All publications and documents

Numbers can tell a compelling story. In this brochure, the numbers highlight how much we rely on productive land. Amongst other valuable  services, land feeds our families, provides fresh water and powers our future ambitions. Much of the data collected here, however, demonstrate  how close we are to pushing our relationship with the land to breaking point. The magnitude of the…

The collection of articles in this Special Feature is part of a larger project on “Forecasting Societies’ Adaptive Capacity to Climate Change” (an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council to Wolfgang Lutz). In investigating how global change will affect population vulnerability to climate variability and extremes, the project aims to help develop strategies that enable societies to better…

The monitoring of ambient environmental conditions is essential to environmental management and regulation. However, effective monitoring is subject to a range of institutional, political, and legal constraints, constraints that are a product of the need for monitoring to be continuous, long lived, and well matched to the resources being studied. Political pressure or myopia, conflicting agency…

This paper is an extension version of the paper presented in the 8th International Soil Sciences Congress (ISSC), Izmir, Turkey, 15–17 May 2012.A large number of vegetation indices have been developed and widely applied in terrestrial ecosystem research in the recent decades. However, a certain limitation was observed while applying these indices in research in dry areas due to their…

This paper explores the main institutional and political factors contributing to the gap between evidence and mainstream policies/funding priorities in dryland management.It explores two agricultural paradigms: first, the dominant paradigm that favours modernization, economies of scale and specialisation. Second, the agroecological paradigm, with resilience of farming communities and their…

According to the State Program of Action to Combat Desertification and Mitigate the Effects of Drought (PAE/CE), the State of Ceara-Brazil has three centers configured with Areas Susceptible to Desertification which are the Hinterlands of Inhamuns, the Hinterlands Irauçuba and Center North and the Hinterlands of Medium Jaguaribe, encompassing twelve municipalities and covering a total area of 26…