Women’s Land Rights Are Necessary to Build Climate-Resilient Futures

Nov 17, 2021 | Juliet Schulman-Hall
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COP 26, the UN Conference on Climate, ended last Friday, after world leaders made several collective pledges to the climate crisis on issues like deforestation, methane emissions, coal and more. But few discussions at COP 26 accurately addressed or focused on the gendered aspect of climate change, say specialists and activists at Landesa and other global land rights organizations.

“Despite the huge impact of agriculture on emissions, and the huge potential of land use for both mitigation and adaptation, it still receives far too little attention; and gender is consistently given minimal attention or altogether left out in conversations about agriculture and land use planning and management in particular, relative to climate conversations overall,” Beth Roberts, the director of Landesa’s Center for Women’s Land Rights, told Ms. 

Women have not only been left out of important conversations and looked down upon, but are frequently seen as property, says Roberts. “One of the questions we often hear, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, when we are talking about women’s land rights is: Why should my property own property?”