Women play a crucial role in agriculture and land management, yet they face significant barriers to access land and land ownership. With soils eroding at alarming rates, their full participation in achieving climate goals is more critical than ever. 

TMG Research contributed two articles to this time-critical publication, Her Land, joining a swell of evidence that demonstrates women’s invaluable contribution to tackling land degradation. 

In our article focusing on land justice’s rightful place in climate action (page 42), we demonstrate how indispensable land rights are to tackling both the climate crisis and inequality. They create the necessary incentives for communities to invest in adaptation strategies such as sustainable agriculture. In addition, women’s land rights advance gender equity and increase household resilience, spelling rewards for entire communities. Yet, climate action and global land restoration initiatives tend to neglect the rights of rural communities, especially those with customary or informal land rights. We offer a solution: enhance access to justice. Our powerful tool, Haki Ardhi, offers a safe pathway to report land rights violations and receive support from community-based organizations to seek redress. We invite you to read the chapter and learn more about how Haki Ardhi places justice in the hands of local communities.

In the other article, we advocate for building on UNCCD’s land tenure decision, which recognizes that women, in their role as land stewards, are a cornerstone of combatting land degradation and promoting sustainable development (page 30). We present concrete steps for systematically mirroring this land tenure decision in its sister conventions, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. To achieve that, we highlight our Women’s Land Rights Initiative, co-hosted by all three UN Rio Conventions, the Robert Bosch Stiftung, and the Huairou Commission – a global grassroots women’s network. We’re a network of partners dedicated to anchoring women’s land rights across these conventions by embedding them within their existing agendas, processes and structures. That way, we can creatively unify efforts across conventions more quickly and effectively to achieve our global climate goals. In the past year and a half alone, we’ve made extraordinary progress, and we invite you to learn more and join the movement!