Land acquisition due diligence: protected areas, wetlands and land tenure before you sign the option
Land acquisition due diligence has a legal half and a spatial half. The legal half — title, encumbrances, zoning, permits — comes from the national register and the lawyer. The spatial half asks what the land itself touches: a protected area, a wetland of international importance, a World Heritage buffer zone, a community's customary claim. ERWAY Legality Assessment answers the spatial half for each parcel from records, before the option is signed and the legal fees start.
Upload the parcels under offer — one, or the four hundred in a plantation deal — and read one outcome per parcel: prohibited where a strict-protection area or a natural World Heritage property overlaps it, restricted where a sustainable-use area or an official wetland boundary does, verification needed where an international designation or a community claim is recorded without settled terms. The strictest tier and the deciding source are named on every row. For a lender on the same transaction, the banks page describes the credit-file use; for a farm portfolio, the agricultural lending page.
What the screening finds that the title search does not
International designations rarely appear on a title. A Biosphere Reserve buffer zone, a wetland boundary, an Indigenous territory recognised but not yet registered — each is a restriction on what the land can be used for, and each is recorded somewhere other than the cadastre. The product reads those records per parcel, reports the overlap in hectares and the relation to each designation, and dates every check. The protected-area screening page shows the overlap logic in detail.
Tenure and consent
Where a parcel lies on land held, used or claimed by Indigenous Peoples or a local community, the finding carries the tenure status — documented, recognised but undocumented, claim submitted, customary — and, for Indigenous land, the consent flag. The country panel gives the tenure-security context and says plainly that it describes the country, not the parcel. An absence of records is not an absence of rights, and this is stated clearly.
What remains the buyer's
Title, cadastre, zoning, permits and price. The screening is preliminary; where a national register is the authority, the page tells you to consult it. Its value is in the order of operations: the parcels that fail the spatial half drop out before the legal half is paid for, and the parcels that pass carry a dated file into the data room.