THERE IS NO EMPTY LAND
RESTORATION BEGINS WITH RIGHTS
Nearly 500 million pastoralists protect and live from rangelands that cover 40% of the Earth’s surface.
Yet there is a common and misguided narrative that pastoralists overgraze, degrade and turn land into deserts. This is not only false, but reckless. Pastoral mobility is restorative, innovative and adaptive, attuned to the rhythms of nature while also being steeped in centuries of tradition.
The truth is that traditions can exist without being stuck in time.
Their practices improve soil microclimates and biodiversity and enhances its critical capacity to store soil organic carbon, often lost due to the conversion of rangelands to other uses such as crop farming and industry, including green energy. Their lands store 30% of global soil carbon. Despite their vital roles as ecosystem protectors, their mobile lifestyles mean the lands they steward are often percieved as "empty." Nothing could be further from the truth.
What's at stake?
Any effort towards achieving degradation neutrality should embrace local communities’ rights to land, territory and mobility and recognise their vital roles as stewards. Only by strengthening land tenure security can we move closer to achieving land degradation neutrality.
What is land degredation neutrality?!
The UNCCD gathers parties with one goal: to combat desertification and achieve land degradation neutrality. That means managing ecosystems to prevent desertification, overcome drought, and recover degraded land so that land stays healthy and productive over time and can continue providing key services: clean water, fertile soil for healthy food systems, and a safe habitat for animals.
What the UNCCD has said about land rights
In 2019 and 2022, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) adopted several decisions stressing the importance of secure land tenure in combating desertification and achieving land degredation neutrality. These decisions should be strengthened with concrete actions and meaningful accountability mechanisms.
WE HAVE A MISSION, WILL YOU HELP US?
Secure land tenure for pastoralists continues to remain tenuous in practice because of the twin features of shared land use and mobility. The lack of secure tenure impedes their dynamic and transformative capacity to provide for people and nature.
It also increases their vulnerability to oppression and violence caused by settlement schemes, industrial and infrastructural development, agricultural expansion, ‘fortress’ conservation, green energy and carbon neutrality programmes, and, more recently, carbon offset projects.
This COP16, these are our demands:
1. Recognition & Enforcement
Parties must recognise and enforce legitimate land rights that respect the unique capacities and needs of rangeland communities, including their livestock-keeping practises, shared land use, communal governance structures, and mobile lifestyles that contribute to sustainably combatting land desertification and restoration of critical ecosystems.
2. Funding
Parties should stop funding fortress conservation, exclusionary nature-based solutions and other restoration initiatives that displace and violate the rights of communities, contributing to land conflicts and social instability.
3. Implementation
Parties should implement COP decisions 16/COP14, 26/COP14 and 27/COP15 to secure land tenure for communities living on and from the land to achieve land degradation neutrality and resilient lives and livelihoods.
4. Monitoring
By using existing monitoring frameworks and guidelines, parties should report on the implementation of COP decisions 16/COP14, 26/COP14 and 27/COP15 that centres secure land tenure for land degradation neutrality. Let’s not reinvent the wheel. Existing, well-established indicators exist for this, including SDG, VGGTs and KM-GBF frameworks. Monitoring frameworks must be backed by adequate financial and technical resources to ensure timely and effective reporting for accountability.
ILC co-led events
Download our event schedule
2 December
16h | Youth
The nexus between youth-centred land governance and desertification
Location: Children and Youth Pavilion
Co-organisers: YILAA, RECONCILE
In March 2024, the ILC Youth and Land Multi-stakeholder Platform in Africa (YLMPA) convened a post-COP meeting in Yaoundé, Cameroon, where youth representatives from different organizations analyzed the outcomes of the 2023 COPs with a focus on land governance. This panel discussion aims to spotlight youth-centered land governance as essential for combating climate change, drought, desertification, and land degradation. By advocating for inclusive policies that empower local and Indigenous communities to utilize traditional knowledge in land restoration and sustainable agriculture, the session will discuss the development of a position paper and a strategic roadmap for elevating this issue in 2024 climate dialogues, underlining the vital role of secure land tenure and youth engagement in achieving resilient and equitable environmental solutions.
4 December
9h | Women & Pastoralists
Women for the future: Enabling women-led rangeland restoration and resilience
Location: MET-05
Co-organisers: CAPA, SAPA, UNDP, ILC
Women play a key role in managing and caring for rangelands, while facing the worst impacts of these linked challenges. Yet, their contributions are often obscured, and even more so as rangelands are often managed collectively. Therefore, it is important to recognise the contributions women-led restoration and secure land rights for women make to community resilience, sustainable land management and thriving livelihoods in rangelands.
