Recommendations
In the context of these daunting challenges, what can and should decision-makers do now to avert the worst impacts of the land crunch, and to improve the chances of achieving globally sustainable land use? Our recommendations can be divided into three categories of action: 1) reduce humanity’s land-use footprint and related pressures; 2) govern global land resources systemically and cooperatively; 3) value land differently and finance its stewardship.
Success will require a whole-of-society effort, so the recommendations that follow are aimed at a wide variety of stakeholders – including governments, regulators, international organizations, scientists and businesses.
Part 1. Reduce humanity’s land-use footprint and related pressures
More than any other action, humanity needs to reduce its demand for land and land-based resources to sustainable levels. Without this, other solutions for addressing land-use pressures simply cannot succeed. In one way or another, all of the recommendations in this chapter serve the overarching aim of using land more sparingly or intelligently.
The challenge is that much of the modern economy is essentially designed to meet resource demand through supply-side technology innovations (albeit supposedly with lower environmental impacts per unit of production as technology improves). Examples include intensive, industrialized farming and the substitution of fossil fuels with bioenergy. However, boosting supply, no matter how efficiently, without also tempering demand is not the answer to alleviating pressures on land use. Demand-side options – such as changing dietary consumption patterns to reduce the land footprint of food production, and reducing the energy requirements of industry – will inevitably also be needed, even if such options are politically unpalatable. In short, countries will increasingly need to decouple resource dependency from economic growth.
Key tasks:
a. Transform food systems
As agriculture is by far the largest land use, and food systems are central to rising pressures on land, efforts to promote transformation throughout food systems need to be redoubled to reduce those pressures and achieve better planetary health outcomes. Crucially, this will include shifting from animal- to more plant-based diets, and reducing supply-chain food losses and consumer waste.
Compared with producing animal-sourced foods, production of plant-based foods requires much less land and emits far fewer greenhouse gases, meaning less land is also required to sequester food system emissions.
These ideas have long been acknowledged as essential elements for sustainability, but have yet to translate into the meaningful policy changes that would drive widespread commercial and consumer adoption. However, their potential to significantly reduce land use means they simply cannot be ignored and must become a priority. Compared with producing animal-sourced foods, production of plant-based foods requires much less land and emits far fewer greenhouse gases, meaning less land is also required to sequester food system emissions. Such a shift would also free up land for other uses, meaning for example that land-wealthy countries could restore native ecosystems – in line with meeting biodiversity goals – without having to compromise food and nutrition security to do so.
Though less of a factor than dietary change, reducing the amounts of food lost in production and transit, or wasted by consumers, is also important for shrinking the land-use footprint of food production (see Chapter 4). Typical industry responses are often confined to boosting supply-chain efficiencies and developing highly processed ‘shelf-stable’ foods that keep for long periods. While it is important that produce reaches consumers in good condition, changes must also include promoting regenerative and resilient agriculture to counter the negative environmental impacts associated with many current industrialized food supply chains.
As noted, however, for change to be achieved at the scale needed, food systems need to attract much greater international political attention. Just as biodiversity protection had its ‘Paris moment’ at the COP15 summit of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2022 (see Chapter 6, Box 13), food system transformation needs a similar galvanizing moment in international relations. In this regard, the upcoming COP28 climate summit scheduled for November/December 2023 could provide an early opportunity to advance transformative action as part of the summit’s ‘non-negotiated outcomes’. The extensive diplomatic groundwork around food systems undertaken in the run-up to COP28 confirms that the urgency to act is now widely understood internationally. However, this must be backed by concerted, ongoing and holistic action to match the rhetoric. In the longer term, the food systems reform agenda needs to be reinforced by continued advocacy and persistent and ambitious actions by politicians, industries and civil society.
b. Avoid ‘high-risk’ climate change mitigation strategies, such as BECCS, that require a lot of land
Reliance on high-risk climate change mitigation technologies such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) – which, worryingly, is increasingly central to many climate action plans – needs to be minimized. BECCS may have some future role as part of a diverse portfolio of climate solutions, but it should be used sparingly. In many instances BECCS will need to be avoided because, if deployed at scale, it will amplify land crunch risks worldwide.
