This document is based on a study carried out for FAO by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED, London) in collaboration with the Natural Resources Institute (University of Greenwich).
Despite the wide publicity given both to climate change and the development of sources of bioenergy which threatens to remove land from other uses, there is still very limited understanding of the relationships between the impacts of climate change, social and policy responses, and land tenure. Accordingly, FAO has identified a need for scoping studies to partially address this knowledge gap and thereby build a basis for sound policy making.
The first part of this paper aims to identify key issues related to land tenure in the context of ongoing climate change and current climate variability, as part of a wider study also including a scoping paper on the implications of biofuels development for land tenure, undertaken by IIED.
The second part of this study aims to open up discussion of the way in which biofuels are likely to impact on access to land. Many observers and activists have raised concerns that the spread of biofuels may result in loss of land access for poorer rural people in localities that produce biofuel crops. However, since liquid biofuels are a relatively new phenomenon in most countries (with exceptions such as Brazil and Zimbabwe), there is as yet little empirical evidence. This study aims to pave the way for future empirical research on how the biofuels boom affects land access, by raising key issues, presenting a basic conceptual framework and presenting a suite of (primarily anecdotal rather than empirical) evidence from around the world.

By: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

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