With climate change impacts already felt in the world’s drylands, there is an urgent need for action, at various scales and initiated by different stakeholders, to ensure the sustainability of food production and livelihoods in these regions in the coming decades. There is also the need to rapidly establish baselines, assess and start monitoring progress on sustainability, emerging as result of the action taken.

To aid in this effort, the Building climate-resilient dryland forests and agrosilvopastoral production systems will provide a short list of expected transformations (under each of the three sustainability pillars) for guiding the planning and implementation of policy, governance and practice-level actions. Gender and indigenous people’s rights and knowledge will be considered cross-cutting issues. The expected transformations will be consulted with and agreed by dryland experts and practitioners and will be complemented with additional relevant information sources and indicators. However, it will be recommended that national and subnational governments, programs, projects and individual practitioners and experts define the indicators they will use for measuring their own interventions’ progress towards the expected transformations, based on the availability of data and specific national and local conditions.

The paper will also present case studies portraying actions that led to progress in sustainability and directly related to the expected transformations. A connected policy brief Blooming Drylands will complement the paper and offer practical recommendations on how policymakers will reach the expected transformations.

This policy brief is intended to inform decision-makers of nine transformational actions to sustain dryland production systems under the impact of climate change. It highlights the relevance of the local context for interventions and the importance of traditional and tested adaptive agrosilvopastoral strategies for building resilience. In addition, it emphasizes the potential for scaling up and using complementary technologies over wider areas. In particular, the roles of both women and men should not be neglected in terms of maintaining, creating and restoring dryland sustainable landscapes.