The world faces no shortage of crises and challenges beyond climate change — such as biodiversity loss, a mounting waste emergency, and multiple threats affecting the oceans. Yet, the decisions made to respond to immediate crises — like a global pandemic, hunger, war, and human displacement — do not always align with the actions needed to address slow-moving, long-term challenges like climate change.
Often, policymakers are not empowered to collaborate across sectors to pursue strategic objectives that both improve social and economic indicators in the short term and lead to the long-term results needed to transition toward sustainable, low-emission societies. Decisions made today can either accelerate the transition to a sustainable society or lock in future emissions. Therefore, aligning short-term policy decisions with both short- and long-term objectives is essential for countries to contribute to both the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.
The land sector is at the heart of social inclusion and sustainable development — meeting today’s needs without compromising the needs of the future. Land is central to human livelihoods and wellbeing, supplying a range of essential ecosystem services, harboring biodiversity, regulating freshwater, and sustaining the food supply. It is also a critical player in keeping average global warming below 1.5ºC by the end of the century. A wide range of land-use activities can act both as significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions and as important sinks of carbon dioxide.
Identifying and implementing viable opportunities to modify land-use change dynamics to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance carbon sinks — while ensuring sustainable, equitable, and inclusive development — is therefore one of the greatest challenges of our time.
Policymakers can take short-term, tangible steps to ensure that their countries are on the right path to meeting climate goals in the land sector. The highest priority must be to ensure that land sector governance is strong, inclusive, and participatory. Governments are set up for success when they collaborate across sectors, enable inclusive participation, build institutional, technical, and knowledge capacities, develop monitoring and reporting infrastructure, and facilitate effective financial flows to climate action.
This guidance aims to support governments in identifying and implementing feasible short-term actions in the land sector that simultaneously contribute to both short-term and long-term climate mitigation goals. Specifically, it helps governments establish the enabling conditions needed to identify and take advantage of synergistic opportunities in the land sector.
It highlights a series of governance, technical, financial, and institutional actions that can be taken in the short term to enable effective implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions. The recommendations are organized around five key building blocks, each addressing common challenges to implementation and providing targeted, short-term recommendations to overcome them.