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Advocacy spaces
We are in a climate emergency. Land rights is a way out.
40% of global land area is considered degraded.
Each day we lose more biodiversity, and our ecosystems decline, making our planet even more susceptible to rising temperatures and extreme climate events. These, in turn, further undermine remaining natural carbon sinks – the vast forests, wetlands and grasslands that the 2.5 billion people who live on and from the land call home.
Because land is at the centre of the climate crisis, many of the solutions to it lie in how land is governed and managed.
As stands, large-scale industrial agriculture is responsible for between 25-30% of global emissions. The industry drives biodiversity loss, destroys carbon sinks, and exacerbates food insecurity. Land-based ecosystems are further deteriorated by resource and mineral extraction, ranging from fossil fuels to the extraction of “green transition” minerals.
At least 55% of transition minerals -- critical for reaching a net zero economy -- are projected to be on or near Indigenous Peoples' lands and territories. They are often extracted without Free Prior and Informed Consent or equitable benefit sharing, reproducing existing patterns of injustice often associated with other forms of resource extraction. We have to be careful that in our fight against the climate crisis we do not further undermine peoples' livelihoods and erode communities' connections to land and nature.
Both industrial agriculture and the top-down energy transition destroy local livelihoods and erode communities' connections to land and nature.
Another world is possible.
Evidence shows that with secure land rights, people who live on and from the land are in a position to uphold traditional knowledge and customary land use and governance practices, including promoting community-based restoration practices and protecting critical carbon sinks.
Find out more about land rights and climate
pastoralists save their ecosystem in Kyrgyzstan
A 3-pillar approach
Promoting land tenure rights as a basis for protecting biodiversity and reversing land degradation -
ILC focuses on promoting land rights as a critical cornerstone for community based conservation and restoration initiatives, while being a defense against top down initiatives in the name of such efforts, which may undermine land rights, prevent traditional land use practices or lead to land evictions.
Defending land tenure rights in the context of climate solutions
ILC's climate-focused work ensures land rights are a basis for carbon and biodiversity markets and other financing initiatives, while highlighting the need to protect land rights in the context of the green energy transition.
Securing land tenure rights for sustainable food systems
Protecting the land tenure rights for sustainable land use practices, including those of pastoralists and other mobile communities, smallholders and family farmers, highlighting their contribution to reversing land degradation, promoting sustainable land use practices, guaranteeing food security and fighting
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