The nexus between Tenure Security and Climate Change Mitigation and Management Practices
Whilst the importance of secure land rights for both climate change mitigation and management is well supported by research, the underlying arguments and the way in which governments, international organizations and civil society can contribute to improving tenure security are less well known. The paper draws from IPCC’s 2019 Special Report on Climate Change and Land and provides an overview of the literature on this topic, including issues such as tenure security, conflict over land, women’s land rights and considers these both from the perspective of mitigation and management. With this overview in mind, it presents entry points for programming on the nexus between climate change and land.
1. Introduction
The mounting economic losses and destruction from changes in weather patterns and climate-related disasters have made it harder to bridge the gap on ambitious goals like ending poverty and hunger, reducing inequality, and providing clean water. Against this backdrop, securing land rights is emerging as a welcome yet still undervalued strategy for achieving the development goals of the SDGs, the Sendai Framework and the Paris Agreement.
How people, communities, and individuals gain access to land, fisheries, and forests largely impacts the eradication of hunger, poverty, and the sustainable use of the environment. In particular for rural people, especially low-income individuals, natural resources and livelihood are one and the same since having access to natural resources constitutes their only opportunity to earn a decent income, achieve food and nutrition security, and it also paves the way for access to social benefits such as health care and education. Contrarily, a lack of secure land access can disempower rural people and expose them to combined threats of poverty, hunger and conflicts.
Therefore, the importance of land rights for equitable and sustainable development has long been recognized by the international community. However, contemporary drivers exacerbated by climate change are combining to generate new vulnerabilities and increased marginalization of already marginalized people. Tenure-insecure individuals, confined to "poverty traps" in marginal and degraded lands, are increasingly vulnerable to growing scarcity of land resources and inequities in their allocation since they lack the necessary protection and security to develop adaptive capacities.
At the COP26, indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) were publicly recognized as the best placed to preserve land, forests and biodiversity, with the Glasgow Declaration formally acknowledging local communities’ crucial role in global efforts to avoid runaway climate change, since they are estimated to hold 50% of the world’s total land area. However, a report by International Land Coalition denounced how IPLCs’ legal ownership rights still extend to only 10% of the land they manage [1]. Therefore, in order to be able to implement climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies, it is necessary that rural communities are first empowered through secured and inclusive tenure reforms and land rights that guarantee increased stability, assurances on the tenure over their land and returns over their investments.
2. Context
Over the last decade, some progress has been made in global awareness regarding the importance of tenure security and good land governance. and in agreeing global principles and guidance on how to implement responsible governance of land, fisheries and forests to contrast climate change. The enactment of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT) by the UN Committee on World Food Security in 2012 was a major landmark, as was the launch of the African Union’s Framework and Guidelines on Land Policy in 2009. This was backed up with the inclusion of specific land targets and indicators under five of the seventeen SDGs. Also, some countries have made notable progress, including the introduction of innovative multi-stakeholder processes as well as legislation and regulations to strengthen land governance. However, data and statistics shows how the scale of the challenge is still enormous:
- The Land Coalition Framework for Action on Land Tenure Security for People, Planet and Prosperity (2021) describes how there is still a large gap between norms and practice in many countries and tenure security remains a distant dream for almost a billion people, in particular for women, the elderly, youth, indigenous peoples and local communities.
- According to the data collected by Prindex in 2020, nearly 1 billion people consider it likely they will be evicted from their land or homes in the next 5 years. This represents nearly 1 in 5 adults in the 140 countries surveyed. Within certain countries and regions, while among certain groups, insecurity is even higher [2].
- FAO and IFPRI “Gender Gap in Land Rights” analysis (2018) revealed that women constitute less than 15% of the world’s landholders.
- The 2013 Human security report by HSRG explained that land disputes were key factor in over two thirds of 416 cases of non-state conflict in Africa from 1989-2011.
- Over two thirds of all human rights defenders killed in 2020 were working on environmental, land or indigenous peoples’ rights [3].
As it stands, the international community is not on track to achieve any of the SDG targets on land by 2030. Climate change and rising pressure on land, have resulted in whole populations on large tracts of land still lacking tenure security. Meanwhile responsible investments in land able to create resilience, raise sustainable land management practices and promote food security and gender equality are hindered by weak land governance systems that too often lead to disputes, unlawful land transactions, and poor outcomes for communities and businesses alike.
