A network to understand the changing socio‐ecology of the southern African woodlands (SEOSAW): Challenges, benefits, and methods

Findings from the Socio-Ecological Observatory for the Southern African Woodlands (SEOSAW) will underpin the sustainability of two of the largest industries on the continent: wood fuels and timber. The article describes a new network of researchers’ (SEOSAW) work in long-term, in situ, measurements that will characterize the changing socio-ecology of the woodlands of southern Africa. These woodlands encompass the largest savanna in the world, hugely important to rural and urban livelihoods, but chronically under-studied. A new development is the use of data from permanent sample plots (PSP) in Bayesian model-data fusion analyses of ecosystem carbon cycles. The article includes an extensive bibliography.National Environmental Research Counci

Community land formalization and company land acquisition procedures: A review of 33 procedures in 15 countries

Indigenous and community lands, crucial for rural livelihoods, are typically held under informal customary tenure arrangements. This can leave the land vulnerable to outside commercial interests, so communities may seek to formalize their land rights in a government registry and obtain an official land document. But this process can be time-consuming and complex, and in contrast, companies can acquire land relatively quickly and find shortcuts around regulatory burdens. This article reviews and maps 19 community land formalization and 14 company land acquisition procedures is 15 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Comparing community and company procedures identifies multiple sources of inequity