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The need to mainstream land degradation issues into national policies and frameworks is encouraged by international mechanisms such as the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs, 2000). However, mainstreaming has faced a number of interrelated institutional, financial, legal, knowledge and policy barriers. As such, despite 15 years…

Economic factors are an important direct and indirect driver of desertification and land degradation, associated with market failures and the lack of appropriate economic policies to address these failures. Hence, economic and political instruments and mechanisms are required to modify the market in such a way that it encourages land owners to invest in sustainable land management (SLM) options…

The need for improved horizontal knowledge management at the national and international levels is essential for monitoring and assessment of land degradation and desertification. At the national level, governments utilise scientific, socio-economic and technical data and information for strategic planning, priority setting and national environment and development planning. However, challenges…

For land degradation monitoring and assessment (M&A) to be accurate and for sustainable land management (SLM) to be effective, it is necessary to incorporate multiple knowledges using a variety of methods and scales, and this must include the (potentially conflicting) perspectives of those who use the land. This paper presents a hybrid methodological framework that builds on approaches developed…

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and its sister conventions, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity, all aim to halt or mitigate the deterioration of the ecological processes on which life depends. Sustainable land management (SLM) is fundamental to achieving the goals of all three Conventions. Changes in land…

Socio-economic and policy dynamics strongly influence sustainable land management and consequently the capacity of land to sustain valuable ecosystem services, so it is important that they be incorporated into monitoring and assessment regimes aimed at combating desertification and land degradation. Systematic surveys can provide standardized information on socio-economic and policy dynamics,…