Logging companies have “acquired” roughly 1m hectares of Indigenous peoples’ territory in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 2000, according to a new study.
This is part of a wider trend in which companies and governments take advantage of weak or unclear land rights to lease out swathes of communal land in the global south.
Many of these deals involve foreign companies using the land for logging, intensive agriculture, fossil-fuel extraction and mining. Increasingly, firms are also seeking land that they can use to sell carbon offsets.
The research, published in Land Use Policy, identifies around 18m hectares of land in Cambodia, Colombia and the DRC that have been acquired in large-scale deals.
Overall, around 6% of the acquired land overlaps with areas that are either legally recognised as belonging to local and Indigenous communities or, in the case of the DRC, are traditionally managed by Indigenous groups.
‘Vast land resources’
Large swathes of land in the global south have traditionally been managed by local communities and Indigenous people. However, their claims to these areas – their land tenure rights – have long been under threat.
Between the 15th and 20th centuries, European powers seized territory from many Indigenous people across the global south. During decolonisation, many of these “land grabs” were never reversed and much of the formerly communal land passed straight into the hands of newly created countries, particularly in parts of Africa and Asia.
There has been growing recognition of traditional ownership in recent years. Over 2015-20, 103m hectares of communal lands in 73 countries were given legal status, according to analysis by the Rights and Resources Initiative, a global coalition of groups that advocates for the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities.
This brings the legal recognition of traditional ownership to around 1,265m hectares, or 19% of land in the countries assessed, as of 2020.
However, this legal recognition has frequently not stopped companies from entering these regions to harvest or extract a range of commodities, from palm oil and timber to copper and gold. The study authors say communal land is often viewed as an untapped resource, writing:
“The lack of private ownership and intensive production systems probably led to the notion that countries in the global south still harbour vast land resources suitable for commercial production.”
Officials in global-south nations lease out “vast tracts of land” to these companies – many of which are based overseas – without seeking communities’ consent or guaranteeing them benefits, the authors say. These rental agreements can last for several decades.
Study co-author Dr Christoph Kubitza, a research fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, says that even in nations where communal lands are legally recognised, such claims are sometimes poorly enforced by central governments. He tells Carbon Brief:
“You have some element in [national] legislation that speaks to communal lands, but implementation just does not work.”
In order to understand the scale of conflict between communal land rights and the transfer of land to companies, Kubitza and his colleagues merged data on the location of “large-scale land acquisitions” from the Land Matrix monitoring initiative with maps of communal land ownership assembled by LandMark and Open Development Cambodia.
(The definition of “large-scale land acquisition” varies, but Land Matrix broadly defines it as an attempt to buy, lease or otherwise acquire an area of land that is 200 hectares or more in size.)
They used data covering the period 2000-22 from Colombia, Cambodia and the DRC – three rainforest nations where governments provide varying levels of protection for communal lands.
‘Alarming’
The researchers identified 18.1m hectares of land that have been targeted for large-scale acquisitions in Cambodia, Colombia and the DRC since 2000.
The vast majority of this land – 14.2m hectares – is in the DRC, amounting to roughly 6% of the nation’s surface area.
In Cambodia, 2.3m hectares – roughly 13% of its land – has been involved in these deals, whereas in Colombia the figure is around 1.6m hectares, which is around 1% of its area. In total, most of the acquisitions in these three nations were by international companies.
The researchers also found that the DRC has the largest amount of communal lands under threat.
Of the 14.2m hectares targeted for large land acquisitions in the DRC, they estimate that roughly 1m hectares – 7% of the total – is land managed by Indigenous groups in the north and west of the country. These lands have predominantly been infringed by logging companies, with around 75% of these deals being struck with international entities.
The blue areas in the map below indicate Indigenous peoples’ lands and the green areas show the locations of large-scale land acquisitions in the DRC. Red indicates the areas where there is a risk of overlap between the two.
In Colombia and Cambodia, where there are more legal protections in place, the areas of communal land infringed upon are lower – 53,369 hectares and 43,150 hectares, respectively, the study says. This equates to 3% of the leased land in Colombia and 2% in Cambodia.
The authors highlight the situation in the DRC as particularly “alarming”.
However, they note that their finding of 1m hectares of overlap is only an estimate, based on the presence of Indigenous people in certain regions and extrapolations of total communal land use from detailed mapping in a smaller area. (For Colombia and Cambodia, the figures are based on legally defined communal lands.)
This is due to the lack of firm definitions of communal land in the DRC, as Kubitza explains:
“You don’t have exact numbers because if you don’t have any progressive legislation, you also don’t have a lot of mapping being done – so you have to rely on estimates.”
Dr Raymond Achu Samndong, a monitoring, evaluation and learning manager at the International Land and Forest Tenure Facility, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the 1m hectare figure could be an underestimate, given the size of the country and the problems it faces.
“Land grabbing is a growing phenomenon in the DRC,” he says, pointing to communities with whom he has worked where the government has allocated large tracts of land for concessions and the affected communities were not informed.
He adds that that the country’s inaccessibility makes monitoring and enforcing land rights difficult:
“You have statutory and customary law that conflicts in some areas where the government has limited access and control.”
In areas where customary local chiefs are essentially the land owners, they have also been known to participate in and profit from “land grabbing”, Samndong says.
Underestimates
The study highlights how the recognition of collective land ownership can help to insulate communities from “land grabs”. However, the researchers also acknowledge the limitations of such recognition.
As in much of Latin America, Colombia has provided clear recognition of communal rights, with roughly one-third of the nation’s land falling under Indigenous and Afro-Colombian control. Yet estimates suggest that up to 9.43m hectares of the nation’s communal lands are still not legally recognised.
