All publications and documents

As part of UNDP's Global Development Imperative Challenge Paper Series, this publication challenges the current wisdom on the distribution and condition of drylands populations and offers more realistic scenarios that decision-makers can take seriously. The paper sets out this challenge and introduces some of the new evidence that is required.

In this illustrated work, the author shares with us the fruits of more than a quarter of careful observation of traditional knowledge and techniques applied to urban settlements and landscape resources management in all regions of the world. The book introduces us to very sophisticated, thousand-year-old, capacities developed by local communities and civilizations around the world,…

The Man Who Planted Trees is not a detailed how-to guide to planting; it is a touching story of Elzéard Bouffier, who devoted his entire life to reforesting a desolate portion of Provence, in southern France. He single-handedly planted 100 acorns each day before, through, and after two world wars, and transformed a sorrowful place into one full of life and joy. Jean Giono's words offer a tribute…

First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and…

Early on an April Saturday in 1986 in a farm village in Ukraine, widow Marusia Petrenko and her family awake to a day of traditional wedding preparations. Marusia bakes her famous wedding bread-a korovai-in the communal village oven to take to her neighbor's granddaughter's reception. Late that night, after all the dancing and drinking, Marusia's son Yurko leaves for his shift at the nuclear…

Since the early nineties in the last century, scholars are warning about the dramatic increase of the demographic and economic gradients from northern African to southern European countries and their consequences to the migration rates. Fifteen years after those predictions are becoming confirmed. Rather than looking at the whole intricacies of this migration process in the source and receptor…