The climate movement has long been missing a critical ingredient.
We have pushed countries—especially those most responsible for the climate crisis—to accelerate efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They tend to focus on numerical targets, such as achieving net zero to limit temperature rise to no more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. This kind of advocacy work is both necessary and insufficient.
We won’t be able to mitigate emissions or adapt to a changing world if we do not plan for a just transition. But we need to start with a broader definition of what just actually means.
The just transition was originally defined around creating green jobs, providing retraining, and ensuring social protection for workers in fossil fuel-dependent industries and countries. Yet that is only part of the picture.
Half the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, which is the second-biggest contributor to the climate crisis, responsible for approximately one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. The sector is also the world’s biggest source of livelihoods.
That’s why effective climate action needs to be driven by the world’s smallholder farmers, fishers, and pastoralists—people who are experiencing climate impacts most directly and already stewarding nature and sustainable food systems. Without connecting global climate and biodiversity policies and funding to the daily realities of billions of people who work the land, we risk creating solutions that exist only on paper.
Worse, some climate action has been pursued at the direct expense of small-scale food producers and Indigenous Peoples’ rights—and not always by accident. The scramble for critical minerals needed for solar panels and batteries is driving the opening of new mines, sometimes on Indigenous land or land that could otherwise be farmed. Solar and wind installations have sometimes been deployed on land used by food-producing communities, often financializing it in ways that make it impossible for young people to enter farming. Offshore wind developments in parts of Africa have blocked small-scale fishers from waters their communities have relied on for generations. Pastoralists and Indigenous Peoples in Central Asia and Africa have found their traditional routes severed because land has been sold for carbon credits—without their Free, Prior, and Informed Consent. These are symptoms of climate policies being designed without the people most affected at the table.
For scalable, lasting change, the climate movement needs to come together with the land rights movement.
And last month, Colombia hosted the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development—the first such gathering in twenty years. The convening was necessary on the international agenda, as land rights have been conspicuously absent from climate policy discussions, even as pressure on land has been intensifying from every direction: carbon markets, new mining concessions, and the rollout of renewable energy infrastructure.
The conference brought together governments, civil society, and social movements to address urgent rural challenges—land governance, agrarian reform, climate-resilient development, and food sovereignty. Its outcome declaration, signed by 28 countries, reaffirmed the human right to land, providing multilateral backing that can now be leveraged across other major international processes.
Land rights and agrarian reform
In many parts of the world, smallholder farmers do not own or formally control the land they cultivate. They rely on informal, sometimes collective, arrangements rooted in tradition rather than secure rights, meaning they can lose access to their land with little notice and no legal recourse—despite producing the majority of the world’s food. The problem is most acute in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America, where Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and women are disproportionately affected.
And insecure tenure is a direct barrier to climate action. When farmers, fishers, and pastoralists have the guarantee of legally recognized land rights and control over resources, they are far more likely to invest in ecologically sound practices, such as planting trees, investing in agroecology, and improving soil health over the long term—all of which absorb emissions and build resilience. Above all, social movements are asking for holistic agrarian reforms that recognize their ties to the land, a place of life, identity and culture, rather than a mere productive resource, with land redistribution as part of climate action.
Human rights must sit at the heart of climate and biodiversity policies; participatory processes must prioritize grassroots voices over top-down mandates; and funding must flow toward the communities doing the most to sustain the land.
By uniting the land rights and climate movements, we can build the just, sustainable food systems we so urgently need. The pieces are in place. Now we have to connect them.
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Photo courtesy of Sabbir Hasan, Unsplash