Certainly, the common notion that widespread deployment of BECCS is a desirable and feasible climate ‘get-out-of-jail card’ needs to be more convincingly dispelled, as BECCS is prohibitively land-intensive (see Chapter 5) and its effectiveness in reducing net emissions at scale is unproven. Unrealistic expectations for BECCS are also causing other necessary climate change mitigation actions to be deferred or overlooked.
A corollary of reduced reliance on BECCS is the need to explore other technological and nature-based carbon dioxide removal (CDR) solutions. These include: direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS); forest and grassland protection and natural forest expansion; peatland restoration; agriculture-compatible solutions such as chemical weathering, biochar, no-till agriculture and regenerative agriculture; and ‘blue carbon’ sequestration options such as mangrove and seagrass restoration.
At the same time, there is an urgent need for civil society to deliver systematic, country-by-country analysis of the practical applications of nature-based solutions (NBS), including their limitations, their net carbon, biodiversity and livelihood impacts, and their suitability for different geographies and economies. There is an equally pressing need for governments and businesses to take heed of this analysis in their decision-making and investment decisions. Only then can risk-calibrated investment and financing options be mobilized for appropriate portfolios of technological and nature-based solutions to limit the overshooting of carbon budgets.
c. Use marginal lands better
‘Marginal lands’ of little current productive value, particularly extensive areas of degraded or barren lands such as deserts, must be harnessed for sustainable use – for example, for nature restoration, carbon capture and storage, or solar energy generation – to reduce pressures on other, more viable land. Alternatively, such areas could be used for ‘land-sparing’ food production facilities, such as vertical hydroponic/aquaponic farms or cultured-meat laboratories. However, as such facilities often have significant indirect land-use impacts (for example, requiring transport corridors) and non-land footprints in the form of water and energy requirements, they should only be situated in environments that can sustain them. Where lower-value lands support fragile ecosystems or marginalized communities, or are inaccessible wildernesses, they should either be left untouched or, through careful management and restoration, returned to their full ecological potential.
One way of facilitating such changes could be for development donors to use foreign aid and other financial flows to build local resilience through appropriate land restoration and investment in sustainable economic activities in marginal areas. This could help to reduce aid recipient countries’ direct vulnerabilities to climate change and land degradation, and limit their exposure to the land supply crunch.
d. Increase the circularity of the global economy
Inclusive ‘circular’ economies need to be developed and widely adopted to decouple economic prosperity from growth in material consumption and its reliance on land. This transition will rely, in particular, on private sector innovation to slow the flow of materials through the economic system by extending product lifespans, using fewer resources per product, and maximizing opportunities for recycling and reuse. Such measures will be especially important as demand increases for biomaterials as substitutes for extractive resources like critical minerals and fossil fuels. Existing bio-based economic practices such as land-intensive agriculture and forestry will also need to be replaced with alternatives that have smaller land footprints and are associated with fewer environmental and societal harms.
The transition to a circular economy will further depend on governments lowering or removing technical barriers to trade in second-hand and remanufactured goods, recycled raw materials and waste for recovery – for example, by unifying regulatory and trade requirements between jurisdictions. Policymakers and legislators will need to improve trade facilitation measures to address the complexities of product classification associated with these innovative types of trade flows, streamlining the current cumbersome authorization processes for trade in the relevant categories of secondary goods. They will also need to embed the principles of circularity and inclusivity within trade and economic cooperation agreements.
Part 2. Govern global land resources systemically and cooperatively
International cooperation will be critical to reducing land-use pressures, as all countries will suffer if the geopolitics around land use degenerate towards zero-sum approaches. As the challenge is global, and the distribution of land wealth between countries uneven, cooperation and coordination must account for asymmetries in political and economic power – and circumvent the obstacles these present – to help unlock collective solutions.
