Community land, crucial to rural livelihood around the world, is increasingly targeted by commercial interests. Its loss can lead to environmental degradation, increased rural poverty and land disputes that last for years. Without formal legal recognition of their land rights, communities struggle to protect their land from being allocated to outside investors.

Seventy-five percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas and most are involved in agriculture. In the 21st century, agriculture remains fundamental to economic growth, poverty alleviation, and environmental sustainability. Increased global demand for land because of higher and more volatile food prices, urbanization, and use of land for environmental services implies an increased need for well-designed land policies at the country level to ensure security of long-held rights, to facilitate land access, and to deal with externalities.

This Topic Guide covers: the trends in and drivers of large-scale land acquisition, and the associated costs, risks and benefits; the provision of and access to more accurate data on large-scale land acquisitions, and key international and regional initiatives to provide guidelines to enhance security of tenure and promote good quality investment; land reform issues such as land tenure regularisation and land administration systems; and land issues in the context of fragile states, and conflict and post-conflict situations.

The objective of the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services is to provide Governments, the private sector, and civil society with scientifically credible and independent up-to-date assessments of available knowledge to make informed decisions at the local, regional and international levels.

Land Degradation Neutrality is a new way of approaching land degradation that acknowledges that land and land-based ecosystems are affected by global environmental change as well as by local land use practices. Achieving the target of a land degradation neutral world encourages adaptive management during planning, implementation, and monitoring of LDN-related activities and follows the LDN response hierarchy of avoiding, reducing, and reversing land degradation.

Only if there is a fundamental change in the way we manage land can we reach the targets of climate-change mitigation, avert the dramatic loss of biodiversity and make the global food system sustainable. The WBGU proposes five multiple-benefit strategies illustrating ways of overcoming competition between rival claims to the use of land. These should be promoted by five governance strategies, especially by setting suitable framework conditions, reorienting EU policy and establishing alliances of like-minded states.

Women constitute the bulk of people who rely on land in many of the regions most affected by desertification, land degradation and drought. One in three people on earth depend directly on agriculture, while nearly 80% of employed women in least developed countries report agriculture as their primary livelihood. Food availability fluctuations also impact women’s role in food production and intra-family food distribution, with women often reducing their nutritional intake and that of their children, with dire health consequences.

The importance of land manifests in various components of the everyday lives of people insocieties: cultural heritage, livelihood, the environment, economy, and community, among manyothers. Land is a factor of development. It is the most influential determinant of developmentbecause women, youths, and men (and households) depend on it for their livelihoods and formaintaining their living conditions in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas.

A call to action: 20 interventions that will matter. The report’s Call to Action identifies 20 points where interventions can create transformative and accelerated progress towards multiple goals and targets in the coming decade. These targeted actions are based on the recent scientific literature analysing the deeper systemic interconnections that identify synergies and trade-offs between individual goals and targets. Decisions based on science. Science must play a major role in advancing sustainable development.

The report’s findings suggest that policies and programmes of governments and the development partners could include a stronger focus on the development of peri-urban areas and smaller cities and towns. The rapid pace of change in peri-urban areas throws into relief any underlying issues in land tenure arrangements, land administration/planning and governance, such as overlapping mandates, conflicts in tenure systems, weak land administration/planning capacity and wider political economy issues that can block positive reforms.

Land markets are evolving in response to increasing population pressure in Africa.
High population pressure leads to land use intensification on very small farms.
Population growth in densely populated rural areas leads to increasing rural–urban youth migration.
Tenure security enhancing land reforms enhance investments and sustainable land use intensification.
Pro-poor development strategies should target the strengthening of land governance.

We cannot live without healthy land and soil. It is on land that we produce most of our food and we build our homes. For all species — animals and plants living on land or water — land is vital. Soil — one of the essential components of land — is a very complex and often undervalued element, teeming with life. Unfortunately, the way we currently use land and soil in Europe and in the world is not sustainable. This has significant impacts on life on land.