• Critics of a government plantation scheme have slammed the program following revelations that only a fraction of forest reserves cleared for plantations over the past decade have actually been replanted.
• An investigation by environmental news site Macaranga found that only 5% of the 77,331 hectares (191,089 acres) of forest reserves cleared in Pahang state for plantations between 2012 and 2020 were replanted.
• A Pahang state opposition lawmaker has called the program a “cover-up” for a logging scheme, while an environmental activist has criticized

A lucrative plot of Tashkent land belonging to a major Uzbek steel plant has been sold to a company close to President Shavkat Mirziyoev’s son-in-law, at a fraction of its market value, documents showed.

• The premium on parcels of land in eight major cities that completed their first round of auctions for the year was up from 2021
• Most of the winning bids in the latest auctions have come from state-owned developers

Main photo: Land in China can only be sold three times a year, according to a centralised scheme introduced by the central government in early 2021. Photo: EPA-EFE

This documentary explores women’s struggles for customary land rights.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 90% of land is held under customary tenure.

Half the women in the region lose their land in the event of divorce or death of a spouse.

The number of hungry people in the Sahel and West Africa has quadrupled over the last three years, currently reaching 41 million, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) reported on Friday.

Issuing the alert, WFP said that the figure rose to 43 million when the Central African Republic was included in the food insecurity estimate.

Cape Town, South Africa faced a crippling drought between 2016 and 2018. The widely reported “Day Zero” crisis, wherein the city faced the real possibility of the taps being turned off, presented an acute shock and highlighted major vulnerabilities in the city’s water supply system, which relies largely on six large dams.

As KwaZulu-Natal continues to count the cost of the floods that have ravaged the province, poor residents who have lost their homes are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance, said the shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo.

“The number of people who have lost their lives has yet to be confirmed, but our members witnessed people, including at least two babies, being taken by the water and many people are missing,” said the organisation, which is active in KwaZulu-Natal’s informal settlements.

• On March 27, Nepali authorities evicted about 100 members of the Indigenous Chepang community living in Chitwan National Park and set fire to their huts.
• They allege the community members are encroaching on national park land, famous for its rhinos and tigers, and building new settlements despite warnings and resettlement plans rolled out by the government.
• However, community members say that only providing shelter, and not land for subsistence farming and their traditional livelihoods, does not solve the community’s problems.
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