Yet the outlook for multilateralism is deteriorating. Given the events of the past decade, in which competition between countries over resources and in other areas has intensified and the architecture for international cooperation has become weaker, relying solely on multilateral solutions to global problems is unlikely to be effective. This is especially the case given that many multilateral commitments are generally not subject to hard laws or clear enforcement mechanisms. Equally, the prospects for forging new binding agreements or creating brand new global institutions look remote.
To mitigate the worst risks, and to avoid the ‘plunder thy foreigner’ future outlined in Chapter 8, countries must therefore not only persevere with multilateralism under the current architecture but also find new ways of working together to reduce demand for land-dependent goods and services, and to ensure land-use decisions are optimized and coordinated globally. While minilateral or ad hoc arrangements must not supplant broad-based multilateral action, novel mechanisms will at times be required to raise ambition, especially as achieving universal action may become progressively more challenging as the geopolitics of land use becomes more contested in the future (see Chapter 8).
Key tasks:
a. Coordinate between the ‘Rio conventions’
Redoubled political investment in multilateral governance is required to ensure responsible stewardship of globally significant land resources. Yet in the context of today’s trend towards ‘reglobalization’ – in which some established alliances and networks have fractured and other bilateral or multi-country arrangements have emerged – progress remains more likely via established treaties and UN conventions than through fundamental reform of the international architecture for environmental governance.
Redoubled political investment in multilateral governance is required to ensure responsible stewardship of globally significant land resources.
An immediate priority should be greater alignment between the bodies and workplans of the three ‘Rio conventions’: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and the CBD (see Chapter 6, Box 13 for background on all three conventions). Central to this will be the development of mechanisms that incentivize and legislate for sustained increases in policy ambition, financial contributions and meaningful action, and that are coherent across all three conventions (so that, for instance, the design of climate change mitigation takes biodiversity implications into account). An example of where this is needed is the UNFCCC’s new four-year Sharm el-Sheikh programme of ‘joint work on implementation of climate action on agriculture and food security’. This work needs to broaden its scope from focusing predominantly on agricultural systems to tackling food systems holistically and in a manner that is consistent with, and advances, their wider roles in responding to biodiversity and land degradation challenges as articulated through the CBD and UNCCD.
At the national level, greater effort is required in many countries to ensure that domestic policymaking coherently advances progress towards meeting the objectives and targets enshrined in all three conventions. Economic development and investment plans, policies and legislation need to be designed with consideration of national commitments under all relevant conventions and multilateral environmental agreements. For each country, this approach should reflect an overarching, coherent ‘masterplan’ coordinated across government offices and agencies, as opposed to the piecemeal and often discordant policymaking currently observed.
International forums such as the UN Food Systems Summit offer mechanisms through which to strengthen domestic action and international cooperation on governance of land policies, for example by refining and bolstering national food system transformation strategies. One useful approach could be to integrate such strategies both into countries’ nationally determined contributions (NDCs) on emissions reductions within the UNFCCC, and into their national biodiversity strategies and action plans (NBSAPs) under the CBD’s new Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). However, participating countries need to use such initiatives to drive ambition forward rather than make lowest-common-denominator pledges.
b. Measure, report and verify land use consistently
Awareness and understanding of global land resources and how they are used is urgently needed to help policymakers to assess the risks of land degradation – both locally and in relation to cross-border flows of goods, services, finance and people – and to take appropriate action. In the first instance, this will depend on significant improvements in reporting on land availability and management.
