If we want to improve lives and alleviate poverty, achieve food security globally, and guarantee human rights and full dignity for all, we must invest in land rights for women.
What if we could alleviate rural poverty, strengthen women’s rights, and help turn the tide against climate change, all at once? In Myanmar, a program to secure land rights for the country’s forest-dwelling communities is helping villages make progress toward all three.
Both the climate crisis and inequality require a democratic overhaul. Governments globally should start by turning over legal control of land and natural resources to local communities and indigenous land users. Their rights are key to survival for all of us.
With the world’s food supply under threat and millions already facing climate-driven migration, a land-use revolution is needed. Legal reforms that strengthen rural communities’ land rights are essential to providing the leverage and incentive to invest in climate resilience.
The climate crisis will reshape our relationships to land around the world. To shift how the world produces food, manages land, and adapts to this crisis, it’s imperative that we don’t sacrifice the land rights of rural communities who have sustainably maintained their lands for generations.
Landesa’s Sr. Research and Evaluation Advisor Gina Alvarado argues that the US should invest in programming that strengthens the land tenure rights of Central American farmers as a sustainable way to stem the current migrant crisis.
As world leaders, climate scientists, researchers, and members of civil society debate the global climate change agenda, their efforts must account for the billions of rural people who bear little responsibility for causing climate change but are most vulnerable to its consequences. Land rights are an important way to confront this immense inequality and promote a more secure world for all.
For communities across the Global South, the impacts of climate change are not abstract projections but concrete realities that threaten their land and food security.
This post originally appeared on Women’s Advancement Deeply. On the U.N.’s International Day …
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