Land tenure is a particularly important issue in Asia, a region most prone to natural disasters and the impacts of climate change and home to the world’s poorest who depend on land for their lives and livelihoods. However, public understanding of the links between climate change, disasters, and land tenure is still very limited, even among civil society organizations.
This publication, “No Time to Waste: Climate action through secure land rights and sustainable land use,” seeks to train the spotlight on specific issues of land tenure, land use and climate change, and on how these are intertwined. It shares experiences from rural communities in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal and the Philippines.
These cases describe how the lack of land rights and tenure security increases the vulnerability of the rural poor, and reduces their capacity to cope with the changes brought about by climate change. They serve to illustrate how improved tenure security, resource rights and land governance can increase the capacity of poor people to adapt to climate change.