All publications and documents

When it comes to nourishing ourselves and the future generations that will inhabit our planet, there’s little room to doubt that on a global scale we’re ‘biting the hand that feeds us.’ Eighty percent of global deforestation and 11 percent of anthropogenic carbon emissions come from agriculture, and conventional farming practices are leading causes of water pollution, biodiversity loss and land…

Land degradation and food insecurity go hand-in-hand across Latin America and the Caribbean. What if we could address both challenges at the same time? Landscape restoration is the process of bringing land and soil back to life. It has the potential to reverse degradation and increase agricultural production at the same time. A recent report by the World Resources Institute, with the…

Restor is a map-based, open-source platform created so that people can better plan, manage and monitor restoration projects. The locations of more than 50,000 restoration and conservation initiatives are now registered on the platform. On the platform, Restor users can view high-resolution satellite imagery of places around the globe to learn about their potential for restoration or…

Droughts have deep, widespread and underestimated impacts on societies, ecosystems, and economies. They incur costs that are borne disproportionately by the most vulnerable people. The extensive impacts of drought are consistently underreported even though they span large areas, cascade through systems and scales, and linger through time, affecting millions of people and contributing to food…

Every five years, the UNESCO Science Report provides an update of trends in science governance. Written by 70 authors from 52 countries, it aggregates data on spending, personnel, scientific publications and patents. The latest edition tracks progress towards the UN's 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and the rapid progress of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It also tracks the impact of the…

Food system innovations will be instrumental to achieving multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, major innovation breakthroughs can trigger profound and disruptive changes, leading to simultaneous and interlinked reconfigurations of multiple parts of the global food system. The emergence of new technologies or social solutions, therefore, have very different impact profiles, with…