How climate change impacts in growth and development in semi-arid lands

According to the Land Matrix, approximately 130 million hectares of land (or more than 52.7 million football fields) has been acquired globally in settled and impending land deals over the last 15 years.

Healthy soils are fundamental to life. They grow the food we eat and the wood we use for shelter and fuel, purify the water we drink, and hold fast to the roots of the natural world we cherish.

Dust and sand storms(DSS) occurrences often have an adverse impact on organisms’ life styles and their environment, not only in the source region but also in the downwind regions.

We draw out common themes in terms of not only what natural and social scientists have learned about the Dust Bowl era itself, but also how insights gained from the study of that period are helping to enhance our understanding of climate–human relations more generally.

The drylands of the world are affected by moderate to severe land degradation from wind erosion and there is evidence that the frequency of sand storms/dust storms in increasing.

Almost four years ago, CIFOR organized a side event on the tropical dry forests of Africa at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties in Durban, South Africa. At that event, we identified the major issues affecting dry forests in Africa and…

Land as a resource. European Commission. Land is a finite resource. It is subject to competing pressures from urbanisation, infrastructure, increased food, feed, fibre and fuel production and the provision of key ecosystem

While never offering a blueprint, FOLA shares a diversity of insights, experiences, and lessons from countries across the continent, highlighting the critical role of property rights in local livelihoods and development.

Centre for Land Tenure Studies (CLTS) Working Paper on land tenure reforms and land markets in Africa

This article examines the nature of commitments that countries have made and if follow-up and review arrangements currently planned are consistent with those. In particular, we consider the need to encompass both the global SDG targets and the nationally defined targets foreseen

The gender equality goal in Agenda 2030, like many other goals, was the subject of wide-ranging consultations, position papers, and extensive commentaries issued by women’s rights organizations and networks, academics, and UN agencies.

Realizing the ‘transformative potential’ of the Agenda in the decade and a half to come will be far from a technocratic exercise – and this is particularly true for the full realization of women's rights.

It pays particular attention to three dimensions: economic and financial volatility, the role of the private sector, and the domestic resource mobilization.

The concept of Zero Net Land Degradation was recently proposed as the basis for a future protocol for the UNCCD to reduce global dryland degradation.

Our larger data set focused only on forest ecosystems and it revealed that enhancement of overall biodiversity also differs among taxonomic groups. Nevertheless, the recovery of vegetation structure and species similarity and composition are likely to take orders of magnitude longer than species…

Ecological restoration and the mainstreaming of the concept of ecosystem services will be critical if global society is to move toward sustainability.

For the successful upscaling of land management, more attention must be paid to the social system from the first involvement stage, up to the long term maintenance.

It is unclear how the current global food system will meet the growing demands of a population expected to reach 9 billion people by 2050. In the present context of climate change, ongoing loss of species and genetic diversity, soil degradation, increasing urbanization, social conflict and extreme…

Drylands may be resilient to environmental changes because the many species with intermediate relative abundances could take over ecosystem functioning if the environment becomes suboptimal for dominant species.

The papers present original research on land (soil and vegetation) degradation and desertification in drylands (and related subjects) using spectroscopy and remote sensing tools and techniques.

The assessment of land degradation and the quantification of its effects on land productivity have been both a scientific and political challenge. After four decades of Earth Observation (EO) applications, little agreement has been gained on the magnitude and direction of land degradation in the…

This collection of papers began with our recognition of the vital need to improve our collective record on gender and agroforestry.