At a country level, much can be learned from the experiences of measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) under the UNFCCC’s framework on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD+). In addition to its focus on emissions, REDD+ includes reporting on activities such as sustainable forest management and the conservation and enhancement of forest carbon stocks. If a new and expanded MRV framework were to cover all land uses (not just forestry), all countries (not just developing countries), and a wider range of ecological metrics (such as biodiversity) and societal metrics (for instance, farmer incomes) at a higher spatial resolution than
under REDD+, it could offer a template for managing and reducing a wider
regime of land-use pressures.
More stringent target-setting around land management will be needed to inform and drive policy change. The voluntary reporting metrics of the UN’s Land Degradation Neutrality Target Setting Programme offer a potential model for monitoring progress and increasing accountability. This programme quantifies aspects of land cover, land productivity (or ‘net primary production’ – NPP) and soil organic carbon stocks. However, for greater effectiveness, the adoption of its land degradation neutrality (LDN) targets needs to be extended beyond the 129 participating countries that have committed to setting national targets, and there is a particular gap in commitments in North America and Europe.
To bolster target-setting, global mechanisms will be required to ratchet up national ambitions to combat land degradation and increase scrutiny of compliance with domestic targets. Widespread adoption of the UN’s new ‘SEEA Ecosystem Accounting’ framework – part of the UN’s System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), which recognizes natural capital in economic reporting – would represent a major step forward by enabling the incorporation of sustainable development concerns into economic planning and policy decision-making. (See also Recommendation 3a for more on natural capital accounting.)
In the private sector, fuller disclosures on land use are required to understand the climate and environmental risks associated with companies’ business operations and investments. As a first step, one option for improving transparency is for governments to advance efforts to meet Target 15 of the new GBF: ‘Take legal, administrative or policy measures to encourage and enable business, and in particular to ensure that large and transnational companies and financial institutions: (a) Regularly monitor, assess, and transparently disclose their risks, dependencies and impacts on biodiversity, including … along their operations, supply and value chains and portfolios … .’
Existing corporate disclosure frameworks, coupled with regulation and policy galvanized by the GBF, could be used to make land- and nature-related disclosures a core part of every company and financial institution’s annual reporting. Two significant initiatives in this area are the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), run by the G20-mandated Financial Stability Board (FSB); and the new Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). Widespread adoption of reporting under the TCFD and TNFD land-use headings (i.e. pertaining to climate risks as well as other ecological and societal risks) among companies with material land footprints (whether direct or indirect), or for investments in such companies, would increase the transparency, resiliency and societal benefits of the operations involved. To increase demand for such disclosures, more stock exchanges, fund providers and institutional investors should make reporting of, and performance against, these measures a condition of market listings or investments.
Mandatory non-financial reporting frameworks should also be expanded to provide for greater disclosure on corporate land footprints. Such frameworks already exist in some jurisdictions, such as under the EU’s non-financial reporting directive (NFRD), and are increasing transparency around the broader social and environmental impacts of business activities.
c. Anticipate and communicate land-use risks to inform decision-making
Improved monitoring and modelling of the quality and condition of land are needed so that the risks to land sustainability associated with environmental change – as well as the risks associated with different policy options – can be more accurately and convincingly communicated and acted on. Determining whether one policy option is preferable to another in terms of land-use sustainability, for instance, depends on quantifiable, context-specific information on the characteristics and performance of each solution, benchmarked against best practice and/or theoretical models of globally optimized land use.
Developing this information requires action from scientists and policymakers alike. The scientific community needs to provide analysis of contemporary and future land, climate and biodiversity interactions in more policy-actionable formats. This should include scenarios highlighting the potential sectoral and temporal trade-offs associated with different land-use, trade, development and climate strategies. (For instance, does an energy decarbonization policy have unintended consequences for food security; or does an agricultural policy to boost food security today undermine food security tomorrow by irreversibly degrading productive lands and reducing communities’ options to adapt to climate change?)
