The power of Earth Observation to measure the variation and dynamics of perceived tenure insecurity

The world’s human population has been tripled during the past 70 years, from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 7.7 billion now (UN-Habitat). The population growth is unprecedented, hence, the amount of human settlements such as villages, towns, and cities. It can be several intertwined driving factors that forced the growth to take various forms, casting some extreme and overwhelming images such as informally built settlements and socioeconomic disparity in cities. A major consequence of such disparity is that significant amount of population has been pushed to the lower end of living conditions in and around cities deprived of basic needs for daily lives as well as the sense of security towards their land and housing properties [ref]. To date, the limited understanding across cities about lack of land or housing tenure security is impeding effective regulatory framework for sustainable land use and urban development. There has been however, a lot of efforts in research for mapping deprived areas , but the tenure security element has been often not looked at in detail.

Tenure security is defined as little or no likelihood of losing physical possession of land/property within some future time period. Land and property security is known to help a country’s development and growth by stimulating investments and improving wellbeing. Estimates suggest that a large number of the world's population has no access to formal land administration systems to register and protect their land rights (S. Enemark, McLaren, & Lemmen, 2016; Prindex, 2020). This includes mostly high number of populations living in poor or deprived areas, where there are high levels of tenure insecurity.  Often, tenure security is believed to improve by formalization and providing documents proving the rights of the holders. It is however, been found that registration or formulization property rights does not always improve the sense of tenure security. As a consequence, people might feel insecure about their rights and may, unwillingly be evicted from their land or properties. Improving perceptions of tenure security has several benefits and may act as a crucial factor in investments and participations in property markets. Also, it may help with evaluating the role of policy interventions and the rights of poor and vulnerable. There is however, often lack of any evidence related to perception of tenure security as the existing survey-based methods for assessment of tenure security are expensive, slow in implementation and are prone to inconsistencies across survey instruments.