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In developing countries, millions of people depend on land for their food and livelihoods. But a global ‘land rush’ — moves to acquire large tracts of land across the world — is increasing competition for this vital resource. A growing body of evidence points to the scale, geography, players and key characteristics~of the phenomenon. Some of this is based on media reports and some on country level inventories. Much of the data cannot be compared due to variations in methodology, timescale and the differing criteria for what makes a land deal. Further improving data and analysis is critical. But while exact numbers will keep changing, all evidence indicates that land acquisitions are happening quickly and on a large scale. So we urgently need to get on with~developing appropriate responses.

Recent years have seen ‘land grabbing’ emerge as a big issue in media houses across the world, with reporters quick to write about deals involving millions of hectares, particularly within Africa. Yet large-scale land acquisitions are not a purely African phenomenon. Other parts of the world are also subject to the global land rush. This briefing looks at how Southeast Asia has become ever more appealing to investors from both within and beyond the region seeking to include agriculture in their portfolios. Set against a backdrop of insecure rights and weak land governance, land acquisitions here are posing significant threats to local livelihoods and environments alike.

Investment funds show a growing interest in farmland and agriculture. They are buying up land and agribusinesses in developing countries with the expectation of high long-term returns linked to rising land prices, growing populations and increasing demand for food. While the media has reported extensively on the involvement of these funds in the global land rush, the mechanics remain little understood by the broader public. What is the interest and what is driving it? Who are the players and what processes do their investment decisions go through? What are the impacts in recipient countries? And what action can be taken to promote investments that genuinely support local people?

How agricultural research is funded, organised, controlled and practised can have a huge impact on small-scale producers in the global South. In many countries, such research is driven by external funds, priorities and technological fixes, such as hybrid seeds, which can erode crop diversity. But food producers across the world are beginning to raise their voices to ensure that agricultural research better meets their needs and priorities. This briefing explains how a series of farmer assessments and citizens’ juries in West Africa has helped farmers assess existing approaches and articulate recommendations for policy and practice to achieve their own vision of agricultural research. In 2012, a high-level policy dialogue between farmers and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa hopes to take this discussion to the next level and develop a shared agenda that can serve development and the public good.

Climate change poses a major challenge to agriculture. Rising temperatures will change crop growing seasons. And changing rainfall patterns will affect yield potentials. Underinvestment over the past 20 years has left the agricultural sector in many developing countries ill-prepared for the changes ahead. Policymakers and researchers alike acknowledge the need for adaptation within agriculture. But what action should be taken? And, more importantly, how much will it cost? Five case studies — of specific agricultural systems in Bangladesh, Malawi, Nepal, Rwanda and Tanzania — provide fresh insights into the options available and likely costs, which are at least US$20,000 for an integrated cropping system in a village, and may well be more than US$100 million for a whole sector such as livestock in a country.

Across Africa, programmes such as the Climate Change Adaptation in Africa initiative are investigating what it means for countries and communities to effectively adapt to climate change, and how this can be achieved in practice. But research results are not always recognised by policymakers or the global research community — in part because they are not visible within the traditional hallmark of scientific scholarship and credibility, peer-reviewed literature. Greater efforts are required to encourage African scientists to engage in the peer-review process and give their research the credibility it needs to convince decision makers that robust scientific findings support the solutions offered. At the same time, decision makers themselves must find ways of assessing and making use of robust research outside the peer-review arena.

Investors in land often look for land with a high growing potential, which means land with lots of rainfall or land that can be irrigated. In multimillion dollar investments involving irrigation, investors typically want to secure water rights as part of the deal. Motivated by potential revenues from water fees and the prospect of improved agricultural productivity, many African governments are signing away water rights for decades to large investors. But they are doing so with little regard for how this will impact the millions of other users — from fishermen to pastoralists — whose livelihoods depend on customary access to water. Water managers must seriously consider the extent to which water rights should be linked to land in this way before setting a long-term precedent that could compromise sustainable and equitable supply to all users in the future.

Parliamentarians can play a key role in building climate resilience by bringing constituents’ concerns into national forums, scrutinising how governments are responding to domestic and global climate change issues, and ensuring policy continuity. In the Southern African Customs Union, members of parliament often struggle to fulfill this role, hampered by limited understanding of the issues,fragmented policy and legal frameworks and competing priorities. This paper looks at how parliamentarians’ can boost their capacity to engage effectively with climate change in Southern Africa.

There is an ever-widening chasm between the support developing countries need to adapt to climate change, and the funding promised and delivered by wealthy nations. This paper looks at the Durban negotiations and the steps countries should take to ensure the developed world can meet its agreed responsibilities: establish funding sources based on international trade; define annual targets for the scale-up; and adopt a transparent, centralised accounting system.

Global debates about reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and promoting conservation, sustainable forest management and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD+) emphasise the need for strategies to build on existing knowledge. This briefing describes an example of South-South collaboration in which IIED has helped facilitate a Mozambique-Brazil partnership to share expertise and create a unique REDD+ working group. The initiative provides key lessons for other countries contemplating South-South collaboration on REDD+, including the need for charismatic champions, continuity in government representation and integration across sectors.

