How China can implement sustainability initiatives.

A new Primer on Citizen Advocacy and Desertification is intended to help guide the efforts of citizen groups and Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) interested in promoting policies and practices that help stop the spread of desertification.

Pok Hong is an indigenous Kuy activist who has been instrumenal in the campaign to save the Prey Lang Forest. EarthAction recently sponsored her visit to the United States as a delegate to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York. She is currently continuing her tour of the U.S. and meeting with officials in Washington D.C. If you would like invite Hong to speak at your meeting, event, or for a media publication, please email contact[at]earthaction.org. Read the interview below to get to know Hong and why she's fighting to save the Prey Lang.

Cambodia's government, facing growing protests by villagers and warnings about disappearing wilderness, suspended the granting of land to domestic and foreign companies on Monday in a move to curb forced evictions and illegal logging.Rights groups in the impoverished but resource-rich Southeast Asian country said the temporary measure did not go far enough and a permanent ban was needed.The government said in the order, signed by Prime Minister Hun Sen, it would confiscate any concessions that involved the grabbing of villagers' land and illegal logging.

On April 16, it was announced from San Francisco that Evgenia Chirikova, one of the founders and organizers of the Defend Khimki Forest movement, based in Moscow, Russia, is the 2012 European winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. "EarthAction salutes Chirikova for her focused, persistent and effective work to protect this important forest on the outskirts of Moscow," says Lois Barber, EarthAction's Co-founder and Executive Director. Starting in July 2010 and throughout 2011, EarthAction rallied its global network in support of Chirikova's work to protect the Khimki Forest from being the site of a planned highway connecting Moscow and St. Petersburg. For its part, EarthAction issued a series of global Action Alerts mobilizing people and organizations worldwide to take action in support of the Khimki forest and the local organizers in Moscow.

EarthAction, a global network of over 2,000 organizations in 160 countries, and Cultural Survival, an advocacy organization for Indigenous Peoples’ rights, have begun a worldwide campaign to protect the Prey Lang forest in Cambodia—its people, its trees, its life. The international campaign supports and complements the local efforts of the Prey Lang Community Network, a group of mostly Indigenous people whose villages surround the Prey Lang forest and whose livelihoods depend on the forest’s resources. Prey Lang, about the size of Rhode Island, is the last large primary forest of its kind on the Indochina peninsula.

Watch this simple but powerful demonstration by Yukie Hori of the UNCCD about why we must combat desertification.

Despite the international ban on the trade of Elephant Ivory in 1989, it is estimated that every year 38,000 elephants are killed for ivory sales on the black market.Poachers sell raw ivory for around $20 per pound. Most of this ivory eventually makes its way to China, where it is resold at $700 per pound—or more. This means that a single tusk from a full-grown bull elephant can fetch upwards of $50,000 on the black market. The poaching of elephants for their ivory tusks requires the death of some of the most beautiful and endangered animals on our planet.

You are invited to participate in a Virtual World Community Forum on Desertification and Citizen Action—Saving the Life-Giving Soils of the World that will take place Tuesday, February 28 through Tuesday, March 6, 2012. The Forum is being co-sponsored by the secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), EarthAction, and The Global Citizens Initiative (TGCI). The Forum is being made available at no cost to participants.

In this International Year of the Forest, please help save Cambodia's Prey Lang (pronounced ‘Pray Long’) forest, the last large primary forest of its kind on the Indochinese peninsula. About 200,000 people, mostly indigenous Kuy, live in or around the forest and are dependent on it for their livelihoods and culture.