All publications and documents

The Soil Leadership Academy, a Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) support platform, is launching its simulation workshops at the UNCCD’s 12th Conference of Parties in Ankara, Turkey. The Soil Leadership Academy (SLA) is a special initiative of the UNCCD, which aims to motivate decision-makers to start thinking about LDN, and to demonstrate how LDN can benefit their country or business.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development has developed a comprehensive work program that can help its members better understand risks linked to inaction and opportunities for action, structuring its work program around the international discussions led by the UNCCD on LDN. In particular LDN is reflected in the WBCSD’s Action2020 targets of “restoring at least 12 million hectares per…

We offer you an annotated list of literary works (among which a few nonfiction ones) that have reflected the major world's environmental problems and disasters. Global environmental challenges are a unifying concern for people around the world. Climate change, loss of biodiversity, human health and welfare, land degradation, drought, some of the major environmental catastrophes…

Global food production must ramp up in the face of enormous challenges. We are all familiar with many of the key metrics surrounding the central food security challenge: By the year 2050, the earth’s population is expected to soar from the current 7bn about 9.6bn. It is estimated that in the next 40 to 50 years, we will need to produce as much food as was necessary in the previous 10,000. …

Over the last three decades the issues of sustainability have been addressed and policy options have been proposed at the global, regional and sometimes at the national level to revert the negative trends on the social, economic and environmental aspects of development. But still, we are in front of a scenario that indicates that if land resources are not managed in a sustainable manner, the…

Monitoring and assessing land degradation dynamics involves extracting the most relevant information from time series of global satellite observations. The longest available satellite observation datasets with global coverage at 1-km resolution, from, e.g., the SPOT VGT sensor, have a continuous frequent temporal sampling over a long enough period, now 15 years, to allow extraction of proxy…