Date: May 7, 2025
Time: 11:00 AM-12:30 PM EST
Location: MC C2-350

A global conversation about the politics of land and resource struggles in an era of global and local crises

7-9 October 2025
University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa

PLAAS is pleased to announce our upcoming international conference on Land, Life and Society.

Building on the successful collaboration in last year’s Annual Conference, the IoS Fair Transitions Platform (UU) and LANDac are pleased to launch this Call for a second joint Conference, which will have a somewhat different set-up from what you are used to and end with a Summit. We welcome your suggestions for panel sessions and round tables for the first two days. Building on your input, we will conclude on the last day with an experiment of democracy – a more-than human Summit. There will be limited hybrid options for participation in the Conference and the Summit.

The spread of COVID-19 in South Africa and other countries in the region has again brought to the fore the fact that very dense, under-serviced, mostly informal, settlements are not healthy places to live. They are also places where the spread of a disease is difficult to prevent or manage. 

Join us for the Land Rights and COVID-19 webinar and discussion series, which is presented by Land Portal, Landesa, the Global Protection Cluster HLP AOR and GIZ, with organizing support from Environmental Peacebuilding Association, LANDac, New America and the UK's Department for International Development (DFID). 

Join us for the Land Rights and COVID-19 webinar and discussion series, which is presented by Land Portal, Landesa, the Global Protection Cluster HLP AOR and GIZ, with organizing support from Environmental Peacebuilding Association, LANDac, New America and the UK's Department for International Development (DFID). 

Join us for a webinar co-hosted by the the Land Portal Foundation, Habitat for Humanity International, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, UN Habitat and Tata Trusts on the distribution of urban land in the global south. 

On September 27^th, the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI), Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Landesa, and Wake Forest Law School will be hosting a day-long conference on the intersection between land use, the climate crisis and clean energy transition, and human rights.

Post-war societies not only have to deal with continuing unpeaceful relations but also land-related conflict legacies, farmland and forest degradation, heavily exploited natural resources, land mines, a destroyed infrastructure, as well as returning refugees and ex-combatants. In the aftermath of war, access to and control of land often remains a sensitive issue which may precipitate tensions and lead to a renewed destabilization of volatile post-conflict situations.

The impacts of climate change increasingly forces people away from their homes and livelihoods. Increased droughts force small-scale farmers to abandon their land and the rising sea level pushes poor families living in delta cities away from their homes.

This event focuses on the challenges Indigenous Peoples and communities face in acquiring legal rights to their land, the loopholes companies can often take, and ways countries can simplify complex procedures.

Indigenous Peoples and rural communities occupy more than half of the world’s land, but they legally own just 10 percent of land globally.