All publications and documents

Optimizing land-based interventions for multiple benefits requires the capacity to do the right thing, in the right place, at the right time, at the right scale. Organic carbon is central to healthy productive soils and the mitigation and adaptation to climate change, but it is not easy to manage without effective measurement.

Drought is one of the major drivers of global food and water insecurity, affecting agricultural production and access to food and water. Drought can, in extreme cases, force people to abandon their land, resorting to migration as their last livelihood strategy, making the prospect of ending hunger and malnutrition by 2030 more difficult. Land management practices offer opportunities for…

Land degradation neutrality (LDN) is achieved if land degradation is avoided or reduced, and new degradation is balanced by reversing degradation elsewhere in the same land type through restoration or rehabilitation. The primary instrument for avoiding and reducing degradation is the application of sustainable land management (SLM) approaches and technologies. Because of its multifunctional…

The World Food System Summer School is an innovative two-week course that seeks to develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes of the next generation of decision makers to build sustainable food systems. Meaningful learning, where the participant is able to relate new information to existing knowledge, is a critical part of education about complex systems and requires the integration of…

Forest and land degradation undermines the foundation of human prosperity and well-being. It threatens our food and water supplies, our climate, and the biodiversity that underpins the ecosystems that sustain us. Land degradation is one of the critical elements in the gathering environmental crisis that humanity must address. Only human agency can trigger landscape regeneration by working in…

This UNCCD-SPI technical report provides well-established scientific evidence for understanding the strong linkages between land use and drought and how management of both is connected through water use. It introduces a new concept of Drought-Smart Land Management (D-SLM) and organizes relevant approaches and practices in fourteen groups across four major classes of land use. The…