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As partners in various initiatives relevant to Forest and Landscape Restoration (FLR) - such as the Global Partnership on Forest and Landscape Restoration (GPFLR), the Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF), TerrAfrica, and the Great Green Wall for the Sahel and the Sahara Initiative (GGWSSI) - the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Global Mechanism of the…

Land Degradation Neutrality has been interpreted by scientists as a “state whereby the amount and quality of land resources, necessary to support ecosystem functions and services and enhance food security, remains stable or increases within specific temporal and spatial scales, and ecosystems” (UNCCD, 2015). Adoption of Land Degradation Neutrality in the Rio+20 Outcome Document “The future we…

The previous edition of Women, Business and the Law found that 90% of economies measured had at least one law impeding women’s economic opportunities. This still holds true, even though this edition covers over 20% more economies. However, over the past two years, 65 economies achieved 94 reforms increasing women’s economic opportunities. Most of these reforms took place in developing…

Although there is global consensus that women’s land rights are fundamental for the realization of food security and rural development, accurate and reliable statistics to monitor the attainment and realisation of these rights are still lacking. Indeed, the lack of clear and accurate statistics on landownership and land management– that are disaggregated by sex - is problematic for developing…

From endless sand dunes and prickly cacti to shimmering mirages and green oases, deserts evoke contradictory images in us. They are lands of desolation, but also of romance, of blistering Mojave heat and biting Gobi cold. Covering a quarter of the earth’s land mass and providing a home to half a billion people, they are both a physical reality and landscapes of the mind. The idea of the desert…

The protection of fertile soils is a precondition for sustainable development. In the final document of the conference of the United Nations on sustainable development in June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro (Rio+20 Conference), the international community thus agreed to strive for a “land degradation neutral world”. The legal study by Ecologic Institute, Berlin, firstly scrutinizes some…