The Climate Change Challenge for Land Professionals

“Climate change is the defining challenge of our time”. This statement by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon (2009) is still valid. The challenges of food shortage, environmental degradation and natural disasters are to a large extent caused by the overarching challenge of climate change, while the rapid urbanisation is a general trend that in itself has a significant impact on climate change. Measures for adaptation to climate change must be integrated into strategies for poverty reduction to ensure sustainable development and for meeting the Millennium Development Goals and beyond.

Sustainable monitoring systems and systems for land administration and management should serve as a basis for climate change mitigation and adaptation as well as prevention and management of natural disasters.

In facing the climate change challenge the role of land professionals is twofold:
• Monitoring change such as sea level rise and environmental degradation through global positioning infrastructures and data interpretation and presentation;
• Implementing climate change adaptation and mitigation measures into land administration systems and systems for disaster risk management.

This paper provides an overall understanding of the climate change challenge and looks at land governance as a key means of contributing to climate change adaptation as well disaster risk prevention and management. More specifically the paper looks at identifying the role of land professionals in addressing the climate change challenge in the wider context of sustainable land governance.

The linkage between climate change adaptation and sustainable development should be self-evident but is not well understood by the public in general. Land professionals should take a leading role in explaining this linkage to the wider public. This should also ensure that the land management perspective attracts high-level political support and recognition.