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In many drylands, recent changes to land tenure systems have had widespread effects on traditional resources utilization mechanisms. Rural household economies often rely directly on the local or regional availability of natural resources. Any qualitative or quantitative changes to the natural resources will have a direct impact on the stability of these households. Overgrazing in many rangelands…

The proposed Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) (Nature 465, 525; 2010) should be part of a broader complementary system of scientific input. This would help to coordinate data that fall under the remit of multiple international environmental agencies and agreements. And it would minimize the risks of duplication in scientific review and…

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) commissioned its First Scientific Conference in 2009 to deliberate on ways to improve the global monitoring and assessment of dryland degradation to support decision-making in land and water management. The papers included in this issue of Land Degradation & Development elaborate the reasoning behind the 11 recommendations that…

The need to mainstream land degradation issues into national policies and frameworks is encouraged by international mechanisms such as the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs, 2000). However, mainstreaming has faced a number of interrelated institutional, financial, legal, knowledge and policy barriers. As such, despite 15 years…

This paper seeks to provide an overview of the relationships between food insecurity, land degradation and desertification, and its antithesis, food security and sustainable land management. It places particular focus on the world's drylands (i.e. arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas), but situates the review within the wider context of global food systems and the macro-processes that drive…

It is increasingly recognised that land degradation monitoring and assessment can benefit from incorporating multiple sources of knowledge, using a variety of methods at different scales, including the perspectives of researchers, land managers and other stakeholders. However, the knowledge and methods required to achieve this are often dispersed across individuals and organisations at different…