Resilience to climate change? Using The EIU’s new Climate Change Resilience Index, this special report looks at the long-term impact of climate change on some of the world's largest economies. A new report from The Economist Intelligence Unit is making some dire predictions about the effects of…

While agricultural systems are a major pillar in global food security, their productivity is currently threatened by many environmental issues triggered by anthropogenic climate change and human activities, such as land degradation. However, the planetary spatial footprint of land degradation…

The Soil Care Network is an interdisciplinary, global community of scholars animated by the love of, fascination with, and dedication to soils.

This report takes stock of key developments since the publishing of the independent report" A New Climate For Peace" commissioned by G7 members. It provides a concise risk horizon scan, and an overview and assessment of key policy developments in 2015 and 2016 that are of relevance for addressing…

Data and information on land are fundamental for enabling smallholder farmers to gain secure access and control over their land, which provides the basis for investing in their operations. This briefing paper outlines the importance and benefits of increasing the availability and accessibility of…

How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and explores the…

The importance of soil is placed under the spotlight in this in-depth analysis by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC)

The explorer.land platform is an online storytelling tool for the presentation of sustainable forest and landscape projects. It is built around an interactive web map which integrates high resolution and up-to-date satellite and drone imagery as well as georeferenced posts and multimedia. It allows…

This report is the first major comparative analysis of usage data for open access (OA) and non-OA scholarly books. Our findings establish that there is a performance benefit from publishing a book OA as they are downloaded seven times more, cited 50% more and mentioned online ten times more. The…

The new report "Land carbon: No substitute for action on fossil fuels" finds that while increasing carbon in land systems is important, Australia is muddying the waters by combining land carbon and fossil fuel reduction policies – which is giving an inaccurate picture of Australia’s progress in…

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…

The detrimental impacts of these processes on land resources, which are widely recognized as environmental problems of global concern become really dramatic in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid regions (drylands), where land degradation is more properly defined as desertification.

Since 2010, human mobility made its way into the global climate change negotiations. In 2015, the Paris Agreement recognized migrants in its preamble and the challenges of displacement. The Protection Agenda of the Nansen Initiative on cross-border displacement as well as the Sendai Framework on…

The world is rapidly urbanizing. How does this affect hunger and malnutrition? IFPRI’s 2017 Global Food Policy Report takes an in-depth look at the challenges and opportunities of urbanization for food security and nutrition.

Access to land is at the heart of rural livelihoods. In sub-Saharan Africa, the pace and scale at which land is changing hands are increasing fast. Understanding these changes in land access is crucial if the systems of land governance, the practices of companies and organisations, and the…

Gender inequalities persist in all areas of social and economic life and across countries. Young women in OECD countries generally obtain more years of schooling than young men, but women are less likely than men to engage in paid work. Gaps widen with age, as motherhood typically has marked…

Environmental protection and human food security co-exist in a critical balance, one that is often difficult to get right. The pressures of population rise, farming intensification, and loss of habitats and species mean that protections afforded under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) are…

Prosperity entails much more than wealth. It reaches beyond the financial into the political, the judicial, the wellbeing, and the character of a nation — it is about creating an environment in which people are able to reach their full potential. A nation is prosperous when it has an inclusive…

The Global Symposium on Soil Erosion (GSER19) will be a high level science-policy meeting, held from 15 – 17 May 2019, at FAO HQ in Rome, Italy. This Symposium is jointly organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Global Soil Partnership (GSP), the Intergovernmental Technical…

Despite turning out better than expected, growth in 2020 is estimated to be the worst on record, at –1.9 percent, leading to a large increase in poverty. In 2021, the region’s economy is expected to resume expansion at 3.4 percent, weaker than the 6 percent for the rest of the world, amid a…

Rangelands are places of important biodiversity and ecosystem services that occupy up to half of all land and up to three quarters of the world’s drylands, providing benefits to local communities, to economies and to global society. Desertification, or land degradation in the drylands, significantly…