All publications and documents

As the planet becomes increasingly urban, societies are changing and many new cultural dimensions are taking shape.This will determine the future of cities and their quality of life, ability to address human needs, capacity to innovate and how they respond to the economic challenges of the future. In many societies, basic human needs are still unaddressed, and this is certainly a priority…

Desertification and soil degradation: Although the level of desertification is lower in much of the pan-European region than in neighbouring regions, in Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, approximately 14 million ha (8 per cent of the territory) has a very high or high sensitivity to desertification, and more than 40 million ha have moderate sensitivity. This impacts on soil…

Chapter 1: Is an International treaty worth fighting for? From Post-2020 Climate Change Regime Formation edited by Suh-Yong Chung This groundbreaking collection is the first of its kind to explore the key features of the post-2020 climate change regime, featuring meticulously researched pieces from leading experts in the field.Each chapter responds to the questions surrounding the…

We explore strategies among farmers in semi-arid Tanzania to cope with drought, and investigate if access to a local supplemental irrigation system (the Ndiva system) can improve coping capacity. Results show high dependency on local ecosystem services when harvests fail, and indicate that farmers commonly exhaust asset holdings during droughts. Ndiva access did not have any direct effects on…

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) remains the only ‘Rio Convention’ that is not well served by the scientific community and lacks the equivalent of an IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) or the proposed IPBES (Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services). The mounting pressures on land (and water) that can drive its…

The relationships between land use and biodiversity are fundamental to understanding the links between people and their environment. Biodiversity can be measured in many ways. The concept covers not only the overall richness of species present in a particular area but also the diversity of genotypes, functional groups, communities, habitats and ecosystems there. As a result, the relationships…