Por Zulema Burneo

Casi tres décadas atrás, el 9 de agosto fue designado como el Día Internacional de los Pueblos Indígenas por la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas. En América Latina, aunque se han logrado avances en el ámbito legal en cuanto a la garantía de sus derechos, basta ver un poco más allá para encontrar serias paradojas que nos obligan a levantar la voz antes que a celebrar el día.

Forests around the world play a major role in curbing or contributing to climate change. Standing, healthy forests sequester more atmospheric carbon than they emit and act as a carbon sink; degraded and deforested areas release stored carbon and are a carbon source.

The LAND-at-sale project in Colombia was the first LAND-at-scale project to kick off. With its mid-term review just concluded, the project provides interesting insights into the challenges of not only achieving tenure security but sustaining it over time within a complex context. LAND-at-scale interviewed Piet Spijkers at Kadaster International, to learn more about their approach to achieve and sustain tenure security in Colombia through the LAND-at-scale project.

Submission Deadline: All manuscripts should be submitted for consideration by December 31, 2021.

The global environmental crisis is intertwined with the crisis of social and economic inequality. From coal plants to palm oil plantations, economic activities that threaten the planet are concentrated in communities with less power and wealth. “You can’t have climate change without sacrifice zones,” writes Hop Hopkins, “and you can’t have sacrifice zones without disposable people.”1

This blog was written by Barbara Fraser and published by EarthBeat at: https://www.ncronline.org/earthbeat/politics/indigenous-peoples-lives-depend-their-lands-threats-are-growing-worldwide

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In the last 15 years, Paraguay lost a greater share of its forest than almost any other country on Earth. While soy farming once drove deforestation in the east, the focus of Paraguay's forest loss has since moved west to the low-lying, thorn-forested Chaco, where cattle ranching has claimed over 3.7 million hectares (9 million acres) of forest for pastureland – an area about the size of the Netherlands – between 2001 and 2015.

A conversation with Julie Maldonado, Associate Director at Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN), and Co-Director of Rising Voices: Climate Resilience through Indigenous and Earth Sciences.

Much of the world’s rural landscapes are technically managed by national governments with limited recognition of, or support for, the rights and management responsibilities of the rural poor who live in these areas. In an era of large-scale land acquisitions for global commodity production, this has led, in some cases, to governments allocating vast tracts of land and resources to companies with limited or no consultation of the people affected.

For hundreds of years, pastoralists in Ethiopia’s lowlands have relied on strong customary land tenure systems to survive. Historically, legislation has failed to clearly define communal rights to rangelands, and the specific roles and responsibilities for both communities and local government to administer and manage these resources. This legislative deficiency prevented pastoral communities from fully exercising their constitutional rights to land (Ethiopia’s Constitution broadly recognizes pastoral communities’ right to access land and prevents their involuntary displacement).