How does acess to land rights help mitigate climate change?

Land not only provides a source of vital resources and income, it also gives the owner social prestige and access to political power. The power to dispose of and own land is largely reserved for men in the global south, due to patriarchal structures of power, gendered role models and cultural traditions. Keep in mind that women are producing 60-80% of the Worlds food (FAO).

Key findings of a Meta-Analysis of Land Rights and Women's Economic Well-Being Yana Rodgers, Rutgers University Nidhiya Menon, Brandeis University

Improved access to land rights for women enbabled:

• Improved agricultural Productivity

• More efficient use of resources

• Better access to credits

• Increased self-esteem -> more autonomous decision-making -> increased educational attainment

• When men migrate in search of work in the aftermath of extreme weather events, women are often left behind without legal control over the land. Insecure land rights reduce the incentive to invest in the land.

Female-headed households have lower productivity than those of men, but this is because they own less land and thus have less access to resources such as fertilizer and work much longer hours as they are also responsible for the household and caring for children and elders. With equal access to productive resources, they would show as much productivity as men. It has been clearly demonstrated and documented that after controlling for access to inputs (land, fertilizer, credit), women are as productive and technically efficient as men.

Considering that women provide a large portion of the agricultural labor force, it can be argued that greater gender equality in land ownership, and thereby access to other agricultural inputs, would increase overall agricultural production and thus reduce the vulnerability of rural populations to climate change by improving their socioeconomic situation. In the long term, this leads to greater decision-making capacity among women, ultimately enabling increased adaptive capacity of society as a whole to the consequences of climate change.