New Types of Land Ownership to Sustain Life on Land

The SDG 15, sustainable Life on Land, has a strong relation to farming. In Europe and in Germany we experience a growth in community- and civil society supported organizations of farmland ownership. Those new types of organizations governing land ownership are to a large part not-for-profit organizations that answer to the ecological values of their supporters. In this contribution we show for Germany that this type of community-supported land ownership appears in numerous and diverse legal forms with a range of 1-68 partner farms each. Each individual legal form of governing such community-supported organization allows for different styles and formal arrangements of land stewardship, with the focus here on combating land degradation and reducing biodiversity loss. They are found in a full geographical spread across Germany although publically beneficial associations prevail in old Federal States for historic reasons. The empirical material is based on a German-wide scoping study conducted in 2020. With a spotlight on two case studies, we will exemplify the new opportunities for supporting the ecological transition of land use by means of community-supported land ownership.