In Cambodia, too, the study authors accept that their assessments of communal lands being encroached upon by business interests are likely to be underestimates.
A UN report in 2020 found that despite Cambodia being home to 455 Indigenous communities, only 30 Indigenous land titles had been handed out by the government.
Luciana Téllez Chávez, an environment researcher at Human Rights Watch who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that while the legislation exists to recognise communal ownership in Cambodia, “the implementation of that legislation is lagging and the process is onerous”. She adds:
“Any study that is only assessing overlap between formally recognised Indigenous territories and land acquisitions would be missing most of the picture, as most territories have not been formally recognised.”
The new paper notes this shortcoming. The researchers also use data on officially recognised Cambodian Indigenous groups and find that around one-third of them are based within the sites of large land acquisitions.
They note that while “more extensive and detailed data are missing”, the impact of land acquisitions on communal areas could be larger than their initial results suggest.
Kubitza and his colleagues highlight that frameworks for states and companies to guide their use of land already exist. They stress that global supply chain regulation – of the kind being rolled out for forest products in the EU – could help to protect communities from land grabs if properly enforced.
In the DRC, Samndong says there have been “baby steps” towards progress from the central government, with the development of a community forest law and a new land law in the works.
Carbon offsets
The study also highlights the mounting pressure placed on communal lands by foreign governments and companies seeking to meet their climate goals by purchasing carbon offsets from overseas.
Carbon offsetting involves an entity paying for emissions to be reduced somewhere else, for example by preserving trees that can absorb carbon dioxide (CO2), while it continues to produce its own emissions.
The researchers point to specific carbon-offsetting projects in Cambodia and the DRC that have infringed on forest communities. These communities often have little understanding of the projects and derive few, if any, benefits, the researchers say.
Téllez Chávez, whose own work has identified human-rights violations at a forest offsetting project in Cambodia, says the research is “right to note carbon-offsetting projects as a potentially important driver of large-scale land acquisitions”. The Cambodian government plans to expand offsetting projects across much of the country’s protected areas.
Kubitza says this trend does not sit well with a vision of a global “just transition”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“It cannot be that people who conserve forests for centuries don’t receive anything and investors just come in and make money with these kinds of business models.”
The post Loggers have ‘grabbed’ around 1m hectares of Indigenous land in DRC appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Loggers have ‘grabbed’ around 1m hectares of Indigenous land in DRC
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Energy crisis
ENERGY SPIKE: US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks across the Middle East have sent energy prices “soaring”, according to Reuters. The newswire reported that the region “accounts for just under a third of global oil production and almost a fifth of gas”. The Guardian noted that shipping traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which normally ferries 20% of the world’s oil, “all but ground to a halt”. The Financial Times reported that attacks by Iran on Middle East energy facilities – notably in Qatar – triggered the “biggest rise in gas prices since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
‘RISK’ AND ‘BENEFITS’: Bloomberg reported on increases in diesel prices in Europe and the US, speculating that rising fuel costs could be “a risk for president Donald Trump”. US gas producers are “poised to benefit from the big disruption in global supply”, according to CNBC. Indian government sources told the Economic Times that Russia is prepared to “fulfil India’s energy demands”. China Daily quoted experts who said “China’s energy security remains fundamentally unshaken”, thanks to “emergency stockpiles and a wide array of import channels”.
‘ESSENTIAL’ RENEWABLES: Energy analysts said governments should cut their fossil-fuel reliance by investing in renewables, “rather than just seeking non-Gulf oil and gas suppliers”, reported Climate Home News. This message was echoed by UK business secretary Peter Kyle, who said “doubling down on renewables” was “essential” amid “regional instability”, according to the Daily Telegraph.
China’s climate plan
PEAK COAL?: China has set out its next “five-year plan” at the annual “two sessions” meeting of the National People’s Congress, including its climate strategy out to 2030, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The plan called for China to cut its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 17% from 2026 to 2030, which “may allow for continued increase in emissions given the rate of GDP growth”, reported Reuters. The newswire added that the plan also had targets to reach peak coal in the next five years and replace 30m tonnes per year of coal with renewables.
ACTIVE YET PRUDENT: Bloomberg described the new plan as “cautious”, stating that it “frustrat[es] hopes for tighter policy that would drive the nation to peak carbon emissions well before president Xi Jinping’s 2030 deadline”. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth analysis of the plan. China Daily reported that the strategy “highlights measures to promote the climate targets of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030”, which China said it would work towards “actively yet prudently”.
Around the world
- EU RULES: The European Commission has proposed new “made in Europe” rules to support domestic low-carbon industries, “against fierce competition from China”, reported Agence France-Presse. Carbon Brief examined what it means for climate efforts.
- RECORD HEAT: The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said there is a 50-60% chance that the El Niño weather pattern could return this year, amplifying the effect of global warming and potentially driving temperatures to “record highs”, according to Euronews.
- FLAGSHIP FUND: The African Development Bank’s “flagship clean energy fund” plans to more than double its financing to $2.5bn for African renewables over the next two years, reported the Associated Press.
- NO WITHDRAWAL: Vanuatu has defied US efforts to force the Pacific-island nation to drop a UN draft resolution calling on the world to implement a landmark International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on climate, according to the Guardian.
98
The number of nations that submitted their national reports on tackling nature loss to the UN on time – just half of the 196 countries that are part of the UN biodiversity treaty – according to analysis by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Sea levels are already “much higher than assumed” in most assessments of the threat posed by sea-level rise, due to “inadequate” modelling assumptions | Nature
- Accelerating human-caused global warming could see the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C limit crossed before 2030 | Geophysical Research Letters covered by Carbon Brief
- Future “super El Niño events” could “significantly lower” solar power generation due to a reduction in s