Such work would lead to the development of clearly articulated global pathways and guidelines for responsible investment, dietary change, and technological and nature-based climate change mitigation, which are needed to inform national-level action plans on the collective transformation of land use. Work could be overseen, at least initially, by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) under the authority of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA). In consultation with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), the development of global, sustainable land-use pathways could foster new collaborations between the respective assessment processes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the UNEP Global Environment Outlook (GEO) and the UNEP ‘Emissions Gap Report’. Such collaborations could draw on new assessment frameworks to strengthen the systemic evidence base and contribute to better understanding of the risks associated with the land crunch.
Policymakers must then use this information to make appropriately risk-adjusted decisions within domestic and multilateral contexts, including accounting for the domestic and international land-use consequences of proposed emissions reduction pathways. This would mean, for example, greater recognition of the ‘embedded’ land associated with each country’s consumption of resources and services imported from other countries, and improved recognition of the indirect land-use impacts associated with offshoring production of goods and services, or with devolving carbon sequestration to external trading partners.
Using this information, countries would be better placed to design regulations and incentives to ensure lands are used, restored or preserved appropriately. Decision-makers would also be better placed to identify options that provide the right balance (and combinations) of climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, nutrition security, and ecological and economic benefits.
‘Horizon scanning’ of potential sources of pressure arising from global land demand is needed to provide decision-makers with better visibility of land-related risks and early warnings of future problems.
‘Horizon scanning’ of potential sources of pressure arising from global land demand is also needed to provide decision-makers with better visibility of land-related risks and early warnings of future problems, especially given the volatility in environmental conditions and commodity markets that is increasingly apparent from land–climate interactions. This may be best realized through the establishment of an inter-agency global risk-scanning institution, for example using the G20’s Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) as a template. The G20 could invite UNEP to establish and host a similar mechanism devoted to land use. The new agency could identify and audit risks from land-use changes and land degradation, as well as cascading risks from biodiversity loss and climate change. In the first instance, such risk-scanning could help countries to mitigate or avoid negative outcomes. But it could also eventually play a broader role: informing strategic planning on navigating longer-term issues such as the resilience and functionality of different supply chains in a changing world.
d. Increase enforcement of land rights and protections
Novel approaches are needed to enforce better land and environmental management at the domestic level. The prospect of mounting pressures on land and more securitized land-related geopolitics points to likely increases in environmental damage and attempted land grabs – whether involving ‘virtual’ land embedded in supply chains or through physical land acquisitions – by states and multinational corporations.
Even in the absence of overt transgressions, countries, landowners and land-using communities will need legally enforceable preventive measures that they can use when their land resources are at risk of expropriation and/or degradation (for example, by private profit-making entities). They will also require mechanisms for legal redress when abuses occur. However, enforcement within domestic jurisdictions will require the relevant national environmental regulatory agencies to receive political support and sufficient resources.
Litigation, already becoming more prevalent over environmental issues, will become increasingly necessary to plug regulatory gaps. In the context of efforts to achieve sustainable land use, environmental and rights-based litigation (already being used by affected communities and non-governmental organizations) could force action to prevent ‘ecological bankruptcy’ by holding companies responsible for acts and omissions in their value chains. Improved safeguards for weakly governed countries with exploitable land resources will still be needed, but lawsuits against international actors in more strongly regulated jurisdictions could also have a valuable role.
Concerted efforts will be needed to safeguard the rights of local communities, and to ensure that protection of high-value lands is not at the expense of local, indigenous or vulnerable stakeholders who may be displaced or denied access to economic resources. Decision-making around land protection should involve the participation of communities most affected by land-use change. It should be complemented by financial mechanisms to compensate communities and/or invest in local livelihoods, and by robust land rights legislation that protects landowners, land users and land with high ecological value. To ensure legal certainty – both for indigenous peoples and society at large – institutions and regulatory frameworks governing the participation and consultation of indigenous peoples will need to be strengthened, or created where lacking. One development worth watching is the work of Brazil’s new Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, set up in response to the dismantling of indigenous and environmental protections that occurred during the administration of the country’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro. Protections are especially urgent in jurisdictions where land governance is weak, weakly enforced or contested, including where customary tenure arrangements may be vulnerable to being overturned.
