A new strategy to bind the international community and to build international cooperation to combat DLDD must emerge from this context, in order to prevent negative impacts on the poorest countries and to improve food security and access to water. Bringing together the strengths of both international human rights and environmental law will better protect people, whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by DLDD, focusing attention on human suffering as well as environmental harm. Linking human rights and the fight against DLDD offers a framework of universal guarantees that protect the right to life, as well as the right to an adequate standard of living, which includes the rights to food and water into the agenda of the UNCCD. A human rights approach will provide the mechanisms to link government accountability, transparency and
responsiveness to environmental protection, while integrating a process for public participation, providing empowerment to people in the combat against DLDD. At a time when the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) process moves further towards concrete implementation, the rights-based approach to DLDD can trigger the development of national normative frameworks and tools whose enforcement and implementation can be monitored through the ten-year strategic plan of the Convention. Propositions to be included in National Action Plans, in developing government strategies, policies, programmes and activities, are proposed as human rights-based practical tools addressed to all Parties of the UNCCD as part of the operational objectives for actions to be integrated by the Parties in the fight against drought, desertification and land degradation.