All publications and documents

The international community pressed for a treaty to tackle the growing physical and human crisis of desertification at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The Convention to Combat Desertification, the first legally binding international agreement on the problem, was agreed on in 1994. It promotes a bottom-up approach that starts with the people actually affected by the crisis and replaces…

Drylands have the potential to play a big role in climate mitigation and, in doing so, to deliver significant co-benefits. Changes in dryland management practices can lead to greater carbon sequestration. Although, on per unit area basis, the carbon storage potential of dryland ecosystems is lower than for moist tropical systems, but the large area of drylands means that overall they have…

Land degradation is an underrecognized threat to global well-being which will be aggravated by climate change. The poor are hurt most, because they depend largely on the land (agriculture, livestock, forests) for their livelihood. Estimating the cost of land degradation is difficult but it must amount to many billions of dollars globally per year, reducing agricultural GDP by several percentage…

Established in 1994, the United Nations to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) is the sole legally binding international agreement linking environment and development to sustainable land management. The Convention addresses specifically the arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas, known as the drylands, where some of the most vulnerable ecosystems and peoples can be found. The 10-year strategic plan…

A working group pooling members of the international scientific community and civil society was formed in 2008 as a French initiative. It aims to address the imperatives outlined in the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification: developing a minimum set of indicators to help policy makers assess desertification and land degradation trends on different scales and also to implement the…

The UNCCD is unique as the only global policy body focused on combating desertification, land degradation and drought, which I will call “DLDD” from now on. The UNCCD recognizes the need to improve the scientific basis supporting its work. It has given us the responsibility of re-invigorating that scientific process. A successful conference will go a long way towards the renewal of the…