Scoping and Status Study on Land and Conflict: Towards UN System-Wide Engagement at Scale
Publisher: UN Human Settlements Programme and Global Land Tool Network
Author(s): Filiep Decorte, Clarissa Augustinus, Erika Lind, and Michael Brown
Date: 2016
Topics: Conflict Causes, Land, Livelihoods
Global Challenges. Member States and United Nations staff are increasingly concerned that land is more and more a trigger for conflict, or a re-lapse into conflict, and a bottleneck to recovery. This situation will be made worse in the coming decades by global challenges such as population growth, urbanization, increasing food insecurity and climate change, which are already increasing competition over land and driving conflict at global, regional, country, local and family levels. These challenges are acknowledged in the General Assembly resolution ‘Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ (70/1), which is a transformative development agenda. For land and conflict, the UN-wide system is not sufficiently fit for the purpose for supporting Member States and the international community to address these challenges. The UN needs to re-think its engagement on land and conflict, clarify roles and develop capacity, particularly as sustaining peace is a core business of the UN system.