All publications and documents

Soil is often seen as little more than the shallow layer of dirt on the Earth’s surface. Its role in providing almost all our food calories, regulating water supplies, supporting biodiversity, and helping stabilize the global climate is widely overlooked and frequently undervalued. The current methods used to produce crops and livestock have contributed to a worldwide decline in soil…

The LDN Target Setting Programme supports countries to define national LDN targets and associated measures. The bellow document “Land Degradation Neutrality Target Setting – A technical guide” has been prepared by the GM and the Secretariat of the UNCCD to provide operational guidance on how to define national baselines, identify voluntary targets and associate measures to achieve LDN by 2030,…

The incidence and intensity of droughts is expected to increase in Southern Africa over the coming years. In order to mitigate these trends, the region has developed the SADC Drought Risk Management and Mitigation Strategy (DRIMMS), which is a 10-year road map to achieve region-wide drought resilience. The objective of the strategy is to enhance the capacity of the SADC countries to…

This drought vulnerability assessment for SADC uses the IPCC framework to assess the distribution of drought hazard and social and biophysical vulnerability to those hazards in order to identify drought vulnerability and risk hotspots. The assessment reveals that most of the SADC countries are experiencing an increasing trend in terms of drought severity, albeit with differing rates of…

There are valuable lessons to be learned from drought risk management around the world for the SADC region. Nations and regional governments must improve their drought monitoring and early warning systems. A better drought plan must consider risk assessments at all levels, from the community level to the regional level, to achieve better vulnerability and risk/impact assessments at the national…