Unprecedented scales of transformation in land use are called for to address the core challenges for the growing and urbanising human population. Afforestation and bioenergy for mitigating climate change and increasing requirements for land for agriculture and urban areas constitute core challenges identified in current global forecasting. The critical impact of how the demands for land for new forestation and agricultural production will affect people’s existing land rights and lives has been largely ignored thus far; perhaps most chillingly, they have often been explicitly disregarded.

Yet none of these transformations can come about without closely involving the people most intimately concerned, those who currently hold legitimate tenure rights over and who generally live on the lands that will be affected. Global Witness reported 201 ‘land and environment defender’ killings in 2017 of people protecting their traditional rights and ways of life. This is, quite literally, a potentially fatal flaw that must be addressed, and addressed now.

Land-use change: potential scenarios
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 1.5°C Report late 2018 and the follow-up ‘Special Report on Climate Change, Desertification, Land Degradation, Sustainable Land Management, Food Security, and Greenhouse Gas Fluxes in Terrestrial Ecosystems’ contain unwritten challenges as to how changes in people’s tenure rights will be made to achieve their targets — targets that will, perhaps, prove to be the most important that have ever been faced by mankind; by far the largest land-use change in the history of humankind.

Up to 7,000,000 km² of land may need to be devoted to bioenergy crops and up to 10,000,000 km² to additional forestation for carbon mitigation. The same is true for the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) 2018 food land forecasts in its recent ‘Alternative pathways to 2050’, although the scales are smaller, suggesting between 1,000,000 km² and 3,000,000 km² of extra land will be needed depending upon scenario.

More recent forecasts based on the IPCC analysis have used a range of expectations as to the total number of square kilometres required or ‘available’, with the most recent, by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, indicating 9,000,000 km² are available. Urban demand for new land comprises two distinct areas of concern from a tenure perspective; housing increasing urban populations as cities grow endogenously and as rural people migrate to them in search of a better future, and the implications of climate change for coastal cities and populations with rising sea levels. The Africa region is forecast to face the highest level of urbanisation of any region in the coming decades with perhaps an additional 190,000 km² of land needing to be made available for urban expansion in the region by 2050.

There is, therefore, no ‘people content’ in these forecasts. If people and livelihoods are brought into the equation for forestry in particular, perhaps it is not just 10,000,000 km² that are required. To be sustainable, people with legitimate rights over these lands will need to generate livelihoods from these new forestry assets that may incorporate selective or rotational harvesting to reap the benefits, ensuring appropriate age class distributions are maintained and enabling both global climate management and livelihood targets to be met.

Land-use change as a social issue
Precious little land in the 21s Century can be considered terra nullius. The overwhelming majority of potentially usable land is subject to some degree of legitimate use claim and is under some form of occupation, whether contested or not. Tenure has been an area that has been so politically charged for so long that it has always been easier for it to be sidestepped by policymakers. ‘Legitimate tenure rights’ have, however, received a measure of defensibility since 2012 through their recognition in the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure agreed by the global community in the UN’s Committee on World Food Security and widely endorsed by governments, civil society and the private sector.

These global ‘soft law’ guidelines recognise that legitimate tenure rights for all, great or small, rich or poor, are defensible human rights and that States have a primary responsibility to defend, in particular, those legitimate tenure rights of the poor and vulnerable. These are, of course, precisely the people most likely to be adversely affected by these unprecedented proposed land use changes unless appropriate approaches are implemented to ensure orderly and equitable tenure regimes.

Securing land tenure as a path to sustainability
The challenges faced for achieving the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) increasingly and explicitly acknowledge in their indicators the significance of tenure and access rights to land and other natural resources.
Read the full article following the link above. Written by Paul Munro-Faure and Alexander Müller

Prepared for a presentation at the “2020 WORLD BANK CONFERENCE ON LAND AND POVERTY” which was scheduled to take place in Washington DC on March 16–20, 2020