The climate disasters that made headlines in 2017 — monster hurricanes, devastating floods and unprecedented drought — will become commonplace in the coming decades as climate change intensifies. Decision-makers from urban planners to corporate executives are grappling with how best to adapt. Should…

Regenerating Urban Land draws on the experience of eight case studies from around the world. The case studies outline various policy and financial instruments to attract private sector investment in urban regeneration of underutilized and unutilized areas and the requisite infrastructure…

Soil sealing for urban and infrastructure development constitutes the most intense form of land degradation and affects all ecosystem services. Researchers and policy makers have become aware of this fact and call for limiting development and compensating for new soil sealing with unsealing measures…

"Land degradation is estimated to cost the global economy from $2 to $4.5 trillion a year, while economic benefits of restoration efforts are an estimated $84 billion a year, according to a report in Environmental Research Letters, and statistics from World Resources Institute. The purpose of the…

A new study has quantified the economic impact of reducing avoidable food waste in Germany, Poland and Spain. The researchers modelled impacts on production, GDP and employment. The results show that reducing food waste from households has the greatest impact, although policy measures should be…

The cultivation of bioenergy plants at fertile, arable lands increasingly results in new land use conflicts with food production and cannot be considered as sustainable, therefore. Marginal lands have been frequently considered as potential alternative for producing bioenergy from biomass. However…

Land use has important consequences for the environment, public health, economic productivity, inequality and social segregation. Land use policies are often complex and require co-ordination across all levels of government as well as across policy sectors. Not surprisingly, land use decisions can…

When people are forced to leave their homes, they usually also leave behind their means of economic activity. In their new location, they may not be able, or permitted, to work. This has wide-ranging implications. This issue includes 22 articles on the main feature theme of Economies: rights and…

This paper conceptually integrates resilience and nexus approaches, developing a combined framework and indicating how it could effectively be operationalized in cases from mountain and mangrove social‐ecological systems. In doing so, it advances understanding of complex social‐ecological systems…

The report — Mechanized: Transforming Africa’s Agriculture Value Chains—summarizes the findings of a systematic analysis of what countries at the forefront of progress in mechanization have done right. It analyzes which policy decisions were taken and which interventions were implemented to…

Today, the New Climate Economy launches its 2018 report, Unlocking the Inclusive Growth Story of the 21st Century: Accelerating Climate Action in Urgent Times. It demonstrates the benefits of a new low-carbon growth model and outlines how we can urgently accelerate efforts to achieve it. Bold action…

Agroforestry is an integrated land use management that combines a woody component with a lower story agricultural production recognized as one of the most important tools to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Calls on institutional investors to increase their allocation of capital towards the SDGs, and to drive the demand for a diverse set of SDG investments ranging from sovereign bonds to corporate bonds and equity.

North Africa was the birthplace of the Arab uprisings in late 2010. This movement affected all the countries in the region, albeit to varying degrees. And while protestors asked in unison for deep political and economic changes, the various governments in North Africa responded differently to their…

Original Research Article published in the latest Journal of Arid Environments

GLOBALANDS project aims to identify promising existing land use policies and to develop possible governance tools towards a more resource efficient and sustainable global land use.

This volume deals with land degradation, which is occurring in almost all terrestrial biomes and agro-ecologies, in both low and high income countries and is stretching to about 30% of the total global land area.

The challenge to increase food production is greater than ever, as the worlds population is set to increase to a predicted nine billion by 2050 (United Nations, 2008), requiring a 70 to 100% increase in global food production (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2009a; World Bank, 2008). The primary…

This article describes key research questions about the economics of landscape change and reviews the state of research knowledge.

"Ignoring land degradation neutrality (LDN) could be political suicide.” Monique Barbut, the UNCCD Executive Secretary Moreover, she stressed that LDN remains a Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) target – under Goal 15 – and populations will experience real benefits in terms of climate change…

The UN International Labour Organization (ILO) released a report that highlights increasing productivity in rural areas of Latin America and the Caribbean but finds 56 percent of rural workers face lower wages and social protection and prevalence of poverty compared to 27 percent of workers in urban…

The Sixth Global Forum on Gender Statistics discussed ways to improve the collection, production, dissemination and use of data on gender to support progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular SDG 5 (Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls). The UN Statistics…

The links between climate change, economic development and poverty reduction have gained increasing attention over recent years in both the academic and policy literature.

Natural resources such as land, water, timber, minerals, metals and oil are vitally important sources of livelihoods, income and influence for countries and communities around the globe. When natural resources are poorly managed they can contribute to tensions that can escalate into violent conflict…

This report is aimed at readers who seek to build economic evidence in support of the inclusion of actions on agriculture in climate change plans and programmes, particularly at the national level under the umbrella of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the December 2015 Paris Agreement…