New initiatives like on-farm trials for seed potato production have the potential of benefiting farmers in the arid regions of Rajasthan, India.

The drivers of land degradation are numerous and often context-specific, so addressing them requires targeting not some individual driver in isolation, but through comprehensive and mutually consistent packages of policy

What most people probably don’t know is that Ethiopia has made significant progress during the last 20 years in restoring its degraded lands and improving its food and water security

The new special issue of Food security journal "Feeding More than 9 Billion by 2050: Challenges and Opportunities" Food Security, Volume 7, Issue 2, April 2015 is out...

Two degree Celsius climate change target 'utterly inadequate', expert argues. The findings are timely as the long-term goal to stay below 2°C warming is currently undergoing a 2013-15 Review, the results of which are expected this June and could be adopted in Paris at COP21 in December 2015

Ensuring that the world's food needs are met by 2050 will take a doubling of global food production. To improve agricultural yields on that scale will require a radical rethink of global water-management strategies and policies.

The Atlas is based on an analysis of mapped regional security issues and development objectives to open the necessary dialogue between regional and international organizations, governments, researchers and local stakeholders tracks

Drylands: Desolate, scorched, uninhabitable? Scientists say otherwise

Climate change to shift global spread and quality of agricultural land. Changing temperatures and rainfall patterns contribute to soil erosion and desertification. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region predicted to lose the most land suited to growing crops

Why Europe should care more about environmental degradation triggering insecurity- Hartmut Behrend in " Global Affairs" Volume 1; Issue 1; 2015

Dry soils exacerbated 2006 heatwave in Northern France -The approach outlined in this study may be adapted for other regions and could be useful for predicting future heatwaves

South Africa is presently experiencing one of the worst droughts in 45 years, with the lowest ever rainfall since 1904. In 2015, South Africa received only an average of 403 mm, which is merely 66% of the annual average rainfall. This matter has to be urgently addressed, with food sources under…

We need to move from the ‘food versus fuel’ debate to a ‘food and fuel’ debate. There is no question: food comes first. But biofuels should not be simply seen as a threat or as a magical solution. Like anything else, they can do good or bad. (Graziano da Silva FAO). Radical shift in agriculture…

Case studies from WRI’s Restoration Diagnostic show that land restoration in Latin America and the Caribbean has been done before. Successes from Brazil, Panama and Costa Rica offer lessons on how to get degraded land back into productive use.

A Method for Developing Forest Landscape Restoration Strategies by Rapidly Assessing the status of Key Success Factors

Through these divisional factsheets FAO aims to provide the readers with concise and clear descriptions on the work they carry out

Sustainably managed forests provide essential goods and services and thus play a vital part in sustainable development. Reliable and up-to-date information on the state of forest resources is crucial to support decision-making for investment and policymaking in forestry and sustainable development

This discussion paper examines the importance of water in ensuring food security

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this study authors used the Global Inventory Monitoring and Mapping Studies (GIMMS) dataset to analyze trends in the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) in the world’s semiarid regions, based on 30 years of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-Advanced Very High Resolution…

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.

An expansion of drylands would lead to reduced carbon sequestration and enhanced regional warming, resulting in warming trends over the present drylands that are double those over humid regions.