Last week, Prindex Co-Director Anna Locke attended the India Land and Development Conference 2023: Land - People Relations: Diversity and Transitions, cosponsored by Global Land Alliance. She reflects on the conference, people she met, and the future of land governance in India. Special thanks to the Center for Land Governance and Pranab Choudhury for convening an important space for dialogue and collaboration.

Global Land Alliance has been selected by the European Commission (EC) to receive a €2.1 million grant to advance Prindex. It is part of an overall effort by the EC to advance land governance with the International Land Coalition (ILC), and underscores the importance of data on perceptions of land and property rights. This grant will further develop the global study which asks people how likely they think it is that they will lose their land or property against their will in the next 5 years.

In this new episode of the LandUP! podcast, we unpack the linkages between land tenure and land degradation. We spoke to Professor of Geography Dr. Jon Unruh, Country Program Manager Kader Baba and Researcher Anne Hennings about the emerging nexus between land tenure and Land Degradation Neutrality.

In this episode of the Land Up! podcast we ask where we land up on gender equality. We spoke to human rights lawyer Faith Alubbe, land economist Nana Ama Yirrah and Mokoro Principal Consultant and Land Portal Board Member Dr Elizabeth Daley about women's land rights with a special focus on widows in Africa.

The latest IPCC climate report mentions tenure security a whopping 58 times. This is a welcome shift in emphasis from the UN – strengthening land rights is a just and sustainable way to protect vulnerable landscapes in the climate fight, and one that works. By the report’s own estimate, time is almost up. As we push closer to the point of no return, the world needs to stop talking and start acting. Ramping up the recognition of land rights could help us preserve enough of the natural world to pull us back from the brink.

In this first episode of the Land UP! podcast, we ask: where do we land up on climate change?

We spoke to Indigenous climate activist Dr Myrna Cunningham Kain, the Guardian's global environment editor Jonathan Watts and Prindex Co-Director Anna Locke about diversity, representation, and climate justice at COP26.

Last summer in the US, an estimated 15 million people were at risk of eviction. Similar problems have been seen in rental markets around the world. Just ahead of the pandemic, Prindex’s global survey found that 1 in 3 renters worldwide fear eviction – an estimated 272 million people. The pandemic has undoubtedly pushed this figure up.

Nigerian politicians like to talk about creating ‘megacities,’ but it’s hard for people living in the country’s slums to see their place in this vision of the future. Voiceless in the policy debate, their homes get bulldozed in the name of urban regeneration. Making them owners instead of subjects of research on urban land rights could give them the direct line to policymakers they so desperately need.

Prindex Global and leading think tank NCAER will announce a new initiative today at the India Land and Development Conference 2021 to enhance land and housing rights in India. The project will go state by state mapping government performance on land records against people’s perceptions of their rights to drive policy progress in the country.

The Washington Post published an article on Nov 19, 2021 highlighting Africa’s rapid urbanization rates projected between now and 2100. GLA and Prindex’s partner Dr. Taibat Lawanson of the University of Lagos was cited in the article:

The mood is mixed coming out of Glasgow. There’s relief that the world didn’t step back from the 1.5°C goal and that rich countries will provide more climate finance. There’s delight that the check-ins on progress will now happen every year. There’s resigned acceptance that the coal phase out was phrased down to make it into the final text.

On the face of things, this is the first time that nature and biodiversity have achieved real prominence at a climate COP. Following a strong focus on forests and land use during the World Leaders’ Summit, COP26 included a dedicated Nature Day on the weekend. In between these two moments, a series of declarations and commitments were released:

From Nov 2nd to 3rd 2021, Global Land Alliance’s Victor Endo and Monica Ribadeneira Sarmiento were in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic participating in the seventh Inter-American Conference on Cadastre and Property Registry (original language “Conferencia Interamericana de Catastro y Registro de la Propiedad”) known as CatConf2021.

Yesterday for the first time at a UN climate summit, world leaders shone a spotlight on forests and land. Heads of state, corporate moguls and philanthropists lined up to announce huge figures to protect nature and halt and reverse forest loss.

Our tropical forests are being systematically scrubbed from the Earth. Not even a pandemic could slow their destruction – an area greater than the UK was lost last year alone. U.N.-led efforts to protect them aren’t working, we urgently need a new approach before it’s too late.

Land is a big deal when it comes to the world’s environmental goals. How we use it not only causes a third of global emissions, it has pushed a million species close to extinction and has degraded around a quarter of all land on Earth.

As we celebrate Workers’ Day tomorrow, hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest workers remain trapped in precarious poverty by land inequality and insecurity. Stronger rights and fairer access to land would give the most vulnerable – especially women – the solid ground they need to work their way out of poverty.

Global Land Alliance celebrates International Women’s Day 2021 and women’s rights to ownership and security of their land and natural resource rights. GLA strives to achieve sustainable prosperity for people and places; and gender equity is certainly a cornerstone of this work. Securing women’s land and property rights can increase agricultural productivity, incentivize the adoption of climate-resilient natural resource management and increase household spending on health and education. Conversely, when women face barriers to accessing, using or controlling land and other productive resources around the world, it not only puts them on an unequal footing in life, but it also restricts these wider positive social, economic and environmental outcomes.

Please join us on 12 November for an online event on land and property rights in East Asia and the Pacific. Secure land and property rights are crucial to economic growth and sustainable development. Improving tenure security is also important to the agendas of many global development institutions and donors working in East Asia and the Pacific. Until recently, however, there has been a lack of reliable data that is comparable across regions and countries.

In their recently published Storymap project, PlaceFund explores the way Prindex data can be used to create change. Drawing on the latest Prindex data and analysis, it does an excellent job in unpacking the Prindex finding that 1 billion people feel they are likely to lose their home or land in the next five years.