The Land Portal has been following the news about USAID’s shutdown with much sadness and concern. During its 60-plus years of existence, the agency has acted on many fronts of international development, funding and managing thousands of initiatives to ensure good health, education, food security, women’s empowerment and, not least, good land governance in many countries of the Global South.
On January 23, 2025, the Land Portal Foundation and Mekong Region Land Governance (MRLG) convened a webinar to explore the evolving landscape of agricultural investments in the Mekong region. Experts from various sectors joined to discuss the impact of industrial crops, smallholder farmer integration into transnational value chains, and the resulting economic, environmental, and social transformations.
The pursuit of effective and inclusive land governance has consistently been hindered by a critical challenge: ensuring the long-term financial sustainability of land services. While technological innovations and increased community engagement have paved the way for progress, many land administration systems still depend heavily on external funding.
As we approach the end of another remarkable year, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for the collective effort that fuels the Land Portal. Your engagement, insights, and contributions make the Land Portal a trusted source of land information, and your feedback inspires us to improve as a convening space and platform for the global land community.
Observers marked 2023 as a “make-or-break” year for voluntary carbon markets and a key “inflection point” for their role in addressing climate change and global deforestation. Proponents highlight that forest carbon projects channel much-needed funds towards forest protection and are pivotal to climate change mitigation. However, critics emphasize that carbon deals set incentives for over-crediting. Moreover, carbon offsetting allows the biggest emitters to simply outsource their climate mitigation efforts with potentially adverse impacts for affected communities.
December 3, 2024 — At the Land Portal, we are committed to advancing the accessibility and long-term sustainability of knowledge on land governance. The World Bank Land Conference is one of the premier venues for knowledge exchange on land, and we were thrilled when the organizers requested our support in making the 2024 conference session materials available to the public in our Land Library, which now hosts over 73,000 publications on land governance.
