All publications and documents

This policy brief summarizes findings from a rapid preliminary review of available approaches to drought impact and vulnerability assessment. The review draws on experiences from different parts of the world. Recommendations focus on the policy needs to enable proactive assessment approaches that can include vulnerable people and work across sectors, scales and timeframes. Why assess…

National policies should take a proactive approach to direct and coordinate drought vulnerability assessments with vulnerable groups. This rapid review explores the application of available approaches and methods for assessing drought impacts and vulnerability. It is based on a series of interviews with expert practitioners from different drought-affected regions of the world. This was…

Climate change and its impacts are experienced worldwide, reshaping irrevocably migration patterns on all continents. Examples of migration occurring in a changing climate are numerous: (a) communities in Pacific islands forced to plan for relocation further inland due to coastal erosion; (b) storms in populous Asian countries displacing tens of thousands of people; (c)…

The 2019 edition of the Land for Life Award puts the spotlight on individuals and organizations that made outstanding contributions to achieve land degradation neutrality on a large scale, with long-term changes and dedicated actions for 25 years or longer. Those remarkable projects involve local people, communities and the society, raising the level of their ambition. Meanwhile,…

The publication underscores that world leaders and their development partners need better information to assess progress, make real-time course corrections – explained as redirecting services and investments in response to most pressing needs – and craft forward-looking projections. According to the authors, this requires that intra-national datasets can be compatibly integrated as parts of…

Land degradation and biodiversity loss are among the most pressing environmental challenges facing humanity. Land degradation has reduced the productivity of nearly one-quarter of the global land surface, impacted the wellbeing of about 3.2 billion people and cost about 10% of annual global gross domestic product in lost ecosystem services. An estimated 23% of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas…