• A court in Indonesia has sentenced two indigenous farmers to eight and 10 months in prison respectively for harvesting palm fruit from land whose ownership is contested by the community and a palm oil firm, PT Hamparan Masawit Bangun Persada.
• The ruling appeared to ignore evidence showing that the villagers are the rightful owners of the land; the defendants say they will appeal and also file a lawsuit against the company.

Like different land management systems across the world, land management systems varied in different territories. 

While indigenous communities in Cambodia stayed home to stem the Covid-19 outbreak, a Vietnamese rubber firm bulldozed their land. Experts say disputes arising from Cambodia's complicated land management system will be difficult to resolve.

When the indigenous Kreung and Kachok communities locked down their villages in Cambodia’s Ratanakiri province in March to keep safe from the novel coronavirus, no one knew change was afoot in their ancestral forest.

A Vietnamese agribusiness company in eastern Cambodia has illegally cleared old-growth forests, wetlands and spiritual sites on land that it pledged to return to indigenous communities. The land move reneges on promises the company, Hoang Anh Gia Lai, made in a mediation process with the World Bank.

New reports from eastern Cambodia say a Vietnamese rubber company has illegally cleared swaths of land in Ratanakiri province belonging to local indigenous communities, in violation of a World Bank-mediated agreement to return the land to local residents. 

Communities in biodiverse Tanintharyi Region are spurning big, top-down projects and seeking recognition for their own approach to conservation.

From its forested borderlands in the east, to vast mangrove forests and hundreds of island ecosystems in the Andaman Sea to the west, Tanintharyi Region is a bastion of nature and biodiversity. The region is home to one of the largest remaining expanses of intact low-elevation evergreen forest in Southeast Asia, a stronghold for endangered and endemic species including tigers, tapirs and pangolins.

As indigenous groups lock down in villages, trespassers are taking advantage of their absence to steal their land

By Richard Pearshouse, Amnesty International’s head of crisis and the environment, and Jurema Werneck, executive director of Amnesty International Brazil

The Land Portal Foundation is seeking a dynamic and highly motivated Information Management Officer to support us in leading the information and data sharing needs of the Land Portal.  The Information Management Officer will ensure the development of information partnerships, lead the development of land information ecosystems, contribute to open data capacity building efforts, as well as promote and enrich land data standards. 

The Land Portal Foundation seeks dynamic and highly motivated Coordinator to establish and lead an international land-related Network of  Researchers to scale up the land data and information available on the Land Portal and to cement the Land Portal’s role as a reputable sources of well-founded and accessible land information. This is a part- time position (i.e. 2 days/week) for a 12-month period, with the possibility of renewal based on performance. Women and people from the Global South are encouraged to apply.

In the wake of devastating bushfires across the country, and with the prospect of losing a billion animals and some entire species, transformational change is required in the way we interact with this land.

Australia’s First Peoples have honed and employed holistic land management practices for thousand of generations. These practices are embedded in all aspects of our culture. They are so effective, so perfectly suited to this harshest of continents, that we are the oldest living culture in the world today.

Analysis reveals corruption more pervasive in countries where money influences political power

More than two-thirds of countries – along with many of the world’s most advanced economies – are stagnating or showing signs of backsliding in their anti-corruption efforts, according to the 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) released today by Transparency International.