt to stifle defenders of human rights and the environment in the East African country. AFIEGO has been prominent in campaigns against sugarcane plantations in the country’s western Bugoma Forest, as well as defending the rights of communities affected by Uganda’s growing oil industry.

By the OECD’s estimates, every year countries in Africa are cheated out of more than $50 billion in taxes, mainly by multinational corporations that run mines, oil wells, and plantations on the continent.