With current rates of land degradation reaching ten to twelve million ha per year, there is an urgent need to scale up and out successful, profitable and resource-efficient sustainable land management practices to maintain the health and resilience of the land that humans depend on. As much as 500 million out of two billion ha of degraded land, mainly in developing countries, have restoration potential, offering an immediate target for restoration and rehabilitation initiatives.1 In the past, piecemeal approaches to achieving sustainable land management have had limited impact.

Restoration of degraded landscapes through the implementation of soil and water conservation practices is considered a viable option to increase agricultural production by enhancing ecosystems. However, in the humid Ethiopian highlands, little information is available on the impact of conservation practices despite wide scale implementation. The objective of this research was to document the effect of conservation practices on discharge and sediment concentration and load in watersheds that have different soil depths and topography.

This is the english version of the flyer done for the workshop "Systems Tool-aided Participatory Development of Sustainable Land Management Scenarios: 2nd Workshop". This activity is under the output activity "User-friendly, interoperable online tool, containing country-specific, accessible knowledge base of standardized, geo-referenced SLM, to enable stakeholders to query SLM options in different context" of the GIZ funded project 'Impact evaluation of SLM options to achieve land degradation neutrality'.

Land degradation is a major environmental problem in Ethiopia posing serious threats to agricultural productivity and livelihoods. The interactions of numerous socio-economic, demographic, natural, and institutional factors constitute the underlying causes of soil degradation in Ethiopia. However, there exist evidence gaps on the contextual factors that hinder investments on soil conservation among smallholders.

Jordan's rangelands, the so called Badia, home of the Bedouins, are threatened through a combination of over-exploitation of the ecosystem services and a changing climate towards drier seasons and highly erratic rainfalls. In the recent decades, the once productive grazing lands transformed into sparsely vegetated and crusted desert grounds not capable of retaining the sporadic rainwater within the landscape - and consequential surface runoff inevitably accelerates soil erosion and gullying.

Powerpoint presentation by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) about the ten key steps for "ELMO".

• Without understanding what (and why) farmers need and are able to carry out, SLM uptake is likely to remain very limited. 
• ELMO is participatory tool to assessing farmers’ land management decision preferences & trade-offs.
• Is mainly concerned with identifying the social and economic drivers of land management decisions & understanding farmers’ preferences for different SLM practices.
• Intention is to better understand farmers’ own perceptions and explanations of the benefits, costs, advantages, disadvantages & tradeoffs associated with different la

The most important international a world-level document defining the policy of protecting land and soil is the UN Convention «On combating desertification/land degradation in countries experiencing drought and/or desertification». Latvia acceded to this Convention in 2002, undertaking to implement it requirements. With the introduction of the Convention, it is necessary to develop a national action program for restriction of land degradation, as well as develop new legislation and a long-term policy.

In the last decade, there have been a number of global/regional targets and initiatives to halt and reverse land degradation and restore degraded land. Starting in 2010, these include the CBD’s Aichi Biodiversity Targets, one of which aims to restore at least 15% of degraded ecosystems; the Bonn Challenge and its regional initiatives to restore more than 150 million hectares; and most recently the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The pressure on land is growing in many regions of the world, due to the increasing demand for arable crops, meat and dairy products, bio-energy and timber, and is exacerbated by land degradation and climate change. This policy report provides scenario projections for the UNCCD Global Land Outlook, exploring future changes to the use and condition of land and the resulting impacts on food, water, climate change and biodiversity.

Becoming land degradation neutral is not simply about restoring degraded lands. It is about self interest making sure the land can still provide food and fresh water for us, our children, and to the third and fourth generations. It is about giving every child, from Mongolia to Afghanistan and from Ethiopia to China, the fighting chance for a better life. If this all sounds too good to be true, read this book.