News on Land

The government has approved 116 projects valued at MAD 81 million for 93 “sulaliyat” groups, who hold the rights to communal agricultural land.

The projects, which were approved this year, aim to support income-generating projects for rights holders, said Minister of the Interior Abdelouafi Laftit on Wednesday, November 7.

• According to research released yesterday, small-scale gold mining has led to the destruction of more than 170,000 acres of primary rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon over the past five years.
• Scientists based in Peru’s Madre de Dios region at Wake Forest University’s Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation (CINCIA) say they’ve developed a new method for detecting artisanal-scale mining that is 20-25 percent more accurate than the tools used in the past.
• The researchers combined the CLASlite forest monitoring technology with Global Forest Change

At the Land Portal, we are in the business of building an information ecosystem for land governance that supports better informed decision and policy making at national and international levels. We realize that these concepts are often difficult to grasp, and that the linkages between open data and land rights are not exactly commonplace “dinner table” talk.

Politics trumps policy in the push for a constitutional amendment to expressly allow land expropriation without compensation. That much became clear at Thursday’s bruising and at times chaotic meeting of Parliament’s constitutional review committee. But in the world of politics it’s not necessarily what’s up front and visible that determines outcomes, particularly with the looming 2019 elections. 

We are honored to announce that Omidyar Network has renewed its support of the Land Portal Foundation with an investment of $400,000 to support the integration and visualization of spatial data and the dissemination of SDG-related data and information, as well as provide core funding for institutional enhancement, over the next two years.

UDALGURI, India — Not long ago, this lush land was nothing more than sand and stone. In the absence of shade trees, Alfred Daimari remembers carrying an umbrella to protect his face from the scorching sun and shielding his dinners from a fierce, dusty wind.

“Now look at it,” Daimari said, gesturing at the thick canopy that hangs over the bench where he’s resting in Udalguri, a district in the Himalayan foothills of northeast India near the Bhutan border.

• Papua New Guinea has embarked on a surge of building projects in Port Moresby as the capital city prepares to host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.
• In the buildup to the summit, thousands of people were evicted from a settlement in Paga Hill, which is next to the conference hall where the APEC Leaders’ Summit will be held.

Tribal group reignite protest on anniversary of attack that saw members killed, thousands 'evicted from ancestral lands'

Rights activists and Santals have renewed calls on the government to return large swathes of disputed land to the ethnic minority community in northern Bangladesh.

The call was made at a protest attended by hundreds of Santal people in the Govindaganj area of Gaibandha district on Nov. 6.

As extreme rainfall brings more landslides, farmers are turning to bamboo to protect their land - and making an income from it

MAKOMBOKI, Kenya - Lunch at Macharia Mirara's house in the village of Makomboki used to be a cheery occasion as his children chattered about their morning at school. But these days, no one is home.

The family is absent because of the threat from an adjacent loose earth slope, which runs about a kilometre down to the valley floor in central Kenya's Murang'a County.

By most accounts, Benjamin Ramos died doing exactly what he had always done as a human rights lawyer: helping his clients free of charge.

LOS CEDROS, Ecuador (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Ecuador is facing a lawsuit this week for giving mining companies exploration rights to a protected forest in one of the country’s most biodiverse regions without local consultation.

Brought by the local Cotacachi government, the lawsuit requests the regional court place an injunction on all mining activity within Los Cedros in the Intag Valley, a lush area of rivers and Andean tropical forest.