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 producers. They provide an incentive for ecosystem stewardship, and they promote inclusive and equitable societies whilst underpinning cultures and value systems.

Land Tenure Service (SDAA) of the Rural Development Division embarked on the preparation of a land tenure "Thesaurus", mainly covering the following sectors: legal, institutional, historical, description of space, traditional or written land tenure regulations, topographical, land management, as well as land tenure related information techniques. It is expected that the Thesaurus will serve as reference material both for the normative divisions at FAO Headquarters as well as for field experts engaged in the implementation of projects with a land tenure component.

2014 was a year in which many citizens around the world lost hope and trust in conventional leaders’ abilities to solve national and global challenges.

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) work with nature to benefit both natural ecosystems and the people that depend on them. By putting nature at the centre, NbS address a range of societal challenges: protecting, sustainably managing or restoring natural or modified ecosystems and supporting their health, function and biodiversity.

The research collated in this brief confirms that NbS deliver simultaneously multiple benefits and shows the wide-ranging beneficial impacts of scaling up their implementation across Europe.

Although there is global consensus that women’s land rights are fundamental for the realization of food security and rural development, accurate and reliable statistics to monitor the attainment and realisation of these rights are still lacking. Indeed, the lack of clear and accurate statistics on landownership and land management– that are disaggregated by sex - is problematic for developing clear policy responses to, and for monitoring of, inequalities faced by women and men in rural areas.

Land rights are rapidly becoming the new political battleground, central to discussions on climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, corporate sustainability, gender equality, and even democracy itself. As the world attempts to recover financial stability, and as an increasing number of countries in Africa and elsewhere seek to emulate the economic success

The eradication of hunger and poverty largely depend on how people, communities and others gain access to land. The livelihoods of many, particularly the rural poor including women, are based on secure and equitable access to and control over land and other natural resources. Land is a source of food and shelter; the basis for social, cultural and religious practices; and a central factor in economic growth.

The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets presents commodity market issues in an objective and accessible way to policy-makers, commodity market observers and stakeholders interested in agricultural commodity market developments and their impacts on countries at different levels of economic development.

This practitioner’s guide explains how to promote gender-responsive forest tenure reform in community-based forest regimes. It is aimed at those taking up this challenge in developing countries. There is no one single approach to reforming forest tenure practices for achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment. Rather, it involves taking advantage of opportunities that emerge in various institutional arenas such as policy and law-making and implementation, government administration, customary or community-based tenure governance, or forest restoration at the landscape scale.

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—between what is held by communities and what is recognized by governments—is a major driver of conflict, disrupted investments, environmental degradation, climate change, and cultural extinction.

Women’s economic empowerment is essential in promoting equality between women and men and is a precondition for sustainable development.

A large number of countries recognize the role of forests in carbon sequestration and committed in their NDCs to protect forests, reduce deforestation rates, and restore forestlands. Few NDCs, however, make any specific commitments to how their forests will be protected or restored on degraded land. It is still unclear if governments will protect forests by expanding the protected estate, improving the management of existing national parks, helping communities safeguard the forests on their lands, or by taking other measures.