‘Land administration is fundamental for scaling climate action, SDGs’

International development experts have urged countries to improve land administration, investment and tenure systems, towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and scaling up climate action.

The experts observed that insecure land tenure keeps landholders from investing in climate adaptation and mitigation measures like sustainable land use practices, while unclear or overlapping laws impede access to land for implementing climate and disaster risk management projects.

They expressed fear that as urbanisation accelerates further and climate impacts become more severe, tensions over land will only become more complex, adding that there was a need to digitise land processes, as well as strengthen land governance to meet climate targets and other sustainable development goals.

They made the submissions at the World Bank land conference entitled: “Securing Land Tenure and Access for Climate Action” in the United States of America. The conference attracted 21 ministers across countries, including Nigeria’s Minister of Housing and Urban Development, Ahmed Dangiwa and 81 country delegates. It was designed as part of solutions to the damage generated by land grabbing, climate change and ecosystem destruction.

It focused on four sub-themes related to improving land governance and tenure amid rapid land use change and competing demands for land. These include securing tenure for sustainability, land technologies for green growth, land administration for climate action and disaster resilience and land administration amid rapid urbanisation.

In his recommendations, the keynote speaker/President of the World Resources Institute, Dr Andrew Steer, who spoke on ‘Land for Projects, People and Planet’, noted that clear land administration is fundamental to scaling climate action and sustainable development goals.

“When the World Bank started, it was much interested in access to land for development, finding land for ports, roads, airports, power plants but realised in the 1970s and 1980s that actually, people really matter and we invested heavily on that. Now, the idea of land also for the planet is much newer,” he said.

Steer emphasised that land has a lot to do with increasing temperature as the human population has doubled since the 1970s while the population of other vertebrates in the world has halved, adding that the footprint of humans on nature is colossal.

“If we are going to address sustainable development goals, the land needs to be more important. We need to address climate change in both rural and urban areas and also need space to make investments. The world is doing a poor job of finding enough land for investments that will be required in renewable energy for new types of cities and others.

Since the industrial era, about half of all soil in the world has degraded. Let’s restore it by 2030. Digitisation is profoundly important in terms of registering land while Artificial Intelligence will transform land management. Honouring the right of people to own land, honouring the right of the governments to make sure that investments are in place, and honouring the right of nature to play the role it needs to play requires incredible skills,’ Steer added.

He lamented that global temperature is rising with 2024 predicted to be the hottest year, stressing that the footprint of people on nature has a lot to do with the development.

The Vice President, Infrastructure, World Bank, Guangzhe Chen, said land tenure and land management are the foundation for climate change mitigation and adaptation. He said financing a scale for land tenure reform and land management is becoming increasingly more important particularly, if the world is to close the infrastructure gap.

“We still have 685 million people who have no access to electricity, over two billion people live more than two kilometres away from over a road, something like two billion people without safely managed drinking water access, not to mention many other access goals and food security requirements. And all these require land, require access to land, require management of land and to be able to provide such services,” he said.

He observed that as a country grows, develop; people’s demand for infrastructure services will continue to expand, which will lead to expanded demand for land.

“We have seen how outdated and incomplete land records and the absence of clear rules for land access can lead to long delays and cost overruns for infrastructure investment and negative outcomes such as displacement. I cannot emphasise enough that land security investment, including securing the land right for indigenous people and land local community through our global programme on land tenure security and land access to climate goals. Scaling up investment in tenure security is critical to achieving a just transition.

This includes energy transition and many other transitions, existing landholders participating and benefiting from climate investments. The World Bank will be investing in supporting our clients to improve their land administrative system, land management and land use planning, aimed to double investment in the land sector from currently about $5 billion to $10 billion over the next five years. We expect this will represent a significant contribution to land sector investment needed to fully achieve global climate growth,”

He said the bank has set some very ambitious targets, including 100 million people with improved tenure security including 40 million women over the next five years and another 500 new urban areas with a climate-sensitive land use plan and over 20 countries with improved land administration and access for climate actions.

World Bank Vice President for Sustainable Development, Juergen Voegele, recommended that the custodians and stewards of land, forest and food systems need to have rights to their lands if they are expected to do the right thing.

Voegele said: “It is a complex issue, but it matters for rural areas as well as for the urban areas if you want resilient cities. Everyone is affected right now by climate, and everybody needs to deal with land use rights in their context. Coastal areas change, dry land areas change, and water areas get wet and flooded. All of these have implications for land values and for the way you manage those landscapes.”

He also cautioned that before investments are made, there is a need to prioritise information and data as well as the analytics behind it because ‘there is so much to do, but never enough money.’