3. Links between Tenure Security and Climate Change
The term tenure security refers to individuals' right to access land and all of the natural resources and property associated with it. It implies the certainty that people's entitlements will be recognized by others and protected in cases of specific challenges.
The link between insecurity of tenure and land degradation was one of topics addressed during the UNCCD COP14, whose discussions were informed by the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land (2019), the IPBES Thematic Assessment on Land Degradation and Restoration (2018), and the UNCCD’s Global Land Outlook (2017). These reports acknowledged land tenure as a key dimension in discussions of land-climate interactions since it affects the ability of people, communities and organisations to make changes to land that can advance climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. In particular, the climate crisis is having a negative impact on tenure security since environmental degradation and reduction in soil fertility are leading to a growing scarcity of land resources and inequities in their allocation. Conversely, insecure tenure exacerbates the climate crisis, affecting individuals ‘capabilities to invest in the land and consequently their resilience.
3.1 Tenure Security and Climate Change Adaptation
During the COP13, held in Guiyang in February 2019, the Bureau endorsed the inclusion of land tenure in the COP14 agenda. As per this provision, in August, the UNCCD secretariat produced a background document that formally acknowledged the fact that individuals who hold land securely are more able and motivated to invest in adaptation practices with a view to long-term health and productivity, without the fear that their land may be unjustly taken or encroached upon. In the same year, the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land identified insecure land rights as one factor deterring adaptation and accentuating climate vulnerability. Specific dimensions of inequities in institutional and customary systems are associated with monoculture and other unsustainable land-use practices, having negative consequences for soil degradation and disincentivizing more sustainable forms of agriculture.
Therefore, securing land rights recently emerged as a suitable approach to increase rural communities' resilience, since tenure-secure individuals have access to a series of capabilities, instruments, and financing that allow them to develop coping strategies to rising climate change issues.
In this regard, tenure security constitutes also a critical requirement for local communities to access project finance to manage their land sustainably. Land rights are a precursor to government interventions such as payments for ecosystem services or technical assistance. These, in turn, can promote long-term community investments in land stewardship that generate positive development and environmental outcomes. Government funding agencies and banks often consider titled community land to be more secure than customarily held land, thereby reducing their investment risks [4].
Hence, weak tenure discourages long-term investments and often leads to communities over-exploiting land and natural resources to maximize short-term benefits. Farmers and herders all over the world have no interest or instruments to adapt to changing conditions, develop new techniques, and invest in tenures they have no evidence of ownership. Consequently, rural communities often over-use land resources and once they exhausted the land available, they then migrate in search of new resourceful areas. However, these practices lead to displacements, precarious living conditions, and exacerbated competition for land and water. Similarly, insecure-tenure individuals who live in areas affected by extreme events due to climate change are more likely to abandon their lands. Once the emergency is over, plots' physical boundaries could be destroyed and, therefore, their properties exposed to takeovers, becoming often subject to conflicts. Having no rights over fields, local communities are prevented from regaining their lands through institutions. Consequently, they are forced to migrate and abandon lands or to engage in conflicts to win them back, exacerbating displacements, violence, and environmental degradation.
3.2 Tenure security and Climate Change Mitigation
At a global level, one of the greatest benefits of securing land rights is their enormous potential for climate mitigation. Guaranteeing tenure security can help countries achieve both SDG13 on climate action and the commitments made in Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement.
According to the 2019 IPCC Report, individuals with secure tenure are more motivated to invest in smart-climate practices that help mitigate environmental degradation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions such as the set-up of water management systems or tree planting in mixed cropland/forest systems. These policies can crucially pre-empt climate change-related displacements, conflicts and inequalities in the long run.
Moreover, as the world faces an urgent need to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, secure tenure emerged as an effective instrument for safeguarding existing forests against external forces. Nowadays, a quarter of all GHG emissions comes from deforestation and other land use changes -- although the rate varies widely across regions -- and about one-third of the carbon in forests is located on community land that is yet not legally recognized, putting both the communities and stored carbon at risk [5].
