This document has been initially released online as a Land Portal data story. You can find it online here.

The climate crisis is no longer projection, but reality. Forests play a key role in regulating the global climate and are critical to preventing runaway global heating. They are also a treasure trove of biological diversity, and home to many indigenous peoples and forest communities. Yet forests continue to be burned and destroyed at an alarming rate. The primary driver of deforestation is agribusiness, with palm oil a chief culprit.

La résilience climatique mondiale est une question de vie ou de mort. Dans les paysages forestiers, 1,3 milliard de petits exploitants agricoles, de communautés et de peuples autochtones doivent organiser leur résilience climatique pour survivre. Du fait qu’ils sont coresponsables de la gestion d’une grande partie des forêts restantes et de l’approvisionnement alimentaire d’une nombreuse population pauvre à travers le monde, leur résilience est également essentielle aux solutions climatiques mondiales.

A report by RFUK reveals the growing extent, and impact, of transport and energy infrastructure development in the Congo Basin – which is on its way to becoming a major driver of deforestation in the world’s second largest rainforest. The eight case studies featured in this report show that, while certain projects may bring some economic benefits, environmental and social impacts have been overwhelmingly higher than necessary due to bad planning, corruption, failure to follow better practice, and simple negligence.

Meeting sustainable development goals requires policies that account for interrelatedness in social and environmental issues such as land tenure and deforestation. This work takes advantage of a nationwide titling campaign in Panama to explore the effect of private titling on forest cover across a heterogeneous landscape covering all stages of forest transition and diverse tenure arrangements.

A quarta edição do relatório Cumplicidade na Destruição, realizado em parceria entre a Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil e a Amazon Watch resgata brevemente a trajetória da mineração de larga escala no Brasil, em especial seu histórico de avanço sobre os povos indígenas, e destaca o novo ímpeto que a atividade ganhou durante o governo de Jair Bolsonaro. Rios contaminados, florestas devastadas, comunidades inteiras sem acesso à água – quando não foram destruídas ou levadas pela lama tóxica.

HIGHLIGHTS

Mapping Together helps people use Collect Earth mapathons to monitor tree-based restoration. Collect Earth enables users to create precise data that can show where trees are growing outside the forest across farms, pasture, and urban areas and how the landscape has changed over time. Building on WRI and FAO’s Road to Restoration, a guide that helps people make tough choices and set realistic goals for restoring landscapes, Mapping Together takes this process one step further.

This report highlights the importance and urgency for climate action initiatives of protecting the forests of the indigenous and tribal territories1 and the communities that look after them. Based on recent experience, it proposes a package of investments and policies for climate funders and government decision-makers to adopt, in coordination with the indigenous and tribal peoples.

Cambodia has suffered some of the highest rates of deforestation (measured as a percentage of forest cover) of any country since the 1970s – and rates have been increasing significantly in the past decade. Even the country’s so-called protected areas have been severely impacted, despite supposedly being safeguarded under Cambodian law.

Global Forest Watch estimated that between 2001 and 2018, Cambodia had lost 557 000 hectares of tree cover in protected areas, representing an 11.7% loss of the total protected area.

Indicator 15.3.1: Proportion of land that is degraded over total land area