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An integrated approach to land and water resource management is essential: this entails reducing demand and increasing use efficiency, protecting and restoring wetlands and watersheds in our working landscapes, providing incentives for sustainable use, and designing more sustainable cities.  

Given growing demands on land and emerging challenges from land degradation and climate change, policymakers require information on the possible consequences. This chapter explores trends up to 2050, through the Shared Socio-Economic Pathways scenarios. Future changes in the condition of land resources are projected to be extensive as a result of continued land use change and the deterioration…

By approximately 6,000 years ago, agricultural expansion had spread across most continents, leading to the clearing of native vegetation and to the culling, or domestication, of herbivores. Native flora and fauna were replaced with intensive crop and livestock management practices as human populations grew and became denser. Starting around 1750, the transformation of land started to…

It is clear that unsustainable human activities put land at risk and at the same time threaten the ecosystem services on which all humanity depends. There is enormous pressure on global land resources due to rising food demand, a global shift in dietary habits, biofuel production, urbanization, and other competing demands. Landfills, mining, and other extraction activities also contribute to…

Our perceptions of land are not only a response to the outside world, but also a cause and an effect of cultural filtering, by which certain phenomena feature prominently, while others recede into the background. In other words, the less visible the elements of land are to a particular stakeholder, the less meaning they have for that person and perhaps result in a lack of awareness as to their…

The growing demand for food, fodder, fuel, and raw materials is increasing pressures on land and the competition for natural resources. At the same time, degradation is reducing the amount of productive land available. The drivers of land degradation are mainly external factors that directly or indirectly impact the health and productivity of land and its associated resources, such as soil,…