Part 3. Value land differently and finance its stewardship
To incentivize the protection of land, its value in providing long-term public goods needs to be systemically recognized and accounted for. Protecting land with a high ecological value from conversion or exploitation is the most effective way of preserving carbon sinks and biodiversity, but current protections are typically based more on an area’s intrinsic and cultural value, rather than on recognition of its economic value in the short and long term.
At the same time, accelerated mobilization of financial resources, particularly in support of ‘ecological governance’ in lower-income countries, will be needed to incentivize and enable sound environmental stewardship. While this is difficult politically in the current economic environment, as many higher-income countries are fiscally constrained following the COVID-19 pandemic and as a result of the economic impacts of Russia’s war against Ukraine, low- and middle-income countries will need financial help to maintain and increase the vitality of their terrestrial ecosystems. Many countries will also need financial support to adapt sustainably to competition for land and land-related resources in a context of more challenging environmental conditions. Despite the cost, supporting poorer countries with these efforts will have global benefits.
Key tasks:
a. Formalize the value of protected and ecologically rich land
The long-term value that protected and other ecologically rich lands provide – both for the countries in which they are situated and for planetary health – needs more formal, institutional recognition. Ad hoc, intrinsic valuations need to be replaced with regulations or payment schemes and other market-based instruments that explicitly assign financial values to social and environmental goods, including biodiversity. Reductionist carbon accounting that fails to reflect the importance of broader ecosystem integrity and functionality needs to be avoided.
An important signal of increased political intent on this issue was delivered at the CBD COP15 biodiversity summit in December 2022. The 116 members of the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People (HAC N&P) secured the inclusion in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) of a ‘30x30’ target to protect or conserve at least 30 per cent of the planet’s land and ocean by 2030. All parties to the CBD have agreed to adopt the GBF, notwithstanding objections from the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the lack of a new biodiversity fund.
The adoption of ‘natural capital accounting’ (see also Recommendation 2b) would allow for jurisdictions to ascribe economic value to land in a manner commensurate with the value of its biodiversity, ecosystem functions and utility as a carbon sink. Natural capital accounting measures changes in the extent and conditions of ecosystems at a variety of scales in a standardized format, and its wider use would allow the flow and value of ecosystem services to be integrated more fully into economic accounting and reporting systems.
b. Use regulation and market-based approaches to incentivize land-use optimization and sustainable trade
There is a pressing need to incentivize sustainable trade and to find ways, through regulation or changes in market structures, to optimize use of global land resources. New measures will be required to ensure that the environmental and social costs and benefits of land-based products and services are better reflected in economic valuations and trade. As a starting point, this will require nations and trading jurisdictions to institute economy-wide carbon pricing for emissions and sequestration.
As this step alone is unlikely to provide sufficiently comprehensive valuations, additional carbon-accounting measures could include requiring emitters who wish to avoid further emissions taxes or the imposition of carbon border adjustment mechanisms to hold verifiable sequestration certificates commensurate with the volume of their emissions.
Applying similar pricing mechanisms to the valuation of non-carbon elements of land wealth, such as embodied biodiversity costs or land footprints, is more complicated because the impacts would be more varied and geography-specific. However, such issues, and their alignment with global trade rules, could usefully be explored through the Trade and Environmental Sustainability Structured Discussions (TESSD) at the World Trade Organization (WTO). TESSD was launched in late 2020 to advance discussions on how – among other objectives – trade-related measures can contribute to climate and environmental goals, and to promote and facilitate trade in environmental goods and services. This is an opportunity to make much-needed progress in multilateral dialogues on land–environment–trade intersections and to bring more focused attention to these issues in the WTO’s regular committees.
