From Nature-based Solutions to Land Equity
Global interest in Nature-based Solutions (NbS) has surged as governments, investors, and development institutions recognise their potential to simultaneously address climate change, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity — with the World Bank estimating that NbS can contribute up to 37% of the carbon emission reductions needed by 2030 under the Paris Agreement. India, with its extraordinary ecological diversity spanning the Himalayas, Western Ghats, coastal mangroves, and tropical forests, has positioned NbS at the centre of its climate strategy, committing to an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent by 2030 and backing this ambition through multiple programmes. Yet as NbS expands in scale and financing, a critical gap has emerged: environmental frameworks have historically been designed around ecosystems rather than the people who inhabit, govern, and depend on them. Land ownership and usage questions, financing constraints, institutional gaps, and the exclusion of local communities from governance and benefit-sharing have meant that the transition to green economies has, in many cases, deepened rather than resolved existing inequities.
This track examines the structural disconnect between NbS as an ecological and financial framework and land equity as a rights-based governance imperative. Rather than treating land equity as an add-on safeguard, the track explores how it can be embedded as a foundational design principle — unpacking the governance mechanisms, tenure frameworks, and financial instruments needed to ensure that NbS initiatives actively strengthen rather than undermine community authority, tenure security, and resource rights, particularly for the marginalised groups. It will also examine the pathways from policy commitment to meaningful practice on the ground.
The track will bring together a deliberately diverse set of stakeholders including government and policy actors, civil society actors, project developers, private sector, impact investors and community-based organisations, including women’s groups and pastoral collectives.
The track invite sessions that cover:
How can land tenure and community rights be secured before NbS projects are designed and financed, particularly where land claims overlap?
As climate investments expand, how can financial flows be structured to deliver fair and direct returns to communities rather than intermediaries?
How can FPIC move beyond a procedural requirement to become a genuine mechanism for community authority, including the right to refuse and renegotiate agreements?
How can NbS be designed from the bottom up, centring customary institutions and traditional knowledge, and replacing consultation with genuine co-creation?
As spatial technologies are increasingly deployed in support of NbS, how can communities retain ownership of and equitably benefit from the ecological knowledge and data that underpin these systems?