Their treatment of land is patchy – each has a different take on what land rights mean and varying commitments on how they can be strengthened and enforced. This is a welcome shift in rhetoric, but with such a shaky record on land rights, all three conventions urgently need to play catch-up if they want to meet their own targets. Last month, the Kunming Declaration at the biodiversity COP committed to ‘recognizing the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities and ensuring their full and effective participation’ and this week’s climate COP will give land and indigenous rights more airtime than ever before, including at the World Leaders Summit tomorrow and on Nature Day on 6 November. Yet looking back over the history of these conventions, land rights have been largely ignored – until this year. So, you’d think land rights and the freedom to enjoy them would be a major point for debate at the UN’s three main environmental conventions on climate change, biodiversity and desertification. According to the Prindex global survey, one billion people around the world feel insecure about their right to stay on their land, injecting short-termism into decisions they make about how to use it.