A/HRC/22/46 insecure tenure arrangements. Unplanned and exclusionary urbanization has obvious impacts on tenure security. 6 7. In addition, due to their increasing commodification, rural and urban lands have become highly contested assets, which has had dramatic consequences, particularly but not exclusively in emerging economies. The dynamics that accompany the liberalization of land markets are increasing the pressure of the market on urban low-income settlements, and this in a global context where resources for housing do not reach the lowest income groups. Communities are under threat of dispossession, their right to adequate housing, including tenure security, left unprotected. B. Who is affected by tenure insecurity—measuring and assessing the extent of the problem 8. Tenure insecurity is a global phenomenon. Yet, assessing the nature and scale of the problem is fraught with difficulties of definition as well as measurement, and precise data is not available.7 This is because tenure security is partly a matter of perception and experience, highly dependent on political, economic and cultural context, as well as a legal issue. 9. Self-made and unplanned settlements, with precarious housing conditions, epitomize tenure insecurity in a very visible form. In many cities they now represent the largest single channel of land and housing supply for the majority of the population. Attempts to measure the scale of these settlements and their level of tenure insecurity have been problematic for the reasons just highlighted, and also because of the great diversity in settlements and tenure characteristics across countries and regions. 10. The United Nations Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) provides data on ―slums‖, the word it has adopted to define such settlements. One UN-Habitat study estimated that 924 million people were living in slums in 2001;8 an estimate for 2010 placed the number at about 828 million.9 However, by 2010 tenure security was not taken into account in the UN-Habitat measurements of slums, hence the latter figure offers only a very small insight into the current extent of tenure insecurity in urban areas.10 Similarly, the revised indicator for the Millennium Development Goal target of improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers (7 (d)) does not include security of tenure. 11 While this particular target was reached, the question remains as to whether this result reflects the real situation of slums and informal settlements worldwide. Developing effective ways to measure tenure (in)security is an urgent imperative, including for the Millennium Development Goals and the United Nations development agenda beyond 2015. 6 7 8 9 10 11 4 Expert projections show that by 2050, 67 per cent of the world‘s population will be urban. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Urbanization Prospects, the 2011 Revision (2012). A few initiatives to measure tenure security are however under way. See, for example, R. Sietchiping et al., ―Monitoring tenure security within the continuum of land rights: methods and practices‖, paper prepared for the Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, Washington D.C., 23-26 April 2012. UN-Habitat, Slums of the World: The Face of Urban Poverty in the New Millennium? (2003), p. 24. UN-Habitat, State of the World’s Cities 2010-2011: Bridging the Urban Divide (2011), p. 33. Ibid. The revised indicator for the target is the proportion of the urban population living in slums (the original indicator was the proportion of households with access to secure tenure). Claiming the Millennium Development Goals: A Human Rights Approach (United Nations publication, Sales No. E.08.XIV.6) , p. 40.