The Women’s Land Rights Initiative
Women's land rights hold the potential to drive transformative change across the Rio Conventions to address the climate crisis, biodiversity loss and land degradation. With over 60 partners, we're ensuring women take center stage of just climate action.
Who we are
The Women’s Land Rights Initiative is a network of more than 60 partners dedicated to systematically anchoring women’s land rights within three UN Rio Conventions on biodiversity, desertification, and climate change. Our goal is to bring about stronger coordination across the Conventions to safeguard women’s land rights, enhance gender equality in land governance frameworks, and ensure women can robustly contribute to climate action. Through strategic joint coordination, knowledge sharing, and advocacy, we collectively ensure that decisions made at the global level prioritize women’s robust contribution to advancing the Conventions’ goals on the ground.
TMG Think Tank for Sustainability joins fellow hosts the Robert Bosch Stiftung, the Huairou Commission – a women-led social movement of grassroots groups in over 45 countries – as well as co-hosts the Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. And our partners span the political spectrum. From local land rights advocates and grassroots organizations, to soil, biodiversity and climate experts, to governments, and UN agencies, we’re leveraging our collective expertise to ensure land rights are incorporated in the Conventions’ agendas and processes to creatively streamline and generate coherent actions around land-based measures.
And we’re making sure that grassroots organizations guide decision-making. Rooted in deep community engagement, they champion solutions that reflect the realities and ambitions of local land users to drive more equitable solutions.
Want to learn more? Join our mailing list!
Why our Initiative matters for climate justice
Land-based measures are central to achieving time-critical global pledges outlined across the three UN Rio Conventions on biodiversity, desertification, and climate change. For example, enhancing carbon dioxide removal through nature-based solutions, restoring degraded land, and accelerating biodiversity conservation all hinge on land use.
But the land needed to meet climate pledges has soared to heights that present novel challenges. For example, to meet these commitments, governments have proposed around 1 billion hectares of land for carbon dioxide removal. That area exceeds the total landmass of South Africa, India, Turkey, and the entire European Union combined. This proposal would also require that around 60 percent of that designated area undergo significant land-use change, mainly conversions to forests. Land-use changes of this scope can conflict with other goals related to food security, ecosystem stability, and the rights of local communities. Indeed, much of the land committed is already managed by local communities and Indigenous Peoples and rests in regions where land governance systems and tenure security are weak or strained. This compounds an already fragile situation, where people, whose right to land is already precarious, face new challenges to maintain access to this vital resource.
The Women’s Land Right Initiative recognizes that the tenure rights and realities of people who rely on land as a lifeline are often overlooked in global commitments and national plans—especially the rights of women which are routinely denied on arbitrary legal and cultural grounds. Less than 15 percent of landowners worldwide are women. Yet, armed with invaluable knowledge of local plants, ecosystems, and sustainable farming practices, women also drive climate action to advance the Conventions’ goals in their communities.
Integrating land rights into Rio Conventions’ agendas is both an anticipatory step to prevent challenges before they occur and a practical pathway to unlocking new solutions to problems that persist. Through stronger coordination and joint advocacy, systematic safeguards can be enshrined into each Convention. That way, women’s land rights are protected against large-scale land-based measures that may unintentionally exacerbate existing inequalities, and climate strategies reflect the need to treat social equity as key to the success of environmental outcomes.
"What I really like about the Initiative is that it’s going to break down silos between the three Rio Conventions to work comprehensively on women’s land rights. It also puts local organizations and our communities at the forefront. Only together can we generate diverse discussions and accelerate change."
Violet Shivutse
Shibuye Community Health Workers, a women-led grassroots organization delivering comprehensive agricultural services to women farmers and spearheading advocacy efforts for women's land rights in Kenya and global fora
Our goals
The Women’s Land Rights Initiative strives to ensure that commitments to women's land rights are systematically integrated across all three Conventions.
UNCCD is still the only Rio Convention with a Land Tenure Decision that explicitly prioritizes secure tenure rights for women as critical to achieving its goals. For example, UNCCD structurally recognizes that land rights can empower women in their role as land stewards and is a step towards fostering the resilient communities needed to combat land degradation and promote sustainable development. However, UNFCCC and CBD also have very promising entry points to embed women’s land rights, for example, through their strong gender caucuses, gender action plans and specific land indicators.
Therefore, rather than focusing solely on years of work to replicate the landmark UNCCD Land Tenure Decision within the CBD and UNFCCC through a high-level campaign, the Initiative works to embed women’s land rights within all of their existing agendas, processes and structures to creatively promote synergies and coherence between the conventions to work more quickly and effectively. In the past year and a half alone, a surprising number of promising entry points have been identified for the Initiative to pursue.
This is an exciting start. With the commitment of the Rio Conventions to our Initiative, we’re excited to pursue joint actions to realize our shared goal.
Our history and milestones
This TMG-founded Initiative was realised in 2023 thanks to the support of the Robert Bosch Stiftung. Together, we set out to create a new platform where grassroots women who generate innovations on the ground have the space to inform and guide climate policies across levels. With the support of the three UN Rio Conventions and grassroots network, Huairou Commission, we’ve assembled a robust network of actors set on driving change that reflects local realities.
We take a four-pronged approach, outlined below, to achieve our goals.
So far, we’ve made incredible strides to unify our advocacy efforts that have gained high level recognition. And our narrative on the importance of identifying and building out synergies between the Rio Conventions has garnered attention and commitments from stakeholders across levels to further progress our roadmap for change.
Here are a few examples:
Since the Initiative’s first workshop in 2023, CBD's Women’s Caucus expressly centered women’s land rights in their advocacy agenda. As a platform that convenes civil society organizations to promote gender equality within CBD frameworks, this effort advances the Initiative’s goal of strengthening dialogue between partners and placing women's land rights at the heart of conservation.
Kenya’s CBD national focal point pledged to collaborate with fellow national focal points on ensuring to coherently integrate women’s land rights in the development of CBD’s upcoming national plans (NBSAPs).
The Initiative was highlighted in the official UNCCD secretariat note on land tenure ahead of COP16, as well as in a UN Women brief on gender-responsive synergies across the Rio Conventions, and has been proposed as an aligned initiative for the Riyadh Action Agenda.
Land Use and the Rio Conventions
The Rio Conventions are more than just stand-alone agreements. They operate in the same ecosystems, transforming them into engines for change set on tackling interlinked climate challenges. Across them, land is a unifying thread.
The Convention on Biological Diversity centers on conserving diverse ecosystems and species, which rely on healthy land and habitats.
UN Convention to Combat Desertification directly targets land degradation and promotes sustainable land management practices to prevent desertification and restore degraded land.
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change emphasizes the role of land use in carbon sequestration and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the impact of climate change on land and ecosystems.
All Rio Conventions recognize that the climate crisis unequally affects women, and that women’s expertise in managing land-based natural resources, like water, agriculture, and forests, plays a critical role in combatting it and should be resoundingly supported. Their commitment to gender equality helps to ensure gender-just land and forest governance, more inclusive participation models, and stronger policy coherence, and presents a ripe opportunity to place women at the heart of just climate action.
We believe this momentum radiates promise to place women’s land rights at the heart of this model for change. Studies continue to show that secure land tenure forms the foundation of an enabling environment to support women’s socioeconomic advancement and their efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
While the Rio Conventions provide a global platform for tackling the climate crisis, our Initiative fills a critical gap. It brings together diverse approaches – from local to international – to capture the transformative power women’s land rights hold in achieving a gender-just transition.