News on Land

A film about one of the world's last hunter-gatherer tribes living in Malaysia's rainforest premiers on Thursday, with its indigenous actors urging authorities to formally grant them land rights after a decades-long battle.

Paradise War, which debuts at the Zurich Film Festival, follows the 1984 expedition made by intrepid Swiss environmentalist Bruno Manser who lived with Malaysia's Penan nomads and made their plight globally known.

• Indonesia’s parliament is rushing to pass a controversial mining bill by Sept. 30, when the current legislators’ term ends.
• President Joko Widodo had previously asked for deliberations of this bill and other contentious pieces of legislation to be suspended, following massive student-led protests that have turned deadly.
• Watchdogs say the bill panders to the interests of mining companies, granting them bigger concessions, longer contracts, and fewer environmental obligations.

She’d lived on this historically black D.C. block for 40 years. Now the city she knew was vanishing, and so was her place in it.

She was moving slowly, but she needed to speed up. Her blue sandals clicked on the hardwood floor, echoing off the empty green walls of the two-bedroom rent-controlled apartment in Northwest Washington where she had spent the past 40 years of her life. Reluctantly, she spun from one room to the next, packing boxes, folding sheets, unfolding sheets, opening cupboards, closing cupboards, doing a mental inventory.

The climate crisis threatens to dramatically alter people's relationships with the land on which they rely. Meanwhile, many climate solutions are themselves land-intensive: solar and wind energy, carbon dioxide sequestration, and finding places for people displaced by climate change to live and grow food. The result is an ever-increasing competition for land, as well as governance and justice challenges that are both intractable and inextricably linked.

The Indonesian government is failing to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples who have lost their traditional forests and livelihoods to oil palm plantations in West Kalimantan and Jambi provinces, Human Rights Watch said in a report. Loss of forest occurs on a massive scale and not only harms local indigenous peoples but is also associated with global climate change.

 Palm oil plantations in Indonesia and commercial fruit orchards in the Philippines have uprooted indigenous people and rural communities from their land, despite laws put in place to protect them, human rights groups said.

Powerful businesses, corrupt officials and paramilitary groups are fuelling violence against rural communities in the Philippines, Britain-based Global Witness said on Tuesday.

New technologies used to map areas in developing nations for granting titles and aiding development could be misused to further marginalize vulnerable people, analysts and land experts warned on Friday.

From Kenya to the Philippines, authorities are using satellite imagery, drones, GPS navigation systems and artificial intelligence to map customary lands, fix boundaries, and modernize land records to verify ownership and issue titles.

Community rights activist Eakachai Itsaratha recalls his brush with death after being abducted in southern Thailand.

Bangkok, Thailand - As an outspoken community rights activist in a country with one of the worst records of enforced disappearances in the region, Eakachai Itsaratha long understood that one day he too would become a target.

Informal settlements are increasingly emerging in cities in developing countries across the world, including Africa.

Non-ownership of land impacts delivery of government services in Bihar

THE FIRST TIME Sadhu Manjhi was introduced to the idea of having a toilet of his own, he felt his head spin. “A landless man like me! Imagine that,” he told himself.

Sadhu lives in Bihar, where more than three in five rural households have no land as per the 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census. He is a member of the Musahar caste—one of the state’s most socially and economically backward groups—listed under the larger category of Mahadalits. Sadhu was born partially blind.

The kids are not all right. For more than a year, young activists have been staging climate strikes around the globe. They are about to get much bigger. Sparked by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg in Sweden last year, the school walk-out movement has spread to what organizers hope will be millions of children and adults around the world protesting for action to end the climate crisis.