The UNCCD-SPI technical report “Creating an Enabling Environment for LDN and its Potential Contribution to Enhancing Well-being, Livelihoods and the Environment” provides science-based evidence on the potential contribution of LDN to enhancing the well-being and livelihoods as well as the environmental conditions of people affected by desertification/land degradation and drought. This is done by capturing evidence on the configuration of an enabling environment for LDN drawn from the scientific literature, the outcomes of the LDN target setting programme, and the experiences of individual stakeholders directly involved in LDN initiatives gathered through a global LDN survey.

An enabling environment for LDN is found to consist of inclusive policies and regulations building on already existing national plans and programmes, an LDN conducive institutional setting, access to multiple sources of finance, and an effective science-policy interface designed to inform sustainable land-based interventions. This report offers solid evidence for the critical dimensions of an enabling environment and provides key messages and policy options for stakeholders involved in national efforts to further engage in LDN planning for sustainably managing land and providing multiple benefits for the environment, human well-being, and sustainable livelihoods.

From the survey results:
Close to 50 percent of survey respondents point to considerable gaps in the availability of quality data across a range of different benefits, including for advancing gender-responsive LDN. Areas with absent or particularly poor data quality included resil-ience (56%), soil organic carbon (SOC) (45%), and gender equality (56%).

Achieving LDN requires responsible land governance, including the cooperation of land users and stakeholders involved in land governance at different levels and in a gender-responsive way (box 3). here below

Gender dimensions of land governanceBecause women tend to be more reliant on natural resources and land, land degradation negatively affects them disproportionally. However, they are often not granted an equal role in official land governance deci-sion-making or land use planning (UN Women, 2018).

At the same time, the large environmental steward role bestowed upon women makes them key partners in land degradation neutrality actions that need to be enabled towards action against degradation (Collantes et al., 2018).Land tenure can be heavily gendered: at the intra-household level, land titles are often vested in men, and skewed inheritance laws can further exacerbate this situation (Tsikata, 2016).

While customary (not for-mally titled) systems can experience similar gender issues, poorly designed land formalization campaigns risk exacerbating such inequalities, especially when land titles cannot be shared among spouses. These tenure insecurities affect women’s participation in initiatives to address land degradation (see figure 9) and Okpara et al. (2019).

The ongoing trend of large-scale land acquisitions and medium-scale farms pose an additional threat to gender equality as it can involve a shift from many and relatively gender-equal rural jobs to few, male-dominated farm hand jobs (Doss et al., 2014).Gender-responsive land governance interventions can significantly alleviate unequal land access and enable women to be effective stewards of the environment (Holden et al., 2011; Ali et al., 2014).

Gender therefore takes a central role in United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification frameworks, the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests and land-related Sustainable Development Goals. Continued attention for the inclusion of gender dimensions in target setting programmes, land use planning and the design of interventions is warranted (Collantes et al., 2018).