All publications and documents

The assessment of land degradation and restoration by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services shows that land degradation across the globe is a wide and severe issue and is showing no signs of slowing down. This trend must be halted and reversed. Restoring the health of the land The United Nations (UN) has announced 2021 as the start of…

The latest IPCC report highlights that a change in diets for richer nations, and smarter land use, could ensure food security and mitigation of potential climate impacts. Land surface processes — agriculture, forestry and other land use — account for 28% of anthropogenic emissions. However, natural land processes absorb about a third of the emissions from fossil fuel burning and…

The Paris Agreement introduced an ambitious goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. Here the authors combine a review of modelled pathways and literature on mitigation strategies, and develop a land-sector roadmap of priority measures and regions that can help to achieve the 1.5 °C temperature goal. Transforming the land sector and deploying measures in…

Competition for land resources is intense, with growing demand for food and resources to support humanity. Despite this, global agricultural area has significantly declined over the past two decades due to socio–political trends, market changes and environmental degradation. Although expensive, restoring degraded lands that are no longer contested for agricultural use due to low productivity may…

Soil erosion is a major threat to food security and ecosystem viability, as current rates are orders of magnitude higher than natural soil formation. Governments around the world are trying to address the issue of soil erosion. However, we do not know whether countries have much actual control over their soil erosion. Here, we use a high-resolution, global dataset with over 35 million…

Vast, valuable amounts of energy, essential agricultural nutrients, and water could be recovered from the world’s fast-growing volume of municipal wastewater, says the United Nations University. A newly-published study reveals a staggering 380 billion cubic meters (m3 = 1000 litres) of wastewater are produced worldwide each year — five times the volume of water passing over Niagara…