Other options for addressing the environmental impacts of trade could include the following: ‘behind the border’ measures such as quotas and regulatory standards in importer and exporter countries; ensuring compatibility between national trade policies and multilateral environmental agreements (i.e. negotiated international conventions and treaties); voluntary measures; and the tracing and disclosure by private sector companies of environmental impacts in specific supply chains, accompanied by relevant consumer labelling.
All such mechanisms would need to be structured to incentivize land uses that enhance land wealth holistically rather than, for example, incentivizing monoculture-based carbon sequestration at the expense of broader ecological resilience. Currently, enforceable climate-related provisions in trade agreements are rare, and high environmental standards may be regarded as discriminatory market barriers if they treat otherwise ‘like’ products differently based on environmental criteria. Such discrimination is potentially illegal under WTO rules (and may not be treated as an essential requirement for managing the ability of land to sustain its output). However, trade agreements will increasingly need to take greater account of signatories’ environmental responsibilities – this is particularly the case for agreements involving major economies and land powers.
c. Redirect public funds towards sustainable land use, and end inappropriate agricultural subsidies
Public money should be redirected to supporting the development and deployment of land management practices and technological and market solutions that reduce, rather than increase, pressures on land. Publicly funded subsidies need to be reallocated, perverse incentives removed, and market failures corrected to enable better use of private and public goods. Agricultural subsidy reforms to support environmental improvements without reducing economic welfare are a particularly urgent priority: currently, nearly 90 per cent of the direct financial support provided by governments to agricultural producers is spent on foods and agricultural practices associated with negative social, environmental and nutritional outcomes. One of the most important steps is to repurpose funding towards production methods and foods that offer health and environmental benefits through a ‘public money for public goods’ strategy.
Since redirecting subsidies carries political risks (as existing subsidy recipients are likely to seek to preserve the status quo), reforms will need to be complemented by significant policy and communications groundwork. One example would be to raise awareness of the necessity of change in stakeholder communities and civil society.
Progress towards achieving this recommendation – at least in terms of elaborating indicative pathways for redirecting public funding towards public goods – may be accelerated by the fact that governments urgently need to identify, by 2025, how they will meet the 2030 targets of the Kunming-Montreal GBF. This may force the issue, with Target 18 of the GBF potentially proving particularly catalytic: ‘Identify by 2025, and eliminate, phase out or reform incentives, including subsidies, harmful for biodiversity, in a proportionate, just, fair, effective and equitable way … starting with the most harmful incentives, and scale up positive incentives for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.’
d. Invest in nature-based solutions and create a ‘Rio convention fund’
More public and private sector financing for nature-based solutions (NBS) is urgently needed to avert a land crunch. The term NBS refers to a wide variety of activities involving the conservation, management and restoration of ecosystems (see also Recommendation 1b). Beyond their carbon sequestration and emissions mitigation roles, NBS offer myriad climate change adaptation and biodiversity benefits if sensitively and appropriately deployed in each landscape.
One means of financing NBS is through ‘payments for ecosystem services’ (PES – see Chapter 3), which can involve payments made by government or by private beneficiaries of the services in question. While PES activity is increasing, especially in domestic contexts, such initiatives need to go further, faster. More research is needed into the factors that determine the success or failure of PES financing schemes, particularly at scale, but there is certainly an expanding role for governments to provide finance and policy oversight in this area.
In addition to domestic public financing, more international public finance and private capital are required. As the UNCCD cautions: ‘It is unrealistic to expect developing countries to cover the entire bill for a “just transition” to a restoration economy and climate-resilient future. Extra-budgetary support will be needed – from corporate investment, climate finance, debt relief, and donor/development aid to a range of innovative financial instruments that explicitly include environmental, social, and governance criteria.’ One urgent priority, requiring immediate action from ‘all sources’, is ensuring that the financial commitments of the Kunming-Montreal GBF are delivered. However, as with multilateral financing for climate action and ‘loss and damage’ compensation under the UNFCCC, governments are struggling to find the fiscal space or political will to deliver on biodiversity funding.
