The Birth of International Land Governance. The 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment convened in Stockholm, Sweden, in the midst of severe drought in the Sahelian region of Africa. Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, approximately 100,000 people died due to food shortages and disease. The drought led to fears the Sahel was turning into a permanent desert due to mismanagement of natural resources, overgrazing, and overpopulation (Giannini, et al., 2003). The Stockholm Plan of Action responded by recognizing international cooperative research on soil degradation needed to be strengthened and broadened.
Recommendation 20 recognized economic and social factors contribute to soil degradation, including the “payment of inadequate prices for agriculture produce of developing countries, which prevents farmers in those countries from setting aside sufficient savings for necessary investments in soil regeneration and conservation.”

Five years later, the UN Conference on Desertification (UNCOD) convened in 1977 and adopted a non-binding Plan of Action to Combat Desertification (PACD), which aimed to improve land-use practices and social and economic welfare at the national level and inrural areas and local communities (Kong, etal., 2021).
The PACD’s 28 recommendations acknowledged the local specificity of desertification and the need to incorporate rural land users when planning policy responses (UN, 1977, p. 5).

The PACD was largely ineffective, in part due to a lack of political will and funding (Mabbutt, 1987; Danish, 1995; Kong et al., 2021). From 1977-1992, implementation efforts focused on large-scale, top-down efforts that were not always appropriate to the realities of farmers and communities on the ground. Increasingly, experts suggested the circumstances surrounding “desertification” were too locally specific to be effectively addressed with regional schemes conceived ( Source IISD/SDG KHub 2022)

Development and international economic co-operation. Implementation of the Plan of Action to Combat Desertification. UN General Assembly 35th session, A/35/411, 18 September 1980

In paragraph 8 of resolution 32/172 of 19 December 1977, the General Assembly requested the Governing Council of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to report to it, through the Economic and Social Council, at its thirty-third session and every two years thereafter, on the irplenentation of the Plan of Action to Combat Desertification. The Governing Council's report on this matter to the Assembly at its thirty-fifth session constitutes section II of the annex of the present note.

Section IV of the annex highlights the constraints that still hinder the implementation of the Plan of Action, while section V presents the action taken by the Governing Council of UNEP at its eighth session.