This document is intended to promote a disciplined approach to integrated closure planning and increase the uniformity of good practice across the sector. The concepts apply equally to both large and small mining companies.

In economics, land has been traditionally assumed to be a fixed production factor, both in terms of quantity supplied and mobility, as opposed to capital and labor, which are usually considered to be mobile factors, at least to some extent. Yet, in the last decade, international investors have expressed an unexpected interest in farmland and in land-related investments, with the demand for land brusquely rising at an unprecedented pace.

A wave of commercial investments in the natural resource sectors has rekindled debates about the place of contracts in the interface between economic governance and control over natural resources.

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.

During the Bonn Challenge 3.0 high-level meeting in Brazil in March 2018, El Salvador indicated its intention to seek the proclamation of the “UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration 2021 – 2030”. This concept note sets out the context, rationale and purpose of this initiative. The distribution of this concept note is intended to reach the international community including governmental and non-governmental actors, UN agencies, and civil society.

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.