15:30h | LAND GOVERNANCE
Putting care at the centre of land Governance and management
Location: Met-04
Co-organisers: Oxfam, ILC Africa, Landesa, AKIWOFF
9:45h | PASTORALISTS & NATURE-BASED SOLUTIONS
NbS for water and food security — resilience of agro-pastoral livelihoods and rangelands
Location: Action Dome (MET-33)
Co-organisers: UNEP, UNDP
This session will explore how NbS contribute to food and water security within rangelands and agro-pastoral systems, focusing on strategies to protect these important ecosystems and the livelihoods they support. It will showcase community-led best practices, followed by a panel discussion highlighting the multiple benefits of NbS for sustainable development.
15:30h | YOUTH
Securing land tenure among youth for resilience and restoration amidst changing landscapes
Location: Met-22
Co-organisers: YILAA, Oxfam, AUDA NEPA
18:20h | Pastoralists & Restoration
Empowering people: Actions on the Ground and Partnerships for Restoration
Location: Action Dome (MET-33)
Co-organisers: UNEP, UNDP
Join us for an engaging session spotlighting how local action and partnerships drive transformative change in landscapes. Explore inspiring examples of community-focused initiatives, the role of local actors, and the importance of just land transitions and people-centered approaches. Learn how partnerships can amplify these efforts to create long-term, sustainable solutions.
5 December
14h | Pastoralists & Women's Land Rights
Custodians of Land and Territories: How Pastoralist Communities and Women Strengthen Resilient Rangelands
Location: Mongolian Pavilion
The International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP) 2026 offers a critical opportunity to elevate global understanding of the essential role of rangelands and pastoralists in food security and ecosystem services. Although both women and men play vital yet distinct roles in managing rangelands within nomadic pastoralist communities, women’s contributions are frequently undervalued. Therefore, creating opportunities that showcase women-led solutions to pastoralism and resilient rangelands is essential. This recognition is fundamental for socio-ecologically integrated rangelands resilience and achieving the SDGs 1,5 and 15.
15h | Farmers
Enabling environments for smallholder farmers to transition to socio-ecological resilient agri-food systems
Location: Blue Zone, MET 23
Co-organisers: One CGIAR, CIRAD, FAO, ADF, UNEP, Ubuntu Alliance, Development Innovation Lab, ILC, Commonland, WWF, Biovision, A-Tree
The world is affected by the triple crisis of biodiversity loss, climate change and land degradation including desertification. Smallholder farmers – including family farmers, fisherfolks, forest dwellers and pastoralists are disproportionately affected, given the limited capacity to access and apply adaptative measures.
This session focuses on exploring the pathways to enable smallholder and family farmers to adapt to and mitigate the triple crisis, and more importantly advance strategies to effectively transition from commitments to actions.
17h | Local Food Systems
Land and natural resource tenure, governance and food production systems: international collaboration for local solutions
Location: Food and Agriculture Pavilion
6 December
9h | Indigenous Peoples
FAO Indigenous Peoples’ Biocentric Restoration contributions to combat desertification under the three Rio Conventions and the works of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration to enhance resilience and ensure biodiversity conservation
Location: Met-01
Co-organisers: FAO, CENESTA
15.30h | Farmers
Tenure security as an enabler of land restoration and sustainable agrifood systems: the role of land policy
Location: Action Dome (MET-33)
Co-organisers: FAO, UNHabitat, UNDP, ILC, GiZ
Many small-scale farmers, particularly women and other groups living in condition of marginalization, work on land that they do not formally own, exacerbating socioeconomic challenges such as poverty, lack of political power and recognition of basic rights. Advancing land tenure governance requires simultaneously addressing the policy, legal and organizational (or institutional) frameworks that organize the institutions, processes and rules related to tenure. Each country and society has different frameworks to arbitrate these relations at different levels (national, sub-national, local). This event will focus more specifically on the policy frameworks linked to the efforts of securing land tenure for restoring agricultural lands as a fundamental instrument to build sustainable agrifood systems and achieve land degradation neutrality. It will highlight ways to advance positively on the inter-relation between tenure and land degradation neutrality through a land policy. The event will embrace tenure governance as defined in the VGGT with the key notion of legitimate tenure rights.
13h | Women
Women’s Land Rights for Effective Restoration Efforts: Understanding Synergies, Taking Action
Location: Action Dome (MET-33)
Co-organisers: Landesa, ILC, TMG, UNDP, FAO, UN HAbitat, UN Women
Women’s land rights has increasingly been recognized by UNCCD Parties and enshrined within UNCCD decisions as a foundation for effective land restoration initiatives and achieving land degradation neutrality.
This session will present attendees with a clear overview of the strong standards set by and for UNCCD Parties; examples of effective approaches to strengthen land rights for women in all their diversity; and recommendations for stronger, more equitable and participatory, and more coordinated action and stronger resourcing to achieve gender justice related to land and natural resource rights, and within land and ecosystem restoration initiatives.
