Land Tenure Insecurity and Climate Adaptation: Socio-Environmental Realities in Colombia and Implications for Integrated Environmental Rights and Participatory Policy

Abstract

This chapter explores how land tenure impacts households’ resilience and adaptive capacity in the face of a changing climate. Following a review of the ways in which climate change adds pressure to land availability and natural resources, the chapter highlights how land tenure can constrain individuals’ options to adapt to shifting environmental conditions. An exploration of a case study of protracted drought in an agricultural region of Bolivar, Colombia, demonstrates how landlessness, socioeconomic vulnerability, and confusion regarding complicated land tenure policies in a post-conflict environment guided families’ resilience strategies and adaptive capacities. This case demonstrates that it is necessary to nuance understandings of (in)secure tenure to include local knowledge of land policies and precarious tenure claims as predictors of adaptive capacities in vulnerable, climate-stressed regions.