Southern Africa is particularly susceptible to climate variability and drought and is increasingly being threatened by desertification processes, degradation of land and water resources and loss of biodiversity. Although rainfed farming is a high-risk enterprise, it is also a way of life and people are committed to making the best of the scarce resources at their disposal. However, droughts tend to reduce production to below the already marginal levels, thus threatening subsistence farming.

Convencidos de la necesidad de incorporar criterios de economía, y controlar la tendencia al consumo y a la explotación de recursos que parece regir nuestra cultura, esta vez reflexionamos en torno a la relación entre arquitectura y medio ambiente en las zonas más secas y calurosas de América.

Convencidos de la necesidad de incorporar criterios de economía, y controlar la tendencia al consumo y a la explotación de recursos que parece regir nuestra cultura, esta vez reflexionamos en torno a la relación entre arquitectura y medio ambiente en las zonas más secas y calurosas de América.

Convencidos de la necesidad de incorporar criterios de economía, y controlar la tendencia al consumo y a la explotación de recursos que parece regir nuestra cultura, esta vez reflexionamos en torno a la relación entre arquitectura y medio ambiente en las zonas más secas y calurosas de América.

Growing processing tomatoes represents one of the most intensive forms of land use in terms of water consumption and nutrient inputs. During the last decade in many European countries and in the United States, Integrated Crop Management guidelines have also been applied for fertilisation and reducing nitrogen inputs to crops has become compulsory. A large number of Best Management Practices, rules and tools have been developed to steer farmers toward sustainable farming practices.

Degradation of the dry semiarid ecosystems in the Mu Us Sandy Land of north central China was explored using high-resolution satellite images from 1978, 1987 and 1996. This study monitored both changes in grassland biomass production and reclamation activities to detect the nature and scale of land degradation since major economic reforms were introduced in 1978. The position of the high-resolution images within the vegetation cycles was inspected from National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) NDVI images at 10-day repetition and seasonal precipitation patterns.

Policy-relevant approaches to assessing land-use change must be based upon a number of transdisciplinary mechanisms. This approach demands a number of skills—social enquiry, modelling and soft complex systems thinking, which are necessary to facilitate an effective cross-disciplinary dialogue. Underpinning the development of these transdisciplinary skills, and the acceptance of systems as complex and subject to multiple interpretations, is the need to move away from the desire to predict and towards enhancing the capacity to adapt.

The rating of biodiversity in arid and semiarid regions on the basis of ecological function and genetic traits of adaptation to severe environmental stresses produces significantly higher values, than that based solely on the commonly applied structural criteria of forms of life and levels of organization.

This report summarizes the findings of the e-mail conference that took place from 9 October to 4 November 2002 and which was organized by the Land Degradation Assessment in Drylands project (LADA). The report contains exchanges of views on data sets and methods that may be used to assess land degradation and a discussion on the biophysical, socio-economic and institutional indicators that explain the root causes, driving forces, status, impact and reponses to land degradation at various scales.

This paper seeks to analyse some of the problems of degradation persisting in the dryland regions with particular reference to Sub-Saharan Africa, and describe the processes that aim to tackle them.It identifies the threat to dryland regions as a complex mixture of degrading soils, continuous exposures to frequent droughts and political and economic marginalisation which is putting poor people living in the drylands at risk.

Remote sensing digital image analysis is applied to monitor desertification processes in central San Luis Province (Argentina), where signs of severe landscape degradation have been observed in the last decades. Two Landsat images, acquired in 1982 and 1992 were used to evaluate the potential of using remote sensing analysis in desertification monitoring. After geometric and radiometric correction of both images, multitemporal comparison techniques were utilized to emphasize areas of greater degradation.