Peru - As the environment changes around us, finding solutions to benefit the common good has never been more pressing. Enter multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs), a seemingly simple idea of getting everybody in one room. These forums bring together government, communities, civil society organizations and business, to share information and find resolutions to commonly held challenges. Among the academic, donor and practitioner world, they have been held up as a panacea in addressing land-use change and climate mitigation.

For Indigenous peoples across the Americas, urgent threats imposed by the industrial extraction of natural resources has characterized the 21st century. The expansion of industry has threatened Indigenous territories, cultures and sovereignty.

NEW DELHI - A push to formalise land claims, map settlements and digitise records is not always in the best interests of vulnerable communities, and may even lead to greater rights abuses, analysts warned on Friday.

From Peru to the Philippines, governments are curtailing the rights of indigenous communities and forcibly resettling people in slums, land campaigners say, while mapping lands and digitising land records with the aim of increasing efficiency.

The Indonesian government launched the One Map Policy Geoportal (KSP Geoportal). This policy involves a more detailed map of land use, hence aiming at resolving overlapping claims - as well as preventing the emergence of new cases - across the country, including in forest areas. The map was launched by Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Tuesday (11/12).

MIRI: Two crucial pioneering projects have started in Sarawak. First, an effort to publish the oral history of the 6,000 indigenous settlements statewide, and second, to use drones and GPS devices to do aerial mappings of native land.

The documentation of native oral history is meant to ensure that rich ancestral traditions and ways of life will not be forgotten.

Drones do not just map households faster, cheaper and accurately, but the maps provide a strong visual template of engagement for communities

Paraguay is home to vast swathes of wild land — forests, savannas, mountains — but over the past 20 years, it’s lost huge amounts of that. Agriculture and development have deforested 9 million acres (roughly the size of the Netherlands) in Paraguay since 2001, the majority of it to enterprises like soy and cattle.

New maps show indigenous peoples are custodians of 40% of Earth’s protected and ecologically intact landscapes

The world’s remaining ‘wild places’ are often envisaged to be packed full of biodiversity, and bereft of one troublesome species: Homo sapiens. But a new global study shows that about 40% of protected and ecologically-intact landscapes are actually under indigenous peoples’ custodianship.

A new study makes a significant contribution to the growing body of research showing that recognizing the land rights of and partnering with indigenous peoples can greatly benefit conservation efforts.

The Land Portal is an independent nonprofit foundation based in The Netherlands. The Land Portal pioneered the open data revolution in the land sector and is committed to building an information ecosystem for land governance that ultimately supports better informed decision and policy making at local, national and international levels.

Cases of double ownership of land are common in Kenya, where cartels collude with officials to create parallel titles for parcels want to acquire illegally

NAIROBI/ACCRA, Feb 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - On a recent Saturday afternoon, Joseph Njuguna received a worrying call. Without his permission, someone was excavating a small piece of land he had bought six years ago.

When he reached the site he found an excavator digging up soil, and two yellow Tata trucks waiting to ferry it away.

• For decades the Papua region in Indonesia has remained the country’s least-understood, least-developed and most-impoverished area, amid a lack of transparency fueled by a strong security presence.
• Activists hope their new website, Mata Papua, or Eye of Papua, will fill the information void with reports, data and maps about indigenous welfare and the proliferation of mines, logging leases and plantations in one of the world’s last great spans of tropical forest.