As a five-star hotel and amusement park are built in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, locals are fearful of losing water sources and say traditional livelihoods of 10,000 residents will be harmed.

The Institute for Collective Action of the Erasmus University Rotterdam is offering two PhD positions to candidates who would like to pursue their PhD studies in the area of collective action. The focus will be on an in-depth micro-analysis of internal functioning of two different types of “institutions for collective action” (ICA).

About the positions

The relationship between size and heterogeneity of both members and resources and their impact on the institutional design of ICA will be studied for:

• Reconnaissance Energy Africa, an oil and gas company with headquarters in Canada, has recently begun exploratory drilling in northern Namibia.
• Conservationists and local communities are concerned over the potential environmental impact that oil and gas extraction could have on such an important ecosystem.
• Northern Namibia and Botswana have a number of interconnected watersheds including the Okavango Delta – the potential for pollutants to enter watercourses and spread throughout the region are a particular concern.

On December 21, Reconnaissance Energy Af

Yang Zeqiang's boat chugs across the Yangtze ferrying a few people and sacks of grain -- his new source of income after all fishing was halted along China's longest river in the name of environmental protection.

As a boy, Yang remembers seeing his father and grandfather head out in the early morning dark to earn a living fishing the upper Yangtze in China's southwest.

"I grew up here on the Yangtze River, where my family have been fishing for generations," said 52-year-old Yang, who also fished for two decades until the ban.

Main photo: A Keppel employee stands at a company shipyard in Singapore. The group sees floating data centers as the next step in diversifying beyond its shipbuilding roots.   © Reuters

With demand for data centers expected to skyrocket in an increasingly digital and interconnected world, Singapore's Keppel Corp. wants to change the game by building these notoriously energy-intensive facilities out at sea.

Fishermen say a development on two islands could destroy their livelihoods

KARACHI, Nov 3 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - In the quarrel over building a gleaming "new Dubai" on two small islands off Pakistan's Arabian Sea coast, the voices of the fishermen who have plied these waters for centuries often go unheard.

Steering his boat out of the Jamote jetty in the village of Ebrahim Haideri, 25-year-old fisherman Shakil said the islands around which he catches fish, crab and shrimp are now patrolled by armed guards.

(main photo: Selangor Menteri Besar Amirudin Shari says the factory building will be demolished within the next few months)

KUALA LUMPUR: The Selangor government will instruct the factory responsible for the pollution of Sungai Selangor, which led to water disruptions to over 1.2 million people in the Klang Valley, to vacate the land it occupies.

At a press conference, Selangor Menteri Besar Amirudin Shari said the factory in the Sungai Gong Industrial Area in Rawang had already been closed.

The government authorities seem content that people are obeying the lockdown regulations which keep on changing at the local level. The authorities believe that there is a positive correlation between the lockdown on the streets and public safety from the spread of the virus: the stricter the lockdown, the safer the population.

The Land Portal published a new country portfolio for Algeria. The country portfolios examine how countries govern their land, the challenges they face, and the innovative solutions they find to manage land tenure issues. Each portfolio comes with a detailed description of the land governance context and a collection of related blogs, news, publications, statistical datasets and more.