Climate Change and Land Governance in Africa 2025

The Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape is hosting an online pilot short course on Climate Change and Land Governance in Africa from 29-30 April 2025. This is part of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)-funded Network of Excellence on Land Governance in Africa (NELGA), an initiative of the African Union, the United Nations Commission for Africa, and the African Development Bank. The intervention is primarily in preparation for the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC) to be held in Belém, Brazil from 10-21 November 2025.

Africa remains the most vulnerable continent to climate change impacts and land use changes. Climate change and land are two interacting global forces of change that influence each other in a complex and continuous cycle. Climate changes directly impact land uses and ecosystems, while changes in land use can worsen climate change. This signifies a pressing African and global challenge that requires thinking differently about climate change interventions and humanity’s use of land. Despite this reality, existing interventions tend to treat these two forces of change – land and climate – as separate processes. Consequently, the two are hardly integrated in global climate change negotiations under the UNFCCC framework. The same approach applies to other multilateral environmental processes contributing to the African Union Agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Goal 13 to combat climate change.

This course has been created to address this gap, placing the relationship between climate and land at the centre of negotiations for how climate mitigation is reshaping land rights in Africa, land-based climate policy measures, carbon deals and land rights in Africa, critical minerals and land rights in Africa, renewable energy and land rights in Africa, and climate and agrarian justice. The course will inform participants on global debates relevant to Africa across six areas:

1. An engagement with land-based climate policy responses that continue to dominate the global discussions.
2. A critical engagement on how common property rights and local livelihoods are intricately connected to popular climate change related conservation measures (private or public) such as wildlife, forestry, oceans, and marine protection.
3. An exploration of whether new environmental green agendas in the name of climate change constitute new forms of appropriation of nature.
4. An interrogation of the race for Africa’s critical mineral resources -as a solution to climate change- and to weigh the benefits alongside land use and socio-ecological impacts.
5. A discussion on who will pay for the climate policy measures required as the climate crisis aggravates, particularly in Africa which bears little liability for global greenhouse gas emissions.
6. To interrogate whether there can be better approaches to implementing climate change policies that can promote more equitable impacts – e.g. for women, pastoralists, people with disabilities, youth and others.

Coordinators

The coordinators for the short course are Professor Ruth Hall and Professor Moenieba Isaacs from the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape.

Participants