Food security entails having sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet dietary needs. The need to optimise nitrogen (N) use for nutrition security while minimising environmental risks in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is overdue. Challenges related to managing N use in SSA can be associated with both insufficient use and excessive loss, and thus the continent must address the ‘too little’ and ‘too much’ paradox. Too little N is used in food production (80% of countries have N deficiencies), which has led to chronic food insecurity and malnutrition.

Monitoring the changes in forest-cover and understanding the dynamics of the forest is becoming increasingly important for the sustainable management of forest ecosystems. This paper uses temporal MODIS Vegetation Continuous Field (MODIS-VCF) to monitor the tree cover change in the Indian region over a period of 6 years (2000–2005). Pixel-based linear regression model is developed to identify rate of deforestation and fragmentation at landscape level. The regression parameters viz., slope, offset and variance are used to identify threshold between forest and non-forest classes.

Global sustainability strategies require assessing whether countries’ development trajectories are sustainable over time. However, sustainability assessments are limited because losses of natural capital and its ecosystem services through deforestation have not been comprehensively incorporated into national accounts. We update the national accounts of 80 nations that underwent tropical deforestation from 2000 to 2012 and evaluate their development trajectories using weak and strong sustainability criteria.

The dependence of smallholder farmers on forest resources for their sustenance and livelihoods is a major driver of deforestation and degradation of forest resources in tropical countries. Understanding the socio-economic drivers that aggravate the extraction and overexploitation of forest products is vital for designing effective forest conservation and restoration measures. This particularly holds with regard to the importance of two fundamentally opposing motivations of smallholder forest exploitation, which we label “wood extraction for need” vs. “wood extraction for greed”.

Land provides a host of ecosystem services, of which the provisioning services are often considered paramount. As the demand for agricultural products multiplies, other ecosystem services are being degraded or lost entirely. Finding a sustainable trade-off between food production and one or more of other ecosystem services, given the variety of stakeholders, is a matter of optimizing land use in a dynamic and complex socio-ecological system. Land degradation reduces our options to meet both food demands and environmental needs.

Wetlands are important providers of ecosystem services and key regulators of climate change. They positively contribute to global warming through their greenhouse gas emissions, and negatively through the accumulation of organic material in histosols, particularly in peatlands. Our understanding of wetlands’ services is currently constrained by limited knowledge on their distribution, extent, volume, interannual flood variability and disturbance levels.

The Tana River is one of Kenya’s most important rivers. It is the principal water source for Nairobi, the capital city, providing water for hydroelectric power generation and irrigation. Several of the flagship projects laid out in Vision 2030 - the blueprint that guides Kenya’s national development – are located in the basin. This report presents the findings of a study to determine the possible impacts of climate change on the hydrology of the basin.

Agricultural productivity and farm household welfare in areas of severe land degradation can be improved through ecosystem-based interventions. Decisions on the possible types of practices and investments can be informed using evidence of potential benefits. Using farm household data together with a farm level stochastic simulation model provides an initial quantification of farm income and nutrition outcomes that can be generated over a five year period from manure and compost based organic amendment of crop lands. Simulated results show positive income and nutrition impacts.

Controlled grazing management is considered as an effective strategy to enhance soil carbon sequestration, but empirical evidences are scarce. Particularly, the role of livestock exclusion related to soil carbon sequestration is not well understood in arid and semiarid savannas of Africa. We investigated the effectiveness of long-term (14–36 years old) exclosures in enhancing soil carbon in the semiarid savanna, southern Ethiopia.