The eradication of hunger and poverty largely depend on how people, communities and others gain access to land. The livelihoods of many, particularly the rural poor including women, are based on secure and equitable access to and control over land and other natural resources. Land is a source of food and shelter; the basis for social, cultural and religious practices; and a central factor in economic growth.

The five components of the toolkit - Land, Extractive Industries, Renewable Resources, Strengthening Capacity & Resource-Rich Economies - all aim to demonstrate how well-managed natural resources can prevent conflict or contribute to peace and sustainable development in war-torn nations. The linkages between natural resources and violent conflict are a critical challenge faced by many countries today.

The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets presents commodity market issues in an objective and accessible way to policy-makers, commodity market observers and stakeholders interested in agricultural commodity market developments and their impacts on countries at different levels of economic development.

In recent years, there has been growing attention and effort towards securing the formal, legal recognition of land rights for Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Communities and Indigenous Peoples are estimated to hold as much as 65 percent of the world’s land area under customary systems, yet many governments formally recognize their rights to only a fraction of those lands. This gap—between what is held by communities and what is recognized by governments—is a major driver of conflict, disrupted investments, environmental degradation, climate change, and cultural extinction.

This practitioner’s guide explains how to promote gender-responsive forest tenure reform in community-based forest regimes. It is aimed at those taking up this challenge in developing countries. There is no one single approach to reforming forest tenure practices for achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment. Rather, it involves taking advantage of opportunities that emerge in various institutional arenas such as policy and law-making and implementation, government administration, customary or community-based tenure governance, or forest restoration at the landscape scale.

A large number of countries recognize the role of forests in carbon sequestration and committed in their NDCs to protect forests, reduce deforestation rates, and restore forestlands. Few NDCs, however, make any specific commitments to how their forests will be protected or restored on degraded land. It is still unclear if governments will protect forests by expanding the protected estate, improving the management of existing national parks, helping communities safeguard the forests on their lands, or by taking other measures.

Women’s economic empowerment is essential in promoting equality between women and men and is a precondition for sustainable development.

Land is the foundation of our life; stopping the critical loss of land and turning this trend around is critical for the future prosperity and security of humankind. The Sustainable Development Goal 15 “Life on land” commits world leaders to work together to achieve land degradation neutrality (LDN) for safeguarding life on land. One of the objectives that comprises LDN is to reinforce responsible governance of land tenure.

According to the U.N. and World Bank, 40 percent of the global population is affected by water scarcity, and by 2030, up to 700 million people could be displaced as a result.
Having spent his youth spent living through a series of droughts and famine, Ibrahim Thiaw is not only a face to these numbers but also on a mission, as Executive Secretary of the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), to ensure that even if the statistics are forgotten, the lands and lives they involve are not.

Indigenous and community lands, crucial for rural livelihoods, are typically held under informal customary arrangements. This can leave the land vulnerable to outside commercial interests, so communities may seek to formalize their land rights in a government registry and obtain an official land document.

Between 1981 and 2003, nearly a quarter of global land got degraded, says UNCCD Executive Secretary Ibrahim Thiaw.

Rangelands cover a surface area of more than 2 million hectares in Cameroon. Despite their relatively unpredictable climate and unproductive nature they provide a wide variety of goods and services including forage for livestock, habitat for wildlife, water and minerals, woody products, recreational services, nature conservation as well as acting as carbon sinks. Rangelands in Cameroon are predominantly grassland savanna with three types distinguishable: the Guinean savanna, Sudan savanna (also known as ‘derived montane grasslands’), and the Sahel savanna.