By Kathleen Buckingham and Lars Laestadius
This is the third installment of WRI’s blog series, New Perspectives on Restoration. The series aims to share WRI’s views on restoration, dispel myths, and explore restoration opportunities throughout the world.
Trees have become an iconic image of environmentalism, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we should plant millions of them.
This year's Goldman Environmental Prize winner says the battle for land rights in Liberia is just getting underway. Alfred Brownell is the recipient of the 2019 Goldman Environmental Prize and founder of Green Advocates an NGO and academic at Northeastern University School of Law
Humans are the most populous large mammal on Earth today, and probably in all of geological history. This World Population Day, humans number in the vicinity of 7.5 to 7.6 billion individuals.
The Sengwer are an indigenous hunter-gatherer people living along the slopes of the Cherangany Hills in the western highlands of Kenya. Their estimated population is 33,187.
We cannot restore tropical forests without restoring the rights of their traditional owners.
Implementing a coordinated global response to curb demand for energy and eliminate further deforestation would reduce the need to deploy artificial carbon dioxide removal technologies, according to a decisive report from the U.N. scientific panel on climate change.
Granting forest dwellers legal rights to their traditional lands helps fight deforestation and climate change, but the vast majority of the world's forests remain under government control with limited access for communities, researchers said.
Only about 14 percent of forests, or about 527 million hectares, were legally owned or designated for local communities in 58 countries surveyed by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group.
Malcolm Childress visited Honduras in April as part of a fact-finding and speaking delegation sponsored by the US State Department.
On the northern coast of Honduras, palm forests give way to white sands, blue seas and one of the world’s most spectacular coral reefs. But, in a story that will be familiar to observers of land rights worldwide, that beauty has brought developers eager to build, and conflict around the ownership of land occupied and claimed by longstanding Garifuna communities.
After years of efforts, land rights are finally getting global attention. With several land-related indicators included in the Sustainable Development Goals, the land sector now has the unique opportunity to create an unprecedented momentum around land tenure issues and bring it to a higher level on the development agenda. Our goal is, of course, to contribute to the success of the SDGs, but also to be part of sustainable development in its real and practical sense!
By Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Chairman of the Advisory Board of CCSI, University Professor at Columbia University, and Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network
