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 land-related policies and land governance on the annual theme and aim to strengthen the evidence base for policymaking. They will be devoted to presenting rigorous research methods in a seminar-type setting to allow academic debate.

Last Updated: Aug 27, 2024

The 2025 annual theme cuts across multiple sectors (including agriculture, forestry, urban development, disaster risk management, transport, and energy) and geographies (including urban and rural). The thematic and research sessions aim to highlight all aspects of land and climate, organized broadly into four interrelated subthemes:

1. Securing Tenure for Sustainability: This track will highlight how to secure rural land tenure and strengthen rural land administration to achieve resilience, food security, traceability, sustainable value chains, climate smart agriculture, and reduced deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), including proven strategies for securing individual and group rights to rural lands and policy and institutional reforms 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, land value capture, land readjustment, and national spatial data infrastructure.
3. Land Administration for Climate Action and Disaster Resilience: This track will feature effective strategies for governing land access for climate-resilient transportation and renewable energy investments (including critical minerals extraction) in support of a Just Energy Transition.  It will also highlight policies and interventions to strengthen land administration in support of improved climate change resilience and disaster risk management.
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 to improve urban development outcomes, including to related to density, planning, serviced settlements, rights of way for infrastructure and services, and green space.