Land degradation gets high visibility at sustainable development summit

Bonn, 20/02/2018 - Dr. Harsh Vardhan, Minister for Science & Technology, Earth Sciences, Environment, Forests and Climate Change of India, says India will achieve Land Degradation Neutrality by 2030. At a meeting with Executive Secretary Monique Barbut held last week in Delhi, India, Dr. Vardhan also conveyed New Delhi’s willingness to co-host the Asia-Pacific Regional Workshop for Capacity-building.

The meeting took place in the margins of the World Sustainable Development Summit, which was held on 15 to 17 February in Delhi.

UNCCD and The Energy Research Institute (TERI) of India co-hosted a ministerial session on implementation of land degradation neutrality and three thematic sessions on The Governance challenges and policy solutions for combatting land degradation, The Business of Land and on Civil Society Engagement in Land Degradation Neutrality.

Nitin Desai, former Under-Secretary of the United Nations, summarized the outcomes of the Ministerial session. The pressures on land come from many sources – agriculture, mining and climate. The solutions must be connected – land, water and biodiversity. If we want the small farmer to think long term, we need to take care of the short term challenge of livelihoods.

Participants at the thematic issues discussed: (1) the important role of land management as an accelerator for Sustainable Development Goals and climate action; (2) how CSOs can and are contributing to the local and global land agenda, including in the critical roles of land tenure, gender equity and policy incentives for sustainable land management; and (3) the private sector as a critical partner in scaling up actions on the ground and shifting production practices.

Their concerns centered on a few issues:
•    how to operationalize sustainable land management (SLM) incentives that deliver multiple benefits
•    how national policy frameworks can encourage and support action at the local level; and
•    how land use planning can be used to negotiate the competing demands for land resources from industrial agriculture, urban and infrastructure expansion, and extractive and energy concerns, including water intensive industries.

Participants observed that civil society organizations are highly effective in achieving change at small scale. But scaling up these successes would require information sharing, public campaigns and peer to peer learning facilitated by both the public and private sectors.

They noted that even when gender equity and tenure security are guaranteed on paper they are rarely achieved due to multiple barriers, such as bureaucracy and political and cultural beliefs.

Participants observed that land degradation poses significant risks, but also offers opportunities, to multiple industries. However, these calculations are rarely taken into account in most business decision making. Land is still not viewed as a “core business” but rather as a peripheral standard business calculation or toolkit.

They argued that the private sector can – and should – invest in good land management considering that healthy land is always an essential economic, either directly or indirectly.

Participants then identified several pathways for possible action.

The noted the need for an integrated approach that is based on the principles of rights, rewards and responsibilities. They called for the adoption of sustainable land management (SLM) practices that ensure productivity of land resources as well as food, water and livelihood security for present and future generations.

To this end, policies on the governance of land and soils are needed in order to create the enabling environment that will ensure restoration outcomes are sustainable and pro-poor.

Participants highlighted that local communities and CSOs are key drivers in the innovation, experimentation and adaptation needed in the search for new pathways and solutions.

Through partnerships, governments, businesses and local communities can mobilize resources and increase efforts to protect and improve rural livelihoods. Such partnerships should seek to overcome the barriers to land rights and to gender equality, which undermine the achievement of land degradation neutrality.

Finding new sources of money to finance small scale producers and other livelihood activities of rural communities was also emphasized. Two options could be to work with green value supply chains and with investors committed to corporate social responsibility.

Participants also stressed that businesses should not degrade the land. Instead, they need to promote sustainable land management, including through consumer demand, product procurement, and value-added processing. They argued that businesses with enormous land and water footprints should find new ways to shift production patterns.

During the Summit, Ms. Barbut also met representatives of 7 leading media houses in India.

Mr. Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister inaugurated the Summit.

Click here for the WSDS news bulletin.

For more reporting on the sessions, click the links below.

http://wsds.teriin.org/land-at-risk-india-needs-to-combat-degradation.p…

http://wsds.teriin.org/towards-sustainable-land-management.php

http://wsds.teriin.org/articles.php

http://thecommonwealth.org/media/news/blog-world-sustainable-developmen…

For more information on the event, contact salexander [at] unccd.int (salexander[at]unccd[dot]int).

Sasha Alexander, Policy Officer, contributed to this report.