In a recent episode of the podcast Uncharted Ground, host Jonathan Levine spoke with Namati about building a global environmental justice movement. You can find it on any major podcast platform or listen to the episode (and access the full transcript)  on Stanford Social Innovation Review's website. A  recap of the episode, written by SSIR, is below.

The main objective of the LAND-at-scale program is to directly strengthen essential land governance components for men, women and youth that have the potential to contribute to structural, just, sustainable and inclusive change at scale. An ambitious objective, that cannot be achieved in isolation. Alignment is, therefore, a key factor in all LAND-at-scale activities - be it at project level for our country interventions or through our collaborative approach to knowledge management.

Over time, land registration has been associated with a diversity of desired outcomes, ranging from modernization and the promotion of sustainable agricultural production to protection of the livelihoods of small-scale producers notably women, peacebuilding or even nurturing good practices of local governance. In this session we have discussed, for a range of settings: How confident are we about the results of registration and formalization program? How have they been justified and have the ambitions been reached?

This session was inspired by the Idai and Kenneth cyclones that hit Mozambique in 2019, as well as military instability in the north of the country, resulting in massive displacements. In this session, presenters discussed the consequences of and prospects for resettlement legislation and procedures in Mozambique in light of increased climate change vulnerability, focusing on impacts on livelihoods and relations with host communities.

This session aimed to generate discussions on different experiences of infrastructure development that addresses climate change in cities. It paid particular attention to new transportation “corridor” development, which has increasingly become popular as a way to redesign the rapidly growing city to reduce traffic congestions and thereby carbon emissions, promote affordable public transportation system, and to make public green spaces accessible for all the citizens. However, it is known that it significantly affects ways that urban land is used, accessed and governed by local communities.

PhD research provides key inputs to strengthen our knowledge base on land access, land governance and challenges related to development, crisis and resilience. This is why LANDac reserves a special place in the programme to discuss their contributions.

This session zoomed in on the local situation and challenges faced by grassroots communities and women in some low-Income countries. It provided an overview of support provided by Civil Society organizations (and governments) facilitating communities, women in particular, to step up the efforts to strengthen their land rights and to generate resilience in face of the climate and COVID-19 challenges they are facing.

More secure land tenure provides much better opportunities to face climate and COVID-19 challenges by investing in high biodiversity local food & income systems.

This roundtable session considered how the ‘practice’ of crisis signals an abrupt temporal ‘rupture’ and how this makes it possible to obscure underlying structures of power, particularly in the context of the relation between land and climate. In particular, it focused asked participants to focus on two questions: 1) within your research, how do you see the politics of crisis framing at work and 2) How might a frame of crisis contribute to reinforcing uneven /exploitative relations.

Key Takeaways

In this session, we explored the linkages between Strategic Environmental Assessment and land governance. SEA often deals with land-related aspects in planning, and has the potential to ensure that they are satisfactorily dealt with in decision making. This potential could reach further if SEA would be applied more widely and, most importantly, before irreversible changes to land and land use are made. Doing SEA before ESIA for concrete investments can help avoid some of the land related challenges and conflicts currently encountered.

Landscape restoration creates opportunities for securing the land and natural resource rights of local land users as well for improving soil health, sequestering carbon, and enhancing biodiversity. In order to achieve synergies between these interrelated aims, restoration practitioners must carefully consider how projects are managed, particularly with regard to supporting equity in project design and planning—the focus of this blog.  

With crucial United Nations conferences due this year on both climate change and biodiversity, experts have called for Indigenous People to be included in the meetings, for current laws protecting forests and the wildlife within to be enforced, and for money to be allocated towards the further protection of such lands by those who live there.

This blog was written by Barbara Fraser and published by EarthBeat at: https://www.ncronline.org/earthbeat/politics/indigenous-peoples-lives-depend-their-lands-threats-are-growing-worldwide

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