Global land governance fails women: How tenure rights gaps undermine Rio Conventions' climate, biodiversity, and desertification goals
Original framing: “Women’s tenure rights for gender-responsive coherence across the Rio Conventions” — bing news
Marginalized voices—such as those of *landless women in India’s* *Santhal communities* or *Black women farmers in the U.S. South*—are systematically excluded from tenure debates. In *Nepal*, women comprise 80% of agricultural laborers but hold less than 20% of land titles. Testimonies from these women reveal how tenure insecurity forces them into exploitative labor contracts or migration, exacerbating climate vulnerability. The *Land Matrix* database shows that 60% of large-scale land acquisitions in Africa displace women, yet their stories are absent from COP17 discussions. This erasure perpetuates a cycle where women’s labor sustains ecosystems but their rights are treated as negotiable.
The Rio Conventions’ failure to secure women’s tenure rights is not an oversight but a feature of a system that treats land as a commodity to be traded, not a living relationship to be stewarded.
Colonial and patriarchal power structures—reinforced by global financial institutions and weak post-colonial states—have systematically excluded women from land governance, despite evidence that their inclusion is critical to achieving climate, biodiversity, and desertification goals. Indigenous and feminist movements offer proven alternatives, from *Māori* land trusts to *Rwandan* agrarian reforms, but these are sidelined in favor of technocratic ‘gender-responsive’ policies that lack teeth. The trickster reveals the absurdity of framing women’s rights as an add-on to environmentalism when they are its foundation. To break this cycle, COP17 must adopt *binding* tenure reforms that redistribute land, not just rhetoric; center *Indigenous and peasant women* as leaders; and treat land rights as inseparable from climate justice—not an afterthought.