 Have you ever wondered why policymakers choose a course of action that may have no basis in fights and even when evidence might tell us to do exactly the opposite? This is a challenge that is faced by many of the 207 members of the International Land Coalition. The first decade of my career was spent working in the ministry of my government in Botswana that was responsible for cutting up and privatizing one of Africa's great ecosystems, the Kalahari Desert, and turning it into ranches. This was land on which tens of thousands of people lived and had their livelihoods, including the indigenous San people. My government's policy was based on the often held assumption that people will degrade common property and people will always over exploit resources that they share. The most productive use of land, therefore, was to hide it over to individuals or to private corporations. But it's simply not true. I witnessed the terrible human tragedy of large scale land dispossession in my country. I also witnessed the environmental cost of fragmenting the landscape. As I read and I started linking with experts around the world, it became clear to me that the tragedy of the commons had long been debunked by science. Yet, many policy makers continue to believe it because it's convenient. It's convenient for powerful individuals and companies to put their own interests and their own concerns above those of the inhabitants of customary lands. To date, the Botswana government has ranched over 2 million hectares. But this is not a unique story. Globally, local communities and indigenous peoples claim 65% of the surface of the earth, yet governments only recognize those claims on 10% of the surface. That puts one and a half billion people who live on the face of our planet into the legal category of squatters. This is absolutely disenfranchising. In an agrarian society, being secure on your land cuts to the heart of both personal and shared preoccupations. How do I feed my family? How do we care for the environment that sustains us? How do we cope with climate change? How do we create a shared prosperity for our future? We're witnessing a massive shift in lands away from their customary owners. In the Land Matrix project, we've tracked 40 million hectares of large-scale transnational deals since 2008. That's about the size of Germany, and it's only the tip of the iceberg. It's time to reconsider. Paradigms are changing, yet decision makers so often seem stuck in the myths of yesterday, convenient as they are to the powerful who benefit from them. And choices based on these myths are often very hard to reverse. When local communities are empowered to control the customary lands they know best, the benefits often ripple way beyond the locality. To realize what international land coalitions members call people-centered land governance, we need to uproot these myths. And I'd like to share with you now six mythbusters that will help us make that change. Firstly, communities are the best custodians of the land. On average, state-protected areas are deforested four times faster than community-controlled forests. To give you an example, indigenous territories in the Amazon have one-tenth the deforestation rate of neighboring state-controlled forests. Secondly, community land rights enable sustainable development. Secure land rights increases incomes and contributes to a whole range of social indicators from education to food, security to health. Recognizing and enforcing land rights is a critical path to achieving more sustainable and equitable economic growth. Community empowerment thirdly can foster gender equality. When communities are making the decisions, it creates space for women to step into leadership positions. Why? Because women are often the primary users of natural resources. Secure land rights can be a stepping stone to greater gender equality. Fourthly, community land rights create new inclusive economic models. By controlling their biggest asset, their land, communities are able to decide on a future which is based on their own desires, their own priorities, and their own built-on, their own natural resource space. Communities can start deciding for themselves what development means. Communities make land more productive. While green grabs may treat land as a museum, land is not as healthy as when it's used responsibly. I recently visited a community in Thailand of 300 people. And their forests requested twice as much carbon per hectare as the neighboring untouched forest. Community control also reduces uncertainty as conflict. It enables local conflict mitigation strategies. Investors, in addition, are more likely to invest if there's little in projects that carry minimal risk of local blockades, of their reputations being charnished, of lawsuits, and of eventual abandonment. So a broad movement is coming together to change the existing dynamic. A global call to action has been launched in early 2016 by the International Land Coalition Oxfam in the Rights and Resources Initiative. Over 100 organizations so far have joined up with the aim of doubling the amount of land under community control by 2020. Yes, our target is ambitious, but it's only a start. We make this call as a matter of basic social justice, but we also make it as a pragmatic call to share and effectively manage our planet's resources. Rebuilding community lines is much, is many times harder than preventing their loss in the first place. Doubling the amount of land controlled by Indigenous peoples and local communities not only serve the interests of those communities themselves, they also help governments to improve their development prospects, feed their people better, and provide investors with greater certainty. It's about people and creating a shared vision for our common future. The rightful custodians of customary lines are standing up to assert their rights and responsibilities. Together we aim to double the amount of community lines by 2020. We invite you to join the cause. Thank you.