This Guidebook for Business Enterprise includes instructions and tailorable tools for business professionals seeking to design and implement an agricultural investment in a socially responsible manner that recognises and protects community land rights. It provides support for implementing best practices related to understanding and respecting land rights in the context of an investment.

The Landassess Tool is a risk assessment and management framework. It provides a clear and simple set of checklists that generate a report to help companies assess and manage how they respect land rights.

This report explains TMP Systems’ statistical analysis of how geospatial data showing indicators of local environmental, social and governance (ESG) conditions correlate with tenure risk. The results indicate strong enough correlations between some of these indicators and tenure risk, to support use of the indicators by companies and investors. This work underpins something new and useful, which is Landscope’s ability to provide location-specific risk assessments across many developing countries.

Almost one-quarter of the world’s land area has been degraded over the past 50 years because of soil erosion, salinization, peatland and wetland drainage, and forest degradation. The resulting damage, in terms of lost ecosystem goods and services, costs the world an estimated US$6.3 trillion a year.

OpenLandContracts.org is a repository of publicly available investment contracts for land, agriculture, and forestry projects. It features plain language summaries of key provisions and provides tools for searching and comparing contracts.

Interactive guide to the VGGT

The Social License Platform (SLP) matches businesses with the services and expertise they need to ensure that investments in agricultural land create growth opportunities for both business and local communities, while respecting the land rights of the communities that use the land.

Landscope is a system for measuring tenure risk, a term created to describe the financial risk associated with local opposition to a real asset. This kind of opposition to investments is very common across Africa, Asia and Latin America, often causing significant financial losses and operational headaches. It applies a new approach to analysing geospatial data about social, environmental and political issues that is designed to help companies and investors in emerging and frontier markets to prepare a proper assessment of tenure risk at project, supply chain or portfolio level.

This guidance aims to provide companies with an overview of the links between land and human rights enshrined in these agreements and in official statements issued by treaty monitoring bodies. While it focuses on Ghana with a non-exhaustive examination its human rights obligations with an overview of the most significant agreements pertaining to land-based investments, it will be useful for companies working in other countries because the agreements presented have been ratified and signed by a large number of countries.

This guide examines the role and responsibilities of private sector lawyers when advising their clients on agricultural investments. It discusses how lawyers can prevent and/or address and mitigate adverse human rights impacts on holders of legitimate tenure rights when advising on or conducting their due diligence and risk assessment processes on behalf of their clients. It provides a number of key recommendations, including on how to align legal advice with the VGGT and CFS-RAI.

Tenure risk – or the risk of dispute between investors and local people over land or natural resource claims – is endemic in emerging markets. There are hundreds of recorded incidents of tenure disputes creating delays;violence, project cancellation and even bankruptcy at a corporate level. These tenure disputes create lose-lose outcomes for investors;local people and national governments;while robbing emerging markets of the developmental benefits of responsible land investments. However;many investors are unaware of the problem or lack the time and resources to address it.

This Guide provides an entry point to understanding and implementing the principles of responsible governance of land tenure set out in the VGGT for companies involved in land-based investment. It provides a more manageable presentation of the VGGT, along with steps to ensure that a company acts consistently with them and includes thorough due diligence on the tenure rights of project-affected communities.