Land-use planning (LUP), an instrument of land governance, is often employed to protect land and humans against natural and human-induced hazards, strengthen the resilience of land systems, and secure their sustainability. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) underlines the critical role of appropriate local action to address the global threat of land degradation and desertification (LDD) and calls for the use of local and regional LUP to combat LDD and achieve land degradation neutrality. The paper explores the challenges of putting this call into practice.

Shortly after the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was founded in 1945, the organization had started to support member countries addressing structural problems in agriculture with land fragmentation and small holding and farm sizes through the development of land consolidation instruments (Binns, 1950). During the 1950s and 1960s, FAO provided technical assistance to the development of land consolidation in member countries in Europe such as Turkey, Greece, Spain and Cyprus, but also in the Near East and Asia (Meliczek, 1973).

The Afghanistan land sector is plagued by a multitude of problems linked to weak governance, corruption and lack of capacity. There are competing claims to land, widespread conflicts, resultant landlessness and poverty. Other issues are limited availability of undisputed farmland, difficulties in accessing grazing lands and many disputes over pasture lands. These issues are exacerbated by conflicting land ownership systems, insecure land tenure and registration, weak land governance environment and uncertain and incomplete legal frameworks.

Secure access to land and secure use of land, for housing-, agricultural- and other purposes is one of the cornerstones of making sustainable, positive development possible. As ZOA provides relief, hope and recovery to people impacted by conflicts and disasters, addressing land rights issues will need to be a permanent point of attention in our work.

Teaser for ZOA's new land rights guidelines developed with input from many of our peers and partners, based on the work done by many others in the field and supported by the Knowledge Management Fund (KMF).

This Guidebook for Business Enterprise includes instructions and tailorable tools for business professionals seeking to design and implement an agricultural investment in a socially responsible manner that recognises and protects community land rights. It provides support for implementing best practices related to understanding and respecting land rights in the context of an investment.

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These learning modules provide training material for Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ advocates on how to operationalise benefit-sharing and concluding benefit-sharing agreements. There are three modules covering these broad issues in relation to natural resources, traditional knowledge and farmers' rights.

This paper provides details of soil and water conservation (SWC) investments in Ethiopia over the past 20 years. It presents SWC practices and estimates the level of SWC investments in different regions. The paper focuses on four principal agricultural regions: Amhara, Oromia, SNNPR and Tigray. Primary and secondary data were collected for the analysis, and consultations were conducted at regional levels. Primary data on diverse SWC practices, their numbers and areal extent were obtained from the archives of regional Bureaus of Agriculture (BoAs).

The current context in the Sahel-Saharan Band is clearly dominated by recurrent issues of desertification, land degradation and climate change.

The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT) set out internationally-accepted principles and standards for responsible practices, providing a framework for governments, the private sector and civil society to use when developing policies and programmes for improving food security.

Climate change affects poor and marginalized communities first and hardest. Particularly in cities, a lack of access to basic services, a long history of unsustainable urban development, and political exclusion render the urban poor one of the most vulnerable groups to climate induced natural hazards and disasters. Yet strategies focused on reducing these people’s vulnerability to climate change often overlook crucial differences in their needs and situations.

This is a brief description of a course organized by the Regional Government of San Martín in Peru and ProTierras Comunales and implemented in coordination with the regional and local indigenous organisations in 2018.  ProTierras Comunales is part of the Global Project “Responsible Land Policy”, implemented since late 2015 by German development cooperation in six countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to promote the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VGGT, 2012).