“The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.” – Aldo Leopold

Pose almost any of the major social, economic and environmental questions surfacing on the world’s freighted list. Ask how to foster economic sustainability, limit climate change, narrow inequalities, and ensure food security. Or how to boost agricultural production, reduce conflicts among and within nations, and protect ecosystems and biodiversity. Or how to improve human health, and address the exodus from withering farming communities to urban centres struggling to cope with the influx.  

No matter the question, it seems, the answer and the conundrum are land. 

The ground below our feet increasingly reveals the strains of unprecedented demand and change. Satellites ply the heavens documenting losses of permafrost, glaciers, and forest cover. At ground level, people flee forest fires of unprecedented proportions, floods of apocalyptic scale, and the slow death of once-productive lands. Even the dark and mysterious soil itself, the “living skin of our planet”, shows signs that its basic integrity is being compromised. 

Land is a proxy for power, a source of cultural identity, a place of spiritual significance, a wellspring of human inspiration. Throughout time, contests have been waged over land over how to use it, who controls it, and who profits – from the use of ground itself, any riches beneath its surface, and the proximity to something else of value, encapsulated in the real estate slogan, “location, location, location”. Now, as the world confronts a changing climate, old tensions are taking on new urgency and new forms of tension are coming to the fore.

Who owns the Earth?

But land science, land politics, and land economics often conflict. The patterns of ownership and control that drive decisions about how to use land and who will profit are stubbornly opaque – often deliberately so. Easing pressures on land requires “reducing humanity’s land footprint, governing global land resources systemically and cooperatively, and changing how land is valued and its stewardship financed”, according to a Chatham House report. No wonder land system scientists have posed a charged question:  “Who owns the Earth?”. 

Land is receiving increasing attention in multinational forums. In late 2024 in Cali, Colombia, the UN Biodiversity Conference managed to establish a new benefit-sharing mechanism for genetic resources, and to recognize Indigenous Peoples as key stewards in conservation efforts. Yet, most nations failed to submit or update promised biodiversity strategies and action plans. Donor countries did not meet financial pledges that underpin a global biodiversity fund. Efforts to implement the “Paris Agreement for nature” (the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework) fell short. In Riyadh, Saudia Arabia, the Convention to Combat Desertification came on its heels. Negotiators established a new drought resilience partnership and set out provisions for greater civil society involvement in processes, but were unable to reach agreement on a protocol to address drought.

More than planting trees

A dose of realism about the human footprint is overdue. As the most recent Land Gap report points out, many land-based carbon removal efforts outlined Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement rely on proposals that come far too late and are largely unrealistic, requiring more than 1 billion hectares, more than the areas of South Africa, India, Turkey and the European Union combined. Half of these pledges entail tree planting, raising potential conflicts with matters such as food security. Planting trees is not enough.  

“Natural climate solutions” – the catch-all phrase to capture a broad sweep of efforts to conserve, restore and manage forests, grasslands and wetlands – have demonstrated their worth. Adhering to  key principles in these multi-faceted measures can help safeguard ecosystems that are vulnerable and help regenerate those that are degraded. But can they attract finance to make them happen?

The risks depend on how much global temperature rises and how much land management patterns evolve, for better or worse. The multiple benefits that accrue to the planet from conserving peatlands, wetlands, rangelands, mangroves and forests do not directly boost the bottom line for corporations or individuals that still seek to build, mine, farm, and raise livestock wherever possible, even in the planet’s most biodiverse reaches. This is illustrated by rising threats on the “global commons” of the Amazon and Congo basins, the growing number of deaths of environmental defenders, and the ever new and cunning ways people find to kill forests.

Food systems account for 80% of deforestation, 29% of greenhouse gas emissions, and almost all biodiversity loss. Meaningful change will require extraordinary ingenuity to devise new kind of green revolution, one that can increase land productivity, feed growing populations and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and methane all at once, and without continuing to depend on fossil fuel-intensive fertilizers. Just this month, 153 Nobel and World Food Prize Laureates made an unprecedented plea for financial and political backing to develop “moonshot” technologies to avert a looming hunger catastrophe; they called for “high risk, high reward, scientific research with the goal of transforming our food systems to meet the nutritional needs of everyone sustainably.”  A 2024 documentary, “The Grab”, by the Center for Investigative Reporting, describes covert efforts by governments, investors, and private security forces to “take control of food and water stocks” for a future in which these are more valuable than oil. Poorer countries are confronting more “green grabs” that appropriate and repurpose land for climate and environmental goals, jeopardizing the livelihoods of people in nearby communities.

Retelling the story

To move forward, the world must devise more intelligent ways of relating to the natural environment. Indeed, more than five years have passed since a special report on Climate Change and Land by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change outlined the urgency to act – on climate, on over-exploitation of resources, and on coordination – for the sake of land. As it noted then, the world has many tools at its disposal. Among them: Adopting plant-based diets that use fewer land resources. Containing urban sprawl. Supporting “bioeconomies” – that is, reinventing economies to rely less on fossil fuels and extraction and more on renewable fuels and sustainable inputs.

From ancient times, the use and misuse of the land have set the stage for civilizations to rise or vanish. This is an old story. The world now decides how to tell it again.

Listen to the podcast episode

Pressures on land are taking on new urgency in 2025 and beyond. In this episode, we will discuss the fears and hopes around land conversion, degradation and restoration, and how these shape the work of our three special guests, Irene Suárez Pérez, Selorm Kugbega and Mónica Trujillo.

This episode is part of SEI’s Currents in sustainability series, a podcast by Stockholm Environment Institute, where we examine the forces shaping our global path towards a sustainable future.

Drawing on insights across SEI’s HQ and seven research centres, we explore our key foresights on issues underpinning transformative change.

Listen and subscribe to the series on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Amazon Music and Audible.