Efforts to establish Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) as a global objective in the fight against land degradation culminated in 2015 when LDN became part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (target 15.3). Following swiftly, the twelfth session Conference of the Parties (COP 12) to the…

The Green Climate Fund has approved US$1,093.5 million in funding for mitigation and adaptation projects in its first board meeting of 2018. A major global insurance company has committed to divest €2 billion from coal and invest €3.5 billion in the green economy. Several renewable energy and energy…

At the dawn of the 2020s, building fairer and more inclusive economies must be the goal of global, national and industry leaders. To get there, instilling gender parity across education, health, politics and across all forms of economic participation will be critical.

The UN World Data Forum called for proposals around the six thematic areas of its next meeting in October 2018, including on the use of non-traditional sources of data. Other recent meetings on data considered the need to balance privacy and security concerns with openness.

Long on the margins of both scholarly and policy concerns, the countries of the West African Sahel have recently attracted world attention, primarily as a key battleground in the global 'war on terror'. This book moves beyond this narrow focus, providing a multidimensional and interdisciplinary…

Cooperating with the Global Donor Working Group on Land – comprising bilateral and multilateral donors as well as development agencies – USAID led a data collection and visualisation project that gathered information from around the globe.

Reported potentials for sequestration of carbon in soils of agricultural lands are overly optimistic because they assume that all degraded cropland and grassland can be subjected to best management practices. Two approaches for estimating this potential are presented.

Levels of carbon dioxide (C02) surged at “record-breaking speed” to new highs in 2016, the United Nations weather agency announced on Monday. Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), issued the warning in Geneva, at the launch of the organization's Greenhouse…

The eighth edition of UNEP's Emissions Gap Report, released ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference in in Bonn next month, warns that as things stand, even full implementation of current national pledges makes a temperature rise of at least 3 degrees Celsius by 2100 very likely.

Ecosystems are essential to human life, livelihoods and wellbeing. Many national policies and international agreements include goals to protect ecosystem services. A new guide – commissioned by the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme and written by Professor James Bullock of…

The Security Council today adopted a presidential statement that welcomed positive developments in several West African countries, but expressed its serious concern over the challenging security situation in the region and the Sahel.

The Expert Review of the First Order Draft of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Climate Change and Land (SRCCL) will take place from 11 June to 5 August 2018. Expert Reviewers can register at https://www.ipcc.ch/apps/comments/srccl/fod/ until 29 July 2018.

The Science-Policy Interface (SPI) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) wishes to invite you to participate in a survey on the potential contribution of Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) to enhancing the well-being and livelihoods of people as well as the state of the…

Women and men have unequal opportunities to address land degradation. While adoption of Sustainable Development Goal target 15.3 leads the world to ‘strive towards land degradation neutrality (LDN)’ by 2030, gender concerns are sparsely considered in LDN programming to date.

As a partner to the Convention since 2011, IUCN supports progress towards policies and programmes that deliver Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) through the application of nature-based solutions (NbS) – actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore ecosystems to address societal challenges.

Africa's Great Green Wall initiative is an ambitious effort to promote large-scale land restoration benefiting both people and the environment. The socio-economic impact of large-scale restoration interventions is assessed through household surveys of beneficiary rural communities. This study…