News on Land

While climate negotiators meet behind closed doors to implement the Paris Agreement, climate activists have put out their own set of demands.

On Monday, as delegates entered the maze of the COP24 conference center in Katowice, Poland, they were greeted by the upbeat sound of a Polish marching band. On Tuesday it was a chorus: the voices of dozens of young climate activists from all over the world.

"We demand so much more from COP24," the group sang in unison. "We remember, we resist, we rise."

Bureau for Economic Growth, Education and Environment (E3) FSL-01 Senior Land and Resource Governance Officer

Official Position Title: Natural Resources Officer, Backstop 40, FSL-0401-01
Functional Position Title: Senior Land and Resource Governance Advisor

Location of Position: U.S. Agency for International Development, Bureau for Economic Growth, Education, and Environment, Office of Land and Urban (E3/LU)

Result of Service

Result of Service

Mapuche leaders met Saturday and discussed a set of demands for the Chilean government, mainly the demilitarization of Mapuche regions. 

A group of Mapuche leaders Saturday met in Temucuicui to decide next possible steps after the assassination of Camilo Catrillanca on Nov. 14 by Chilean Carabineros (police).

The leaders decided on four demands they will put forward to the Chilean state.

As a new report reveals a rise in the number of indigenous activists being killed for defending forest and land rights worldwide, Down To Earth poses questions about the situation in India

Indigenous or tribal people fighting to defend their forests, land and other resources in India are being targeted prominently, though not in the way one sees in other nations, say tribal and forest rights activists.

A United Nations expert says Ecuador has awarded concessions for energy projects on indigenous land without consulting local people

QUITO - Excluding indigenous Ecuadoreans from the country's development plans has made their rights "invisible", a U.N. expert said, citing a government push to approve oil and mining projects to extract resources from their territories.

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, made the comments on Thursday at the end of an 11-day fact-finding mission in the country.

The Horn Plateau, with its myriad of lakes, rivers and wetlands, has been a spiritual home for local Dehcho Dene peoples for millennia. In October, the Dehcho First Nations Assembly designated these lands and waters, called Edéhzhíe (eh-day-shae), as an Indigenous protected area (IPA), designed and managed or co-managed by Indigenous communities.

Indigenous communities across Malaysia face relentless harassment, intimidation, arrest, violence and even death as they peacefully resist attempts to force them off land they consider ancestral, a report by Amnesty International reveals today.

As UN Women hails the bravery of women’s rights defenders, we pay tribute to some of those killed in the past year

Rising misogyny and an increase in the restrictions placed on women’s freedom worldwide mean the work of campaigners who defend their rights is more important than ever, the head of UN Women has said.

A herder in Kenya's northern Laikipia was shot dead last week when police tried to confiscate his cattle

NAIROBI - Renewed invasions of white-owned ranches by herders in Kenya's northern Laikipia region a year after similar invasions led to deadly conflicts is a sign of cracks in the country's land use system, experts said on Wednesday.

A herder was shot dead when police tried to confiscate his cattle after they invaded one of the ranches last week, police and ranchers said.

Between 2010 and 2015, forests around the Mediterranean have expanded by two per cent, but that has come at the price of significant degradation and increasing vulnerability to climate change, population pressures, wildfires and water scarcity, warned a new UN report launched on Tuesday.