While academics have largely shifted their focus from ‘women in development’ to addressing women and men as
part of broader ‘gendered’ social relations, this shift is yet to be fully translated into development practice. This
requires development practitioners to be sensitive to local contexts and to the various inequalities they contain
with regards to land rights and land use (based on class, gender, age, migration status etc.).

The economic and social organization of rural societies has a high level of gender differentiation in terms of rights, activities
and responsibilities. This interacts with other aspects of social stratification based on factors such as ethnicity, statutory groups, religion and level of wealth. Consequently, women do not represent a homogeneous category, but a group whose interests are sometimes conflicting and which are equally subject to power relations. Some observations:

The importance of land manifests in various components of the everyday lives of people insocieties: cultural heritage, livelihood, the environment, economy, and community, among manyothers. Land is a factor of development. It is the most influential determinant of developmentbecause women, youths, and men (and households) depend on it for their livelihoods and formaintaining their living conditions in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas.

Up to 2.5 billion people depend on indigenous and community lands, which make up over 50 percent of the land on the planet; they legally own just one-fifth. The remaining land remains unprotected and vulnerable to land grabs from more powerful entities like governments and corporations. There is growing evidence of the vital role played by full legal ownership of land by indigenous peoples and local communities in preserving cultural diversity and in combating poverty and hunger, political instability and climate change.

This UNCCD-SPI technical report provides well-established scientific evidence for understanding the strong linkages between land use and drought and how management of both is connected through water use. It introduces a new concept of Drought-smart land management (D-SLM) and organizes relevant approaches and practices in fourteen groups across four major classes of land use.

This infographic builds on the Regional Dialogue on Women’s Inclusion in Landscape Management,
organized by WOCAN in partnership with RECOFTC and The Forests Dialogue, 7-9 Oct. 2014, Thailand

The Mekong region – Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam – is in the midst of profound social and environmental change. Despite rapid urbanization, the region remains predominantly rural. More than 60 per cent of its population live in rural areas, and the vast majority of these people are engaged in agriculture. Due to rapid growth of its agricultural sector, the Mekong region has become a global centre of production and trade for commodities such as rubber, rice, cassava, wood, sugar cane, and palm oil.

This report suggests that a new and explicit goal of sustainable development to be agreed as a result of Rio+20 should be the reduction of the rate of land degradation to achieve land degradation neutrality, which we refer to as “Zero Net Land Degradation” or ZNLD.

Land restoration has tremendous potential to help the world limit climate change and achieve its aims for sustainable development. In its latest study, the International Resource Panel finds positive spin-offs to support all 17 Sustainable Development Goals agreed to by the world’s nations as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. While other reports have focused on a subset of the SDGs, this report has intentionally considered all of them, and has done so by inviting a large number of diverse authors to participate in the process.

Dryland mountains are among the least-known environments in the world, and certainly one of the most overlooked by decision- and policy-makers. Dryland mountains have an outstanding strategic value. They act as water towers for surrounding dry lowland areas, as shown by the examples of the Rocky Mountains of North America, the Central Andes, the mountains of the Mediterranean Basin, the Sahara and Sub-Saharan Africa, West Asia, and Central Asia

The Restoration Opportunities Optimization Tool (ROOT) was developed out of a need to more efficiently and effectively communicate the importance of ecosystem services to decision makers.

IUCN’s collective experience working to increase ecological productivity and improve human well-being through forest landscape restoration (FLR) demonstrated that although stakeholders were interested in generating ecosystem services from proposed restoration activities, the many services and their interactions with each other were often too complicated to communicate clearly.

Although there is global consensus that women’s land rights are fundamental for the realization of food security and rural development, accurate and reliable statistics to monitor the attainment and realisation of these rights are still lacking. Indeed, the lack of clear and accurate statistics on landownership and land management– that are disaggregated by sex - is problematic for developing clear policy responses to, and for monitoring of, inequalities faced by women and men in rural areas.