According to a study published by Right and Resource Initiative in 2018, communities in 52 tropical and subtropical countries manage at least 22% of forest carbon and 17% of the total carbon, including soil carbon, stored in forestlands. Developing this land and releasing the carbon, which is equivalent to 33 times the global energy emissions of 2017, would be a climate catastrophe [6].
Hence, ensuring that IPLC’s rights to these lands are recognized and protected is vital to keeping forests standing, and carbon from being released into the atmosphere. The 2019 IPBES Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services supports this thesis by giving evidence of how community land rights led to lower deforestation rates, higher carbon storage, and higher biodiversity. In countries that provide stronger legal rights to rural communities to own and manage forests, there is an overwhelmingly positive correlation with reduction of land degradation, and the stabilizing of forested landscapes.
Rural communities manage nearly 300 billion metric tons of carbon [7]. Ensuring that their rights to these lands are recognized and protected is vital to keeping forests standing, and carbon from being released into the atmosphere.
4. Conflicts over the land
Land is the object of competition in several potentially overlapping ways: it constitutes an economic asset, a connection with identity and social legitimacy, and political territory. High population growth, climate change, natural disasters, and large-scale economic globalization put increasing pressure on land, which becomes increasingly scarce and poorly managed, and consequently subject to conflicts.
Land scarcity and tenure insecurity are two highly interrelated factors that create vulnerability to land conflict. Climate change and the consequent increasing temperatures, higher precipitation variability, weather extremes or sea-level rise will exacerbate land insecurity by reducing the fertile land available and leaving many with little or no land, creating intense competition for land.
In areas in which land lacks adequate legal, institutional, and traditional/customary protection, it becomes a commodity easily subject to manipulation and abuse. Tenure-insecure individuals experience a constant fear of loss of land and livelihood and, in the presence of such tensions, violence is often sparked by a trigger event. Trigger events may be situations that expose and intensify a vulnerability, for instance, where an extended drought threatens the viability of existing land use patterns, or where a sudden rise in demand for some crops rapidly intensifies competition for land, or where new climate change mitigation frameworks at the international level (such as REDD+ programs) lead to major shifts in land use.
Therefore, lack of land rights lead to major insecurity in rural populations, which can result in tensions and disputes over natural resources. In the Sahel area, environmental degradation and land insecurity is undermining local resilience to climate change's impacts, leading to conflicts. Increased temperatures and desertification phenomenon force nomadic herders to abandon their traditional routes and move towards more resourceful areas, which brings them into competition for land and water with the agriculturalists settled in these territories. As a result, intra- and inter-communal conflicts over land and resources have increased since 2015 in Central Mali, and they spread in 2021 to parts of Burkina Faso and Niger. Clashes between farmers and herders – such as between the Mossi and Peul or the Fulsé and Peul in northern and eastern Burkina Faso, between the Zarma and Peul or the Haoussa and Peul in western Niger, or between migrant Fulani pastoralists and host Yoruba farmers in south-west Niger became increasingly communal clashes, pitting all migrants against all hosts. Jihadists and other armed groups are able to quickly draw local support by taking advantage of governments' inadequate management of natural resources , the lack of land and resources rights, and social inequalities. Jihadist groups have offered economic incentives and food to rural communities in exchange for loyalty and recruited heavily among marginalized pastoralist Fulani youth in Niger. Here, in the northwest, farmer-herder conflicts have intersected with armed groups and criminal networks, escalating violence.
Therefore, land conflicts can be considered as a consequence and an aggravating factor of soil degradation and tenure insecurity. Environmental degradation and lack of land rights increase the pressure on natural resources and exacerbate land insecurity, contributing to the rising of clashes. Similarly, land conflicts further degrade the environment because they deprive individuals and communities of essential rights and land access, and contribute to poor land and resource management practices, further reducing the limited resource base. In this regard, the World Bank report, “Fragility and Conflict: On the Front Lines of the Fight against Poverty” (2020), gave evidence of the clear link between conflict, fragile settings, and perceived tenure insecurity. Countries with medium- to high-intensity conflict or institutional/social fragility tend to have relatively high rates of perceived tenure insecurity. Countries with a record of violent events in the past also have higher rates of perceived tenure insecurity. Experiencing at least one event of organized violence in the previous year pushes a country’s overall rate of tenure security down by about 10 percentage points on average (71% vs. 81%).