15:30h | Data
Data for improved rangeland governance
Location: MET-02
Co-organisers: ILC, RECONCILE, LandMark, WRI, ILRI
Robust data is essential for effective policy making and to direct action on the ground. Yet data on rangelands is missing perpetuating the historical neglect faced by rangeland environments and users such as pastoralists. This session showcases various data initiatives that can not only fulfil missing gaps in knowledge but also offers fertile ground to discuss how the twin challenges of scale and nuance can be fruitfully overcome. The discussion will centre around how data can further support communities and governments towards inclusive community-led rangeland restoration and governance. By doing so the session offers possibilities to incorporate available data and people’s considerations within country monitoring and implementation frameworks to ensure inclusive rangeland restoration and governance and the full implementation of the UNCCD.
18h | Pastoralists & Land Governance
Shared Lands, Shared Futures: Inclusive governance for rangelands and pastoralists
Location: Action Dome (MET-33)
Co-organisers: FAO, WWF Int, ILRI
The event will analyse the reality and potential of inclusive governance for rangelands and pastoralists, highlighting the importance of considering mobility as a substantial element of pastoralism and the critical role mobility plays in the adoption of equitable and adaptive governance systems. The format of the event and the participants invited will showcase the importance of participatory and multi-stakeholder institutions, along with interdisciplinary, multi-level and multi-functional approaches to deal with the key challenges posed by the governance of vast, open and often commonly-owned lands.
7 December
9h | WOMEN & YOUTH
The Gateway to Land Restoration and Resilience: Pathways to Land Tenure for Women & Youth
Location: MET-04
Co-organisers: YPARD
15h | WOMEN & DATA
Gender Caucus session: Emerging best practices on the collection of sex-disaggregated data and gender-responsive indicators for DLDD initiatives
Location: MET-24
Co-organisers: UNCCD, Adaptation Fund, UNDP, GEF, KSA
What is not measured cannot be counted, analyzed or addressed. At CRIC21, Parties to the Convention have recommended that UNCCD should advance on defining the most suitable gender-responsive indicators to measure the ways in which women and men are affected by drought, land degradation and desertification (DLDD). This session shares some examples of best practices in data-based gender-responsive indicators, to consider and to pave the way for the UNCCD process of refining its indicators for the next strategic framework.
17h | Pastoralists
Road to the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists 2026
Location: Food and Agriculture Pavilion
Co-organisers: CGIAR
An event to share why 2026 has been designated as the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists a process led by the Government of Mongolia, the importance of these issues, and what is being prepared for this final part of the journey running up to the Year including the UNCCD COP 17 to be held in 2026 in Mongolia.
14h | Pastoralists
Mobility Matters: in the footsteps of hunters and gatherers walking around the world
Location: MET-23
Co-organisers: UNEP, ILRI, FAO
Mobility matters for millions of pastoralists and hunter-gatherers around the world who move with their livestock and/or hunt across vast lands of patchily distributed vegetation and water. Mobility enables pastoralists to thrive in dry and variable environments, avoid degradation and maintain healthy herds. Normally mobility is organised to make the most of and traveling between wet and dry season grazing areas, which may involve traveling over thousands of kilometers and sometimes up and down mountains. This movement is often a culturally embedded practice with departure and arrival a moment of celebration. Yet it is increasingly fraught with danger, not only from wild animals, but also increasingly from other land uses blocking the migration routes and access to grazing lands or water points. Mobility is also a key strategy for overcoming drought on the one hand and offering environmental services that improve rangeland health on the other. However, there is a need to improve the recognition of mobility and transhumance as a fundamental human right upon which millions of livelihoods depend, and which contributes greatly to both people and the planet.
15:30h | INDIGENOUS PEOPLES & Local Communities
The Role of Indigenous Peoples, Local communities on Ecosystem Restoration - Integrated vision for scaling up Community Led Ecosystem Restoration and Stewardship
Location: MET-23
Co-organisers: UN Decade for Ecosystem Restoration
18h | Indigenous Peoples
Rethinking Ecosystem Restoration from the Ground Up - A Celebration of Indigenous and Community Stewardship
Location: UNEP Pavillion (In Pavilion D)
Co-organisers: Kyrgyz Jayity, CENESTA, Semiaridos, UN Decade for Ecosystem Restoration, PIPD
10 December
13h | Land Restoration
Scaling Up Land Restoration and Sustainable Land Use Planning: African Development Bank’s Contribution to Combating Land Degradation
Location: MET-01
Co-organisers: AfDB, ILC, IDLO
CONTENT HUB
ILC at the COPs
