All publications and documents

Soil ecosystem services, as all ecosystem services (ESS), are fundamental for meeting societal needs such as food and energy provision and for overcoming societal challenges like climate change mitigation and adaptation. The MAES (Mapping and Assessment on Ecosystems and their Services) Soil Pilot aims to increase awareness on the importance of soil functions and related ecosystem services and to…

Land degradation and desertification are some of the world’s greatest environmental challenges in the light of a rapidly growing world population and increasing demand for food, fibre, and biomass energy. Asia is the largest and most populated continent in the world, with a total land area of 4.3 billion hectares. Degraded areas on the continent include expanding deserts in mainland…

For the African continent, the ability to manage trade-offs at a landscape scale has huge potential to influence the future of migration and conflict, as well as the future of land resources, food security and biodiversity. Integrated land management can act as an accelerator for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and can be considered an essential element of a sustainable strategy to…

Women disproportionately bear the negative impacts of large-scale land investments (in agribusiness, extractives, logging) in the global South. ▪▪Lack of formal land rights and their subordinate role in the household and community lead to the marginalization of women in decision-making processes and the bypassing of them in the distribution of compensation and the planning and…

Trends.Earth (formerly the Land Degradation Monitoring Toolbox) is a platform for monitoring land change using earth observations in an innovative desktop and cloud-based system. The three sub-indicators for monitoring achievement of Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 15.3), are supported by: productivity, land cover, and soil organic carbon. …

The ‘think soils’ manual is a practical guide to soil assessment. It aims to help farmers, land managers, government and non-government advisers to recognise problems with erosion and runoff from agricultural land. Our changing climate makes this issue increasingly important. Diagnosing the state of soils on the farm is often not simple. Every field is unique. Soil condition can vary…