“Secure land tenure transforms dormant assets into active capital—unlocking access to credit, encouraging investment, and spurring entrepreneurship. These are the building blocks of job creation and economic growth.

When landowners have secure property rights, they invest more in their land. Existing data shows that with secure property rights, agricultural output increases by 40% on average. Efficient land rental markets also significantly boost productivity, with up to 60% productivity gains and 25% welfare improvements for tenants…

Building on a long-term partnership with the World Bank, the Government of Côte d’Ivoire has dramatically accelerated delivery of formal land records to customary landholders in rural areas by implementing legal, regulatory, and institutional reforms and digitizing the customary rural land registration process, which is led by the Rural Land Agency (Agence Foncière Rurale – AFOR).

This has enabled a five-fold increase in the number of land certificates delivered in just five years compared to the previous 20 years.”

From World Bank.

“The world’s largest and most influential development bank said on Wednesday it would lift its longstanding ban on funding nuclear power projects.

The decision by the board of the World Bank could have profound implications for the ability of developing countries to industrialize without burning planet-warming fuels such as coal and oil.

The ban has been formally in place since 2013, but the last time the bank funded a nuclear power project was 1959 in Italy. In the decades since, a few of the bank’s major funders, particularly Germany, have opposed its involvement in nuclear energy, on the grounds that the risk of catastrophic accidents in poor countries with less expertise in nuclear technology was unacceptably high.

The bank’s policy shift, described in an email to employees late on Wednesday, comes as nuclear power is experiencing a global surge in support.

Casting nuclear power as an essential replacement for fossil fuels, more than 20 countries — including the United States, Canada, France and Ghana — signed a pledge to triple nuclear power by 2050 at the United Nations’ flagship climate conference two years ago.”

From New York Times.

“The FDA has issued its first ever approval on a safety consultation for lab-grown fish. That makes Wildtype only the fourth company to get approval from the regulator to sell cell-cultivated animal products..

Wildtype salmon is now on the menu at Haitian restaurant Kann in Portland, Oregon, and the company has opened a waitlist for the next five restaurants to stock the fish. It joins Upside Foods and Good Meat, two companies with permission to sell cultivated chicken in the US, while Mission Barns has been cleared by the FDA but is awaiting USDA approval for its cultivated pork fat.”

From The Verge.

“President Trump has issued an executive order ‘leading the world in supersonic flight’ which requires the Federal Aviation Administration to remove restrictions on supersonic flights within U.S. airspace. The existing noise rules have been in place since 1968, and a corresponding FAA restriction on flights exceeding Mach 1 established in 1970. These rules previously prevented Concorde operations on transcontinental flights.

The FAA has reviewed this rule in recent years but made no changes to the overland flight restriction. The new Trump executive order requires the FAA to repeal its ‘prohibition on overland supersonic flight, establish an interim noise-based-certification standard, and repeal other regulations that hinder supersonic flight.’

The FAA would need to repeal the prohibition on overland supersonic flight in 14 CFR 91.817 within 180 days and issue a Notice of Proposed Rule Making to establish a standard for supersonic aircraft certification within 18 months of the order.”

From Forbes.