World Bank Land Conference 2025: Securing Land Tenure and Access for Climate Action

The World Bank Land Conference 2025 will be held from May 5–8, 2025 at World Bank Headquarters in Washington, DC.

The Conference will include a range of events organized by the World Bank, development partners, civil society, and other partners, including high-level plenary sessions, thematic sessions, research sessions, regional operational workshops, global land initiatives, and an innovation expo in the World Bank Atrium and online. 

• Plenary Sessions: These sessions will feature high-level external and internal speakers to motivate multistakeholder and multisectoral global action in the land sector and highlight key lessons and evidence. 
• Thematic Sessions: These 90-minute parallel sessions will highlight operational innovations related to the annual theme. They aim to share cross-country best practice and facilitate knowledge sharing on the annual theme. 
• Global Land Initiative Sessions: These 90-minute parallel sessions will facilitate key global partnership or policy initiatives in the land sector (e.g. Stand for Her Land Campaign). They aim to catalyze multistakeholder initiatives and policies to advance the global land agenda.
• Land Administration Best Practice Sessions: These 90-minute parallel sessions will highlight sector best practice. They aim to share cross-country best practice and facilitate knowledge sharing on technical issues falling outside the annual theme and to strengthen the sector operational evidence base. 
• Regional Operational Workshops: These workshops will consist of 2-3 sessions per region and will provide a forum to discuss key technical/land issues and innovations in the region, highlight operational lessons learned from governments and their partners, and discuss outstanding policy reforms and technical issues. They will support in-depth South-South operational knowledge exchange and technical learning across the World Bank, governments, and partners.
• Research Sessions: These sessions will feature presentations and technical discussion of innovative research papers on all aspects of land-related policies and land governance and aim to strengthen the evidence base for policymaking. They will be devoted to presentation, in small rooms and a seminar-type setting to allow academic debate.

Last Updated: Aug 27, 2024

The 2025 subthemes relate to improving land governance and tenure amid rapid land use change and competing demands for land, organized into four parallel tracks:

1. Securing Tenure for Sustainability: This track will highlight the importance of securing tenure and strengthening land administration for achieving traceability, sustainable value chains, climate smart agriculture, and reduced deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) and proven strategies for securing individual and group rights to rural lands and policy and institutional reforms, including to address the often overlapping land administration mandates of ministries of forestry/environment/land, cadastral agencies, and sector agencies (e.g. mining, coastal, marine).
2. Land Technologies for Green Growth: This track will feature innovative technologies and tools for leveraging land in support of green growth, such as mass land valuation, multi-purpose and 3D cadastres, digital land information systems, and national spatial data infrastructure.
3. Land Administration for Climate Action and Disaster Resilience: This track will present qualitative and quantitative analysis of the ways that land administration both affects and is impacted by climate change and disaster risk management, including case studies and quantitative analysis on the implications of poor land administration for disaster vulnerability and on managing land access for climate actions and commitments, such as afforestation, mitigating deforestation, and clean energy.
4. Land Administration Amid Rapid Urbanization: This track will feature innovative approaches for better managing urban land administration to secure public and private land rights, including for low-income residents, and improve urban development outcomes, including to related to density, planning, serviced settlements, rights of way for infrastructure and services, and green space.

Gender and youth will be cross cutting themes across all session types. Sessions are expected to address relevant gendered and youth issues and how to ensure women and youth benefit from land-related investments.

Research evidence should be integrated across all session types. All session types are expected to highlight policy- and practice-relevant research evidence.