The changing climate is making extreme weather events more frequent. Meanwhile population growth is pushing more people into marginal land vulnerable to storm surges, landslides and flooding. The inevitable result is that more natural disasters are affecting more people and more land. As a consequence humanitarian relief agencies are responding to more, and bigger, natural disasters than ever before.

It is widely acknowledged that determining and redistributing land ownership1 promptly and equitably after natural disasters is an important step in the transition from short-term humanitarian relief to the long-term reconstruction of livelihoods and communities. However, there is little consistency between the approaches of different humanitarian relief agencies.