With an expected 9.5 billion people living on earth by 2050, population pressure, higher consumer expectations and climate change will tax and degrade our natural resource base, especially the LAND.
With an increasing awareness of the potential of land to meet public and private development goals, land is being seen as an ever more attractive investment vehicle.
The vision for financing sustainable development outlined in this brochure seeks to leverage the longterm potential of human, financial, and natural capital to improve the health and productivity of land and soil, and to serve as a catalyst for making progress towards many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It makes a compelling case, in particular, that by investing in land degradation neutrality, we can reap significant rewards. The value of terrestrial ecosystem goods and services goes beyond what the land provides for important sectors, such as food, water and forestry.
Recognizing that trade-offs among competing land-use sectors such as agriculture, industry, urbanization and tourism are somehow inevitable; economic assessments and approaches to managing and investing in land resources should aim to understand the total range of values that are important to the entire society.
Investing in SLM is both an affordable and a low-risk proposition. More financing is needed to support scaling up of SLM but this can mostly come from existing sources. In the scaling up of SLM and achieving LDN, the public sector should focus on mainstreaming SLM into existing policies, providing the enabling environment and driving institutional and policy reform. In the future, new investments could be dominated by private funding.