International climate and biodiversity conventions agree that to be effective in the long term, strategies to reduce emissions from deforestation, forest degradation, conservation and enhancement of forest carbon stocks, and sustainable forest management (REDD+), must not undermine biodiversity. But how do countries achieve ‘high-biodiversity REDD+’ in practice? This briefing presents a range of national and international policy options that can be pursued to promote high-biodiversity REDD+ and reinforce the Cancun safeguards.

The prospect of gaining carbon credits by acquiring land to implement REDD+ has caught the eye of the private sector. In many countries, including Papua New Guinea and Republic of Congo, there are reports of a carbon rush. In Mozambique, private investors have expressed an interest in acquiring more than 22 per cent of the country’s land for REDD+. But Mozambique, like many developing countries, is still in the early stages of preparing a REDD+ strategy. This briefing warns that encouraging private sector involvement before the country has the right policies and institutions in place to safeguard local environments and people risks undermining the potential of REDD+ for sustainable development.

With millions of people dependent on natural resources and agriculture, China is very vulnerable to climate change. The need to adapt to future changes is gaining importance in the country’s political agenda. The government’s latest five-year plan, for example, is the first to include a section on adaptation, and the development of a national adaptation strategy is under way. But there are still major gaps in the knowledge and processes required to develop effective adaptation policies at national and local levels. This briefing describes some of the key challenges and explains how initiatives such as Adapting to Climate Change in China (ACCC) are addressing them.

Across the developing world, decision makers understand the need to adapt to climate change — particularly in agriculture, which supports a large proportion of low-income groups who are especially vulnerable to impacts such as increasing water scarcity or more erratic weather. But policymakers are often less clear about what adaptation action to take. Cost-benefit analyses can provide information on the financial feasibility and economic efficiency of a given policy. But such methods fail to capture the non-monetary benefits of adaptation, which can be even more important than the monetary ones. Ongoing work in Morocco shows how combining cost-benefit analysis with a more participatory stakeholder analysis can support effective decision making by identifying cross-sector benefits, highlighting areas of mutual interest among different stakeholders and more effectively assessing impacts on adaptive capacity.

Cities face a mounting challenge from climate change. In developed and developing countries alike, rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, higher sea levels, and more frequent and severe extreme events such as droughts and floods threaten to overwhelm urban infrastructure, services and management systems. City officials recognise the need to adapt to climate change, and use scientific evidence to support their plans for doing so. But the precise details of these changes and the local impacts they will have cannot be predicted. This briefing explains how decision makers can draw on scientific data while simultaneously managing the uncertainty inherent in future projections, and highlights the forward-looking city officials across the world who are proving themselves to be ‘urban adaptation leaders'.

Over the coming decades, climate change is likely to pose a major challenge to agriculture; temperatures are rising, rainfall is becoming more variable and extreme weather is becoming a more common event. Researchers and policymakers agree that adapting agriculture to these impacts is a priority for ensuring future food security. Strategies to achieve that in practice tend to focus on modern science. But evidence, both old and new, suggests that the traditional knowledge and crop varieties of indigenous peoples and local communities could prove even more important in adapting agriculture to climate change.

In 2009, developed countries pledged US$30 billion of ‘fast-start climate finance’. Transparent reporting on climate finance is essential for governments to plan mitigation and adaptation activities and for civil society to hold contributors and recipients to account for how climate funds are spent. This briefing presents a new scorecard based on the extent to which developed countries meet a set of common-sense criteria in their climate finance reports to the UN. It reveals that we have a long way to go in making climate finance transparent and urgently need an international registry of funds that provides comprehensive, detailed, consistent and transparent accounting and reporting measures at the project level.

African agriculture faces the dual challenge of being vulnerable to climate change and largely underfunded. This briefing, commissioned by the European Initiative for Agricultural Research for Development (EIARD), discusses the need to integrate climate change into agricultural research for development, taking into account the synergies and trade-offs of adapting to and mitigating climate change while also boosting food security. This will demand a more strategic and coordinated approach that reflects African realities, responds to African priorities for adaptation and development, and makes the best use of limited resources.

Rapid expansion of biomass energy in the global North is fuelling demand for wood and increasing interest in tree plantations in the global South. But if biomass is sourced from food-insecure countries where local land rights are weak, there is a real risk that people could lose the land they depend on for their livelihoods. This briefing discusses the potential social impacts of biomass plantations in developing countries and calls for greater public scrutiny and debate about the issue.

This briefing discusses the opportunities and challenges involved in the creation of a new form of private property that can be bought and sold in domestic and international markets — the ‘carbon right’. It looks at how equity and fairness can be built into this new commodity so that carbon trading schemes and REDD+ projects support the rural poor who rarely hold formal land ownership or tenure rights but are key players in putting sustainable forest management into practice on the ground.