All publications and documents

In recent years, there has been growing attention and effort towards securing the formal, legal recognition of land rights for Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Communities and Indigenous Peoples are estimated to hold as much as 65 percent of the world’s land area under customary systems, yet many governments formally recognize their rights to only a fraction of those lands. This gap…

The Global Estimates Report released in July 2015 by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) offers evidence that 19.3 million people were displaced in 2014 by natural disasters worldwide. Of that 19.3 million, 17.5 million people were displaced by disasters related to weather hazards, primarily typhoons and floods. The remaining 1.7 million people were displaced by disasters related…

The Soil Atlas 2015 presents data and facts about the importance and condition of land, soils and arable land in Germany, Europe and worldwide. Without healthy soils, it is not possible to produce healthy food. But soils do not just produce food: they do many other things too. They filter rainwater and turn it into clean drinking water. They regulate the climate, for after the oceans, the…

The Post-2015 Agenda must address the structural factors that undermine sustainable development. It is widely recognised that secure and equitable rights to land and natural resources are central to this effort. Land rights empower people and provide a sense of dignity. They enhance food security and are fundamental to achieve the right to food and increase the productivity of small-scale food…

The 2015 edition of the Global Risks report completes a decade of highlighting the most significant long-term risks worldwide, drawing on the perspectives of experts and global decision-makers. Over that time, analysis has moved from risk identification to thinking through risk interconnections and the potentially cascading effects that result. Taking this effort one step further, this year’s…

By 2050, the global population is expected to grow from 7 billion today to 10 billion, and the global economy is expected to triple in size. But by 2050, the world needs to cut harmful greenhouse gas emissions to around half of today’s levels to have a chance of meeting our international commitments to constrain the global mean temperature increase to 2°C. Is it physically possible to meet our…