COP30 has come to a close, leaving behind a landscape that is both promising and unfinished. While land and resource rights did not dominate every negotiation or headline, the summit did deliver meaningful steps forward with the launch of the Intergovernmental Land Tenure Commitment (ILTC) and the renewed Forest & Land Tenure Pledge – both of which are explored further below. These commitments marked some of the clearest acknowledgements yet that securing community land rights is essential for effective climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.
At the same time, COP30 delivered major advances in forest and climate finance—including the Forest Finance Roadmap developed by 34 governments and the launch of the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF).
Yet, despite the progress made in Belém, global recognition of the critical importance of community land rights has not yet been realized. The people who steward our forests, coasts, and farmlands still lack secure land rights to the land they protect. Until that changes, resilience efforts will remain underfunded, unsustainable, and unjust.
The Missing Pillar of Resilience
COP30 reinforced what decades of research have shown: secure land and resource rights are one of the most practical and cost-effective tools for climate adaptation. This point sits alongside the billions mobilized for nature-based solutions at COP—from Brazil’s NbS Capital Mobilization Campaign, which announced $10.4B in planned investments to scale over 1M hectares by 2030, to the Earth Investment Engine aiming to aggregate a $150B pipeline by 2030. Yet these investments will only reach their potential where secure tenure is in place. When communities have clear and enforceable tenure, they invest in long-term protection of forests, soils, watersheds, and agricultural systems.
From mangrove restoration and coastal defense to reforestation and watershed management, this year’s COP placed significant emphasis on nature-based solutions for adaptation. Every one of these solutions ultimately rests on clear and secure land rights. Nature-based solutions cannot be scaled, monitored, or sustained when communities lack secure tenure or face displacement.
The inverse remains true. Insecure tenure undermines resilience efforts across both rural and urban landscapes, whether it’s coastal mangroves threatened by competing land claims, watershed initiatives that falter without upstream landholder participation, or urban upgrading projects that stall because residents risk eviction or lack formal rights. COP30 exposed the widening gap between the climate solutions we champion and the tenure systems required to support them.
Data: The Engine of Climate Justice
One of COP30’s clearest lessons is that the world still lacks the data systems needed to operationalize secure land and resource rights at scale. These data needs mirror other COP30 efforts to improve nature-related information systems, including MDB voluntary guidance on nature-impact metrics and the UK’s £16.9M AIM4Forests commitment.
As Kimaren Ole Riamit of the Indigenous Livelihoods Enhancement Partners in Kenya reminds us, “Data drives narratives, narratives drive policy, and policy drives resources.”
Yet community land data—particularly data generated by and for Indigenous Peoples and local communities—remains incomplete or invisible in many national climate plans and adaptation strategies. This data gap perpetuates inequities in access to adaptation finance and limits communities’ ability to demonstrate their contributions to climate mitigation and resilience.
The Forest Climate Partnership estimates a $66.8 billion annual forest finance gap, driven in part by missing or unreliable land data. COP30’s new commitment to legally recognize 160 million hectares of community land by 2030—and its aspiration that 20 percent of financing reach communities directly—cannot be delivered without major investment in mapping systems, local governance, and transparent land information platforms.
Without that foundation, even well-intentioned pledges risk remaining aspirational rather than actionable.
Belém: Progress Without Transformation
COP30 showcased major regional commitments, including the renewed $2.5B Congo Basin Pledge through the Belém Call to Action—a reminder that large-scale finance delivers impact only where tenure systems are strong. At the same time, momentum is building, but systemic transformation has not yet arrived. Midway through the summit, Indigenous leaders staged a powerful protest calling for stronger protections, direct access to climate finance, and genuine recognition of their territorial rights. Their message resonated throughout COP30: without secure land rights and direct funding, conservation efforts will continue to sideline the people who protect the world’s most vital ecosystems.
One of the summit’s spotlights, as noted earlier, was Brazil’s Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), a mechanism intended to provide long-term financing for tropical forest conservation. But the Facility closed COP30 with only $6.7 billion secured against a target of $25 billion, underscoring the gap between ambition and available resources. Its future effectiveness will depend heavily on clear and secure land tenure in the very regions it aims to protect. Without secure rights, long-term financing cannot translate into lasting forest protection.
COP30 revealed momentum, not a paradigm shift. Land rights remain peripheral in high-level negotiations, even as their importance becomes impossible to ignore.
From Pledges to Practice
The renewed Forest & Land Tenure Pledge, a USD $1.8 billion commitment through 2030, and the launch of the ILTC reflect years of advocacy by Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant peoples and grassroots networks such as The Pledge We Want. These commitments expand the agenda from forests to whole landscapes and articulate clear ambitions: dramatically increasing the share of financing that reaches communities directly.
But recognition is not the same as realization.
This includes ensuring alignment with broader COP30 forest-finance launches—from J-REDD+, projected to mobilize $3–6B annually by 2030, to the CCAT Fund supporting agricultural transition—to avoid fragmentation and ensure tenure foundations underpin every finance mechanism.
Closing the implementation gap will require confronting structural barriers that have historically slowed progress. That includes simplifying pathways to titling and registration, investing in local governance, data systems, and monitoring, and ensuring that a meaningful share of adaptation and mitigation finance reaches communities in predictable, direct ways.
What was announced in Belém is the starting line, not the finish line.
The Call to Action
If we are serious about resilience, we must be serious about land rights. With the COP31–32 multi-year cycle ahead and the COP Presidency and the High Level Climate Champions preparing to operationalize the five-year Action Agenda vision starting early next year, the window to embed land rights at the center of climate action has never been clearer—or more urgent. COP30 offered a glimpse of what is possible when the world acknowledges the central role of communities in protecting ecosystems. Now, governments, investors, and institutions must decide whether these commitments become operational realities or remain symbolic gestures.
Securing land is the surest path to securing our shared future.
Learn more about the authors: Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez, Ana Teresa Fuzzo de Lima, Amy Coughenour Betancourt