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A working group pooling members of the international scientific community and civil society was formed in 2008 as a French initiative. It aims to address the imperatives outlined in the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification: developing a minimum set of indicators to help policy makers assess desertification and land degradation trends on different scales and also to implement the…

Drylands have the potential to play a big role in climate mitigation and, in doing so, to deliver significant co-benefits. Changes in dryland management practices can lead to greater carbon sequestration. Although, on per unit area basis, the carbon storage potential of dryland ecosystems is lower than for moist tropical systems, but the large area of drylands means that overall they have…

Land degradation is an underrecognized threat to global well-being which will be aggravated by climate change. The poor are hurt most, because they depend largely on the land (agriculture, livestock, forests) for their livelihood. Estimating the cost of land degradation is difficult but it must amount to many billions of dollars globally per year, reducing agricultural GDP by several percentage…

World-famous geographer and desert photographer Michael Martin with Elke Wallner produced this remarkable movie to draw the public’s attention to desertification, land degradation and water scarcity. The expressive pictures show the devastating impact of unsustainable land use and climate change. The results are multifaceted in socio-economic terms and range from extreme poverty and forced…

The Man Who Stopped the Desert is a one hour feature doc telling the story of Yacouba Sawadogo, an African peasant farmer who has pioneered a technique that reverses the process of desertification. This is what Dr Chris Reij, a world expert on desertification has to say about Yacouba: “Yacouba single-handedly has had more impact on…conservation than all the national and international researchers…

Drylands are a sizeable part of the world's potentially arable land. They vary from the hyper-arid regions of the classic deserts of Africa and Asia to the more common semi-arid and sub-humid areas that support extensive agricultural systems dependent on rainfall or irrigation. Following their successful and innovative work The Economics of Dryland Management the editors have assembled twenty…