5. Securing women’s access to land and natural resources
In many parts of the world economic and social wellbeing are still dependent on owning or having the rights to land. Yet in these areas, discrimination against women’s rights to property and tenure remains the norm, and the existing policies and legal frameworks often provide little recourse for women to realize these rights. Therefore, with few paths to land ownership, many women are effectively excluded from having an income, achieving food security, and taking part in decision-making processes.
Despite the recognition and realization of women’s land rights have often faced challenges, there have been some encouraging signs of progress in the last decade. In 2012, gender equality was included as one of the 10 main principles of implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines on Tenure. Global commitment to promoting women’s land rights was then renewed through the Sustainable Development Goals, in particular SDG 1 – elimination of poverty, SDG 2 – food security and adequate nutrition and SDG 5 – gender equality. Moreover, in 2018, the Human Rights Council adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), which encouraged the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women working in rural areas and urged states to provide legal recognition for their land rights, including customary land rights. Additionally, the EU proved to be increasingly committed to promoting gender-responsive land actions and has embedded the promotion of women’s rights, including equal rights to land, in its Gender Action Plan (GAP II) 2016-2020.
However, despite some progress being made, the scale of the challenge is still massive. Women represent 43% of the agricultural labor force, yet they still own less than 2% of that land. In developing countries, only 10-20% of all landowners are women and farms managed by female-headed households are between half of the ⅔ the size of the farms run by male-headed households. Moreover, agriculture extension services are accessible to only 5% of women that make up the workforce in developing countries [8]. These circumstances are the result of the lack of implementation of existing laws, constraining customary laws, traditional and social practices, norms and power structures within communities and households, and lack of legal security systems to protect women against land grabbing. As a result, rural women tend to have less access to land than men across the world. In many countries, they do not enjoy the rights set out in national policy or law because of vague norms and constraints posed by customary laws. Indeed, legal systems characterized by constitutions or land regulations that formally grant gender equality in land access often present customary or institutional marriage, divorce, and inheritance laws that contradict these rights by discriminating against women, wives and daughters [9].
Securing women's equal right to land does not only represent a human rights issue, but it constitutes a major development concern due to the direct relationship between women's right to land, economic empowerment, food security, and poverty reduction. In this regard, UN-Habitat recently launched “Key messages on Women, Land and Peace”, the publication analyzed the links between peace, women’s empowerment and access to land. The report highlights how securing access to land means that women can better carry out their roles as income earners, food producers, and peacemakers. Therefore, the protection of women's housing, land and property rights mitigate the risk of violent conflicts flaring up and help society to emerge and recover from war. It increases agricultural productivity and production, contributing to food security and it is also essential to foster the realization of other related human rights, such as the rights to an adequate standard of living, adequate housing, protection from forced evictions, and equality.
In order to protect and advance women's housing, land and property rights, a review of existing laws and practices is required. According to the OHCHR Report “Realizing Women’s Rights To Land And Other Productive Resources” (2020), particular areas of focus include the revision of gender-discriminatory inheritance and personal laws, the promotion of the registration of written marital contracts containing information on land and property regimes, the removal of the impediments keeping women from accessing land administration services, financial facilities and mechanisms, systems for land improvement and exploitation, land disputes resolution mechanisms, and reform of the legal and administrative procedures with a gender-sensitive lens.
However, when it comes to women’s property rights, governments have responsibilities that go well beyond enacting improved laws. Once new regulations are passed, it is necessary to ensure that individuals can actually benefit from them. Hence, when formal rights exist, development actors must make them known, understood and recognized by all segments of societies. Thus, in order to secure women’s access to land, institutions have a broader responsibility to promote social and cultural change regarding gender roles in rural societies so that women's rights, whether formal or informal, are recognized and that women are empowered to participate and lead land management and HLP rights, given their major contribution in working the land and putting into effect decisions taken over land management.
6. Possible Entry Points
Over the coming decades, competition and conflict over land is likely to intensify with the growing pressures of climate change, population growth, increased food insecurity, migration and urbanization. Due to growing evidence of the link between land, armed conflict, and human rights abuses, all relevant stakeholders - governments, development actors, international organizations and civil society - need to be more responsive to the emerging needs of Member States and populations.
