Make it Count!

The interrelationship between land tenure and climate justice for communities in the Global South is thoroughly unexplored. In 2019, in an unprecedented move, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change underscored that in discussions of land-climate interactions, land tenure is a key dimension. 

While experts are in consensus on the importance of land rights, there is still ambiguity on the role and magnitude that land tenure rights have on systemic climate injustice. In an effective response to the unfolding crisis, governments, communities, and individuals at the heart of it will have to make deliberate investments in natural resources.

At an individual level, substantive investments into land, whether mitigative or adaptive, require security in proof of ownership.  But this is not the reality for majority of climate-marginalized people in the Global South.  

Women in the Global South shoulder the greater burden of the climate crisis. However, the conclusive reasoning as to how much and why that much, remains unclear. Indigenous women continue to bear a significant burden of insecure land tenure and rights which when accelerated by an unpredictable and multidimensional climate crisis, threatens their socio-economic development and the world’s preservation. For instance, women farmers constitute 43% of the global agriculture workforce yet own only 20% of the land.

Certain milestones in the Generation Equality Forum and the Sustainable Development Goals cannot be achieved without comprehensive address of land tenure rights. Women have weak land tenure security, the climate shocks against them become insurmountable, for both households and communities. In addition to food insecurity, this system threatens the ability of women, usually the guardians of land, to take on mitigative features on the land such as investing in water harvesting structures, planting trees or taking up agroecology.

Women are further excluded from loss and damage  support.  In Sri Lanka for instance, to gain membership into farmer societies through which drought relief is channeled, proof of land ownership is the primary criterion.  

As this Oxfam report shows, the four public climate finance mechanisms – Global Environmental Facility, Green Climate Fund, Climate Investment Fund, and the Adaptation Fund – have articulated gender considerations. However, in ensuring that there are gender-transformative climate transitions, particularly for the Global South, there must be harmonisation of gender approaches, frameworks, and parameters.

Further, the operationalisation of climate financing in the Global South must transition from seemingly anecdotal information to being scientific and evidence-based. An evidence-based climate finance system in the Global South will prioritise the inclusion of women, youth and persons living with disability in decision making platforms.  It would also entail the development of contextualized research on the role of gender and its intersections in accessing climate finance.

Additionally, to achieve efficacy of climate finance mechanisms to intervene at the nexus of gender and climate justice, the potential of Women’s Rights Organisations in the Global South must be leveraged.  These organisations compile the kind of data that are necessary for revealing the role and importance of land rights and land tenure across different contexts in the Global South.

Beyond the design phase, their close interaction with communities allows for human-centric implementation – recognising the differed needs of rural communities in solving the multidimensional challenges of land rights, agricultural productivity, and climate change.  

The climate crisis is one of many challenges in the Global South. It is happening to communities already marginalized by systemic challenges in health, education, financial access, and various types of conflict. This crisis exacerbates their inability to autonomously define their life outcomes. In addressing challenges on land tenure, it is integral that climate financing serve as a source of investment to institute safeguards and protection protocol particularly for women, children, youth and persons living with disabilities.

In this way, as women seek the gender equitable climate transition they rightfully deserve, they are protected from further harm, abuse or distress.  

Ultimately, if climate financing does not consider the magnitude of land tenure issues for demographics in the Global South, it’s an indicator of systemic ignorance of vulnerable regions in the global financing landscape.  

Read Oxfam report: Harnessing the Potential of African Women