Land Use in NDCs: A Guide to High Ambition

Guide

This guide identifies twelve ‘implementation areas’ in forestry, agriculture, land tenure, and other land uses that should be addressed in nationally determined contributions (NDCs).

Reading time: 5 minutes
Foto: Dicht bewaldeter Eukalyptuswald mit hohen, geraden Stämmen und wenigen Ästen. Der Boden ist mit grünem Buschwerk bedeckt.
Teaser Image Caption
All new NDCs should adopt firm no-deforestation pledges.

COP29 comes right at the time that countries are to begin submit-ting updated NDCs (nationally determined contributions), outlining national actions to limit emissions and climate damage. When it comes to land management, forestry, and agriculture, previous NDC submissions were quite bad – very little detail, and a lot of reliance on using land as an ‘offset’ for continued fossil fuel use. 

The Land Gap team came together to analyze that previous round of NDCs. The 2022 Land Gap report characterized the national commitments made. The ‘gap’ in this case was between the amount of land that could actually be used in a sustainable way for mitigation purposes and the amount of land proposed for such uses in the existing NDCs. A 2023 update to the Land Gap report focused on how rich countries were planning to use massive amounts of land – frequently outside their own borders – for carbon sequestration purposes. 

Noting the conclusion of the Global Stocktake, and the mandate to countries to submit new and enhanced NDCs, this year the Land Gap team produced Land Use in NDCs: A Guide to High Ambition

Download Guide here (PDF)

This easy-to-read, easy-to-use Guide identifies twelve ‘implementation areas’ in forestry, agriculture, land tenure, and other land uses that should be addressed in an NDC. The Guide also cautions against the use of three ‘false solutions’ that showed up a lot in the previous round of NDCs. Here is a high-level overview of what’s in the document:

First, land tenure. The Land Gap team again wanted to emphasize how attention to land tenure and better land governance is itself a necessary climate action. We cannot get to true solutions until fundamental land and livelihood rights are recognized. We cannot get to resilience unless we allow for mitigation and adaptation benefits, woven together in community wisdom and indigenous knowledge, to play a fuller role in national just transition plans. But this basic point, about land tenure, remains absent in too many NDCs.

Second, agriculture, and specifically agroecology. Very few first-round NDCs had much to say about agriculture, and none included plans for serious transitions in the food sector. We hope that new NDCs will focus attention on food systems, with community and city resilience in mind. We also hope that some countries will outline transition plans toward agroecology. 

The recommendations around forestry follow the now-accepted sequencing of ‘protect, restore, sustainably manage’ to describe the priorities for conserving forest ecosystems. Specifically, all new NDCs should adopt firm no-deforestation pledges

Neither forest restoration nor plantations can compensate for a lack of ambition elsewhere.

But forest degradation is also a problem, and too often ‘tree planting’ is proposed as the solution. Tree planting is not the same as restoration. The 2023 Land Gap update characterized about half of the total global reforestation effort as ‘restoration’. That is good news. But too many first-round NDCs put forward plantation development as their major (and sometimes only) proposed land-sector action. This might have been the single worst feature of the first round of NDCs, as far as land is concerned – an emphasis on tree planting, and on plantation development, instead of restoration focused on ecosystem integrity and resilience. Plantations store much less carbon, make only weak contributions to resilience, and do nothing for biodiversity. 

So we remain concerned that ‘tree planting’ will get inserted into new NDCs in the service of mitigation and to support the goal of ‘net zero’, with too little attention given to the concerns of people who are already using this land. 

Carbon-market offsets, biomass burning for electricity and tree plantations are ‘false solutions’

We are also concerned that new NDCs will build ‘net zero’ strategies on the land sector. Meaning, forest conservation and restoration will excuse weak mitigation ambition in other sectors. And while restoration is a better approach than plantation development, neither forest restoration nor plantations can compensate for a lack of ambition elsewhere, and certainly not to allow for continued fossil fuel use. That should be a bottom-line principle – no use of forests, or the sequestration potential from other ecosystems, to allow for continued fossil fuel use! 

‘false solutions

The Land Gap team therefore also felt it necessary to call out three areas that have been proposed as part of NDCs but should be avoided. These include: the use of carbon-market offsets; the use of biomass burning for electricity; and tree plantations. The problems with these approaches are also discussed in the Guidance. 

We hope that the Guidance can be useful to you. 
 

For more information, please contact info@landgap.org, or directly to peteriggspivotpoint@gmail.com.