Possible entry points include:
Addressing land scarcity. Land scarcity negatively impacts tenure security. Governments can often increase the availability of land through reforms such as opening up state lands while taking into account customary claims, removing regulatory and administrative barriers to liberalize land and rental markets, or more directly through legislating land reforms. Land scarcity can also be addressed long term through smart-climate practice as the setting-up of water management systems, tree planting in mixed cropland/forest systems or the prohibition of monoculture and other unsustainable land-use practices that have negative consequences and reduce arable soil degradation in the long run.
Promoting housing, land and property rights. It is fundamental that government and communities create property rights in land and natural resources to avoid a free-for-all that leaves room for violence and conflicts. Measures that strengthen and/or extend property systems can play an essential role in reducing insecurity of tenure. Examples include legal reforms that create more robust property rights, such as those that recognize previously unrecognized customary land rights or programs that regularize informal settlements and community land demarcation and registration. However, it is fundamental to highlight how land tenure reform can create more conflict if not done with careful attention to issues and local limiting factors, including those identified by local people when they produce their own long-term plans for development. Poor, marginalized individuals and women are among the most vulnerable groups. They can be subject to backlashes and be negatively impacted by land titling and property-rights projects if their issues and interests are not appropriately addressed in the design and implementation of projects, laws, and policies. For example, when land redistribution and registration programs fail to consider pre-existing and customary rights, agrarian reform pushes poor farmers into occupied lands, and rural individuals are left to fight over weak rights.
Improving land governance. Corruption, malfeasance, and lack of capacity in public land management and land administration exacerbate and heighten tensions over land. Reforming these processes, making institutions accountable, and involving communities in land governance, access to water, soil and food system's conservations can lower tensions. Concrete reforms for governments include developing clear and widely publicized service standards and fee structures, decentralizing land administration services, improving transparency in all stages of land programs, prosecuting proven cases of corruption, eliminating practices that discriminate between different groups in competition for land (including discriminatory staffing in the land agency), and instituting mechanisms such as complaint lines and an ombudsman.
Improving land dispute resolution mechanisms. Land disputes can turn into severe and violent conflicts. Efficient solutions can ease tensions and prevent their escalation. The combination of poor records of land rights and cumbersome court procedures often delays resolution, allowing disputes to fester, resulting in major backlogs in courts. Measures that can help include: upgrading capacity in local courts; simplifying court procedures by allowing for plain language submissions or submissions in local languages; adopting paralegal and legal aid programs targeted toward land and natural resource rights; and reinforcing alternative and traditional dispute resolution mechanisms.
Empowering communities, particularly women, the poor and marginalized, to pursue their land rights. Those seeking justice often lack an understanding of how best to pursue it. Programs that can empower them include public education on land law and administrative procedures, training of community-level paralegals to act as a bridge to the formal legal system, creation of fora in which aggrieved communities can voice their concerns, and support for responsible leadership (as opposed to conflict entrepreneurs) in those communities. Building the capacity of local communities to negotiate fair contracts with external domestic or international investors for rental or leasing of community lands can go a long way toward creating a level playing field and greater transparency between all parties.
NOTES
[1] International Land Coalition, Uneven Ground: land inequality at the heart of unequal societies” (2020).
[2] Prindex, Comparative Report, A global assessment of perceived tenure security in 140 countries, July 2020.
[3] Agrawal A., Chhatre A., Hardin R., Changing governance of the world’s forests. Science 320, 1460 (2008).
[4] Peter Veit, Land Matters: How Securing Community Land Rights Can Slow Climate Change and Accelerate the Sustainable Development Goals, World Resource Institute, 24 January 2019.
[5] United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data, https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data.
[6] RRI, A Global baseline of carbon storage in collective lands: Indigenous and Local Community Contributions to Climate Change Mitigation, 2018. https://rightsandresources.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/a-global-baseline_rri_sept-2018.pdf.
[7] The Land Portal, COVID-19, Biodiversity and Climate Change: Indigenous Peoples Defining the Path Forward, https://landportal.org/event/2...
[8] Sida, Gender Tool Box, March 2015. https://cdn.sida.se/publications/files/-women-and-land-rights.pdf.
[9] FAO, Gender and Land Rights Understanding Complexities; Adjusting Policies, March 2010. https://www.fao.org/3/al059e/al059e00.pdf