All publications and documents

More than a third of the world’s population live in water scarce regions. Rising global temperatures and greater rainfall variability are accelerating the frequency and intensity of drought and expanding the extent of area experiencing water scarcity. While agriculture is currently the largest user of freshwater globally, it also offers considerable opportunities to improve water use efficiencies…

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…