All publications and documents

By 2050 the EU's economy has grown in a way that respects resource constraints and planetary boundaries, thus contributing to global economic transformation. Our economy is competitive, inclusive and provides a high standard of living with much lower environmental impacts. All resources are sustainably managed, from raw materials to energy, water, air, land and soil. Climate change…

While climate change will affect all regions of the world, people in developing countries are the most vulnerable. That is why adaptation is a priority for German development cooperation, with many programmes already addressing the challenge in partner countries. Now that the need for adaptation to climate change has been generally accepted as an immediate priority, it is time to bundle the…

Desertification offers a comprehensive overview of the subject and clearly emphasizes the link between local and global desertification processes and how past and current policy has affected arid environments and their populations. This book tackles the issues surrounding desertification in a number of ways from differing scales (local to global), processes (physical to human), the relationship…

Past assessments of land degradation have focused on the biophysical impacts rather than on the overall societal and economic costs and benefits of degradation prevention. Additionally, past studies have largely addressed how land degradation impacts on-site productivity while paying limited attention to its off-site costs, which often make it a transnational and global issue. To address these…

The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011 highlights the differential impacts that the world food crisis of 2006-08 had on different countries, with the poorest being most affected. While some large countries were able to deal with the worst of the crisis, people in many small import-dependent countries experienced large price increases that, even when only temporary, can have permanent…

The Great Green Wall is an initiative spearheaded by African Heads of State to combat soil degradation in a zone spanning Senegal to Djibouti. The wall is a visual concept symbolizing the collective work we all have to do in order to combat environmental degradation, in particular desertification and the poverty in rural areas. The GEF CEO answers six questions about this initiative to combat…