Since public funding is difficult to secure in the current political and economic environment, the onus will increasingly fall on private investors to provide financing for NBS.
Since public funding – both domestic and international – is difficult to secure in the current political and economic environment, the onus will increasingly fall on private investors to provide financing for NBS. However, because of the largely intangible economic yields (other than for emissions offsets), NBS often struggle to attract capital investment. To scale up investment in NBS will require addressing risk aversion among private investors, whose concerns partly reflect the difficulty of coordinating and measuring the impact of investments spanning multiple and diverse landscapes (including forests, fields, farms, savannahs, etc.). Effective approaches might include addressing currency risks through blended finance developed with international development institutions; implementing policies that seek to provide long-term certainty for investors through the development of novel markets for nature-based products and services; and partnering with local experts on appropriate ecosystem management practices to mitigate risks.
In the longer term, the creation of an additional ‘Rio convention fund’ using public or blended finance may offer a promising means of mobilizing finance to address the land crunch. Such funding could be made available for integrating ambitious action spanning all three Rio conventions, for example through governments creating country masterplans supporting the alignment of (a) NDCs on greenhouse gas emissions; (b) national biodiversity strategies and action plans (NBSAPs); and (c) national plans for achieving land degradation neutrality (LDN) targets. As many of the most pressing land-use challenges are at the local level – and hard to reach for national or federal government policy – measures will be required to channel funding effectively to subnational governments and non-state actors so that the issues can be addressed close to the source.
Final words
All of the above are vital actions, which need to be taken by a multitude of stakeholders if humanity is to avert the worst outcomes from the deepening land crunch. But perhaps most fundamentally, governments have to make land an urgent priority. They need to start recognizing and acting on the land crunch as one of the existential issues of our time. Governments need to acknowledge the magnitude of the challenge, take responsibility for addressing it, and effect institutional changes that embed land crunch planning at the centre of domestic, foreign and economic policy.
Governments have to make land an urgent priority. They need to start recognizing and acting on the land crunch as one of the existential issues of our time.
Challenges, contests and conflicts over land are as old as human history. Yet the pressures created by humanity’s current and prospective land uses are perhaps unprecedented. This is the first time that choices over land use are accelerating global environmental threats – which are existential for many and will affect us all. It is also the first time since the dawn of globalization that land use is so closely entwined with geopolitics: land use could become a major factor in reshaping international relations, while equally being more susceptible to foreign policy agendas. As this report has illustrated, the land crunch is already a real problem for the world, and the risks associated with it are intensifying.
However, calamity is not inevitable. Land use is as much a part of the potential solution as it is a part of the problem, and with the correct choices it could be harnessed to decelerate, rather than accelerate, environmental threats. Through a range of actions to reduce pressures on land – along with international cooperation to mitigate impacts, innovations to enhance understanding of sustainability in land use, and adaptive measures to cope with economic and geopolitical realities – a course can be charted away from the folly of business-as-usual land use towards a more land-secure and cooperative future.
Doing so will not be easy. It will require fundamental changes at all levels in the ways in which societies use and value land wealth. It will require societies to rethink how they work together to distribute land wealth sustainably and equitably in line with climate, biodiversity and other sustainable development goals. Given the enormous heterogeneity of land wealth between countries, and the asymmetries in economic and political power that shape how this wealth is spent or reinvested, global cooperation is vital.
The urgent need for coordinated and deep-rooted action demands a foundation of pragmatic and enlightened multilateralism. The frameworks established through the three Rio conventions – on tackling climate change, land degradation and biodiversity loss – provide a potentially expedient means of harnessing global efforts and actors, but these strands must be brought together more coherently, ambitiously and urgently. While addressing the risks from a land crunch presents many unprecedented and formidable challenges, doing so successfully is necessary to safeguard a habitable planet for current and future generations.
