Observers marked 2023 as a “make-or-break” year for voluntary carbon markets and a key “inflection point” for their role in addressing climate change and global deforestation. Proponents highlight that forest carbon projects channel much-needed funds towards forest protection and are pivotal to climate change mitigation. However, critics emphasize that carbon deals set incentives for over-crediting. Moreover, carbon offsetting allows the biggest emitters to simply outsource their climate mitigation efforts with potentially adverse impacts for affected communities.

Under the umbrella of the Land Dialogues series, the last  webinar of this year’s series “Navigating Loss and Damage : A Path to Justice for Indigenous Peoples” took place on December 5th, 2024. The webinar drew in a little over 250  participants. The series is organized by a consortium of organizations, including the Land Portal Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Tenure Facility and this particular webinar was  

The key takeaways from the World Urban Forum 12, which took place in Egypt between 4-8 November 2024.

The Land Dialogues nurture a community of trust with Indigenous peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendent peoples by producing webinars that bring unlikely voices and perspectives together.

Defending the rights of nature represents a big step forward in the fight against climate change.

Speaking truth to power is an art, but increasingly a lost art. This goes as much for academia as for the rest of the world. Indeed and unfortunately, much of academia reflects the world in which it functions and often makes the challenge of deepening social justice harder rather than smaller. To put it bluntly, much of academia has resorted to instrumental and naïve beliefs in innovation, technology and efficiency (which dominate the natural sciences) or (as in much of the social-economic sciences) increasingly arcane niche debates that too often revolve around virtue-signalling, methodological-theoretical wizardry or apolitical pragmatism. What we seem to have lost to a good degree – though to be sure: it was never a dominant endeavour and at the same time it has never been absent either – is the art of speaking truth to power.

Under the umbrella of the Land Dialogues series, the first webinar of this year’s series “Gender and Biodiversity : How Indigenous and Local Community Women Safeguard Nature” took place on June 13th, 2024. The webinar drew in a little over 300 participants and featured Indigenous and local community leaders from around the world. The series is organized by a consortium of organizations, including the Land Portal Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Tenure Facility and this particular webinar was organized in collaboration with the GATC.  

Imagine a world where every community has the data, information and knowledge it needs to make informed decisions about the land they call home. A world where the power of information is harnessed to hold leaders accountable for managing essential natural resources sustainably. This is the transformative potential of open and accessible land data in the fight against climate change, which is the defining challenge of our time, threatening the lives and livelihoods of communities worldwide.