All publications and documents

Land provides crucial ecosystem services for human existence and human well-being, including provisioning, regulating, supporting and cultural services. Those services provide among others the production of fresh air, food, feed, fuel and fibre. They regulate the risks of natural hazards and climate change, offer cultural and spiritual values to our society, and support key ecological…

The report provides scientifically sound practical guidance for selecting SLM practices that help address DLDD, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and for creating an enabling environment for their large-scale implementation considering local realities. It targets a broad audience from scientists, policy makers, landowners, community stakeholders and enterprises.

Soils play a critical role in delivering ecosystem services. Healthy soils are a basic prerequisite to meeting varied needs for food, biomass (energy), fiber, fodder, and other products, and to ensuring the provision of essential ecosystem services in all regions of the world. However, soil resources are facing unprecedented pressures today, many of which are human-induced. Over the past three…

The words of Alison Anderson, Papunya elder and recently retired Australian politician, resonate. They resonate with all indigenous peoples whose relationship with their land is often more profoundly intimate than that of Western or eurocentric societies, and they resonate with a geologist. For Aboriginal people and geologists, the land tells stories – in different ways, of course, but the…

To achieve the ambitious goals of alleviating poverty, securing food and water supplies, and protecting the natural resource base, we need to recognize the inter-connectedness of the factors driving land degradation, so that solutions can be taken to scale, transforming management practices for millions of land users. An analysis of the critical barriers and incentives to achieve scaling up…

The annual costs of land degradation are thought to be in the order of 10-17% of global gross domestic product. The very high costs of land degradation makes large-scale ecological restoration a global imperative. This paper documents the areas wherein, and manners whereby, large-scale ecological restoration has the potential to be an integral component of the sustainable management of natural…