New law will allow people of Toledo to act as legal guardians for Lake Erie, and polluters could be sued to pay for cleanup costs

The latest report from Mokoro's WOLTS project team is the product of rigorous field research in a third Mongolian community, in collaboration with the Mongolian NGO, People Centered Conservation (PCC). The report addresses critical issues at the intersection of gender, land, mining and pastoralism in Tsenkher soum, in Arkhangai aimag in central-western Mongolia.

About 8 million indigenous people in India are in danger of being evicted from forests that their ancestors have lived in for millennia. This grave injustice follows a shocking supreme court ruling that rides roughshod over the rights of India’s indigenous people, known as Adivasi, or tribals.

Decades-long legal disputes over land could cost tens of millions of dollars, research says

LONDON - Food companies doing business in Africa risk becoming bogged down in decades-long legal disputes over land that could cost tens of millions of dollars, according to a report released on Monday.

From sugar to coffee and palm oil, agribusiness firms could find that the land they are using is already claimed or occupied by local people, researchers said.

Rapid felling of South Sudan's teak forests, largely by foreign-owned firms, has drawn protests - and brings environmental risks

KATIRE, South Sudan - Sprawling teak forests, planted nearly a century ago to supply lumber and government income, are fast disappearing in South Sudan as timber companies take advantage of the country's chaos to extract large amounts of wood, environmentalists say.

CANBERRA — A report from the U.N Environment Programme released last month seeks to make governments look beyond environmental law, and focus on gaps in implementation.

The report analyzes the global environmental rule of law and provides an important evidence base to help advocacy efforts on proper enforcement of laws.

“Governments talk about how good their laws are but they don’t necessarily talk about how these are being implemented.”

Four coffee co-operatives in Peru will be trained in sustainable farming, learning about the best use of organic fertiliser and robust seeds

BOGOTA, Jan 29 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Thousands of coffee farmers in Peru hope to produce higher and more profitable crop yields to better cope with the impact of climate change under a landmark United Nations-backed project.

More than 1.3 billion people live on farmland that is deteriorating and producing less, putting them at risk of worsening hunger, water shortages and poverty, the U.N. says.

Historically, farmland could be used for solar or for farming - not both. But that could change

WASHINGTON, Jan 28 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Nathan L'Etoile and Caroline Taylor are both passionate about preserving farmland, but they differ over a question being posed across the United States: should farmers devote some, or even all, of their land to solar energy?

Residents of the northern highlands of Nicaragua were typically overlooked by modern infrastructure development. The Association of Rural Development Workers has changed this, securing access to electricity and clean drinking water for local people for the first time. Today the association is also generating enough profits from hydro power to fund US$300,000-worth of development in the region.

It’s a familiar refrain in environmental circles: to be effective and sustainable, landscape restoration initiatives must be founded on local communities’ desires and needs.

Only about a tenth of the nearly 93 billion tonnes of materials utilised annually - including minerals, metals, fossil fuels and biomass - are currently put back into service

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - More of the billions of tonnes of materials the world uses each year must be recycled and reused to keep climate change in check, researchers said on Tuesday.

• The authors of a new report argue that investment in forests as a climate change mitigation strategy is just as important as addressing emissions from the energy sector.
• Despite the recognized potential contributions of forests to slowing the warming of the earth, they aren’t typically seen as a permanent solution to climate change.