Over the coming decades, global change will have an impact on food and water security in significant and highly uncertain ways, and there are strong indications that developing countries will bear the brunt of the adverse consequences, particularly from climate change. This is largely because poverty levels are high, and developing-country capacity to adapt to global change is weak.

The recent food crisis, combined with the energy crisis and emerging climate change issues, threatens the livelihoods of millions of poor people as well as the economic, ecological, and political situation in many developing countries. On top of these crises, the decades of shrinking global investment in agricultural research are leading to slower growth in agricultural productivity. Progress in achieving development goals-such as cutting hunger and poverty in half by 2015-has been delayed significantly.

Numerous studies indicate that agricultural production is sensitive to climate variability, and lack of infrastructure in developing countries increases vulnerability to extreme climate events. In Ethiopia, the historical climate record indicates frequent droughts and floods, which can devastate agricultural production and existing infrastructure. Too much precipitation can flood crops, rot or suffocate roots, and wash out roads, creating similar economic conditions to those resulting from drought.

After 30 years of dynamic growth and substantial poverty reduction in Asia, do agriculture and rural development still have a role to play in that region? The policy briefs in this collection provide abundant evidence that they do. Although the incidence of people living in poverty fell from more than 50 percent in the mid-1970s to 18 percent in 2004, and the incidence of hunger fell to 16 percent, Asia is still home to more than half of the world’s poor, most of whom live in rural areas. Agriculture and rural development are thus still key to reducing poverty and hunger in the region.

Across vast areas of the world, human activity has degraded once fertile and productive land. Deforestation, overgrazing, continuous farming and poor irrigation practices have affected almost 2 billion hectares worldwide, threatening the health and livelihoods of over one billion people. In this edition of New Agriculturist, a collection of articles explores some of the approaches and policies that can help to successfully rehabilitate degraded land.

This report analyses the impact of climate change and land degradation on agriculture and related sectors in Viet Nam. It intends to guide the project based on the design of the Country Strategic Opportunities Paper (COSOP) priorities and to identify supplementary financing for International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) projects from the UNFCCC and other carbon related financing mechanisms. It is explained that the harmful effects of climate change are already being experienced in Viet Nam, and farming communities have begun to respond by:

Following from the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture project, this book examines the relationships and linkages between land use and water management and social systems. Given that agriculture is the largest economic sector in many developing countries, this volume provides innovative ideas for the prevention of land degradation and for improving the sustainability of food production in the developing world.

This sourcebook is intended as a ready reference for practitioners (including World Bank stakeholders and clients in borrowing countries as well as Bank project leaders) seeking information on the state of the art about good land management approaches and innovations for investments, and close monitoring for potential scaling up.

Originally Published In: World Bank, Agriculture and Rural Development Department (2008)

This paper summarises a study undertaken by the Indonesian Forest Climate Alliance (IFCA) to support Indonesian stakeholders to participate in global negotiations. The authors note that the objective of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) payment distribution mechanisms is to support policies and measures that reduce deforestation and degradation through transfer of revenues from international REDD funds or carbon markets to national levels.

Despite the central role of urban areas in socio-economic and geo-political change processes at the local, regional, and global level, as well as in the regional and global biophysical processes, little attention has been paid so far to the complex and dynamic interactions between urban areas and the biophysical and chemical processes of global environmental changes.This book contributes to the knowledge about these interactions.

This report provides an overview of the issues, root causes, and driving forces behind the crimes related to illegal logging. The report includes a comprehensive review of existing initiatives to address the challenges of illegal logging in Southeast Asia. The results are derived mainly from a literature review of various publications, websites, and project documents, but also from personal communication through interviews with people working on the issues of illegal logging in the region.

This African atlas is the first publication to use satellite photos to depict environmental change in each and every African country during the last thirty years. Through an array of satellite images, graphs, maps, and photographs, this Atlas presents a powerful testament to the adverse changes taking place on the African landscape as a result of intensified  natural and human impacts. The atlas is composed of three parts: