The people of the Sahel — that huge region stretching along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert — are still striving to recover from the fallout of the terrible droughts that have afflicted the area since 1973. Drought has shattered the momentum of socioeconomic development in Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal. According to researchers with Burkino Faso’s Institut de l’environnement et de recherches agricoles, “Rural men and women are now struggling to survive in a land that is exhausted, denuded, desiccated, and swept away by the wind and water.”

Successive surveys related to land degradation in India, reveal that despite several announcements and policy changes, the desertification and degradation of land and forest continues to rise. It has posed serious threats to environment, biodiversity, local economy and food security. Globally and nationally, India has been very vocal to address this issue.

Land is very important natural resource to the human being as it provides the basis for more than 95% of human food. On the broader context, land has many other functions, e.g. provision of biological habitats and physical and connective space; regulation of hydrology and climate; storage of minerals, raw materials and historical/pre-historical records; and as a buffer to control waste and pollution. Expanding human requirements and economic activities are placing ever increasing pressures on land resources, creating competition and conflicts and resulting in suboptimal use of land.

David Barrio - Oficial de Asuntos Económicos de la División de Desarrollo Sostenible y Asentamientos Humanos de la Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL) habla sobre el ODS 15. La desertificación y la deforestación son dos grandes retos para el desarrollo sostenible de la región, pues la pérdida o daño a los recursos naturales supone graves consecuencias ambientales y económicas.

En el presente documento se analizan los principales temas relacionados con el desarrollo agropecuario y rural, y la situación del medio ambiente y los recursos naturales de América Latina y el Caribe en el período 1990 a 2005. El documento está estructurado en torno a cinco ejes temáticos: i) desarrollo productivo; ii) deforestación; iii) degradación y desertificación; iv) factores sociales y demográficos, pobreza, ingreso y empleo, y cambios poblacionales, y v) cambio climático y desastres naturales.

List of Participant to the stakeholder meeting held in Tunis and aimed at establishing a processes for sustainable collective rangeland management and governance

Land degradation and desertification are among the biggest environmental challenges of our time. In the last 40 years, we lost nearly a third of the world’s arable farmland due to erosion, just as the number of people to be fed from it almost doubled. That’s why the UN General Assembly declared 2015 as the International Year of Soils. And the good news is that this new report shows that while Africa remains the most severely a«ected region, the benefit of taking action across the continent outweighs the cost of implementing it: not just by a little, but by a factor of seven.

As the world’s population continues to rise, there is
an ever increasing demand for our land to produce
a diverse range of products such as food, timber,
and fuel. Our growing need for these goods is
leading to higher levels of competition between
different land uses and, as a result, land users. Not
only is the quantity of land available for production
under current technical and economic conditions
limited, but there is also growing evidence that the
quality of our land is degrading (Safriel, U. N. 2007;

Jordanian rangelands are a source of valued livestock produce, carbon storage, biodiversity, and medicinal plants. They also serve as watersheds that receive rainfall, yield surface water, and replenish groundwater throughout the area east and south of the western Jordan highlands. Appropriate land management, which is currently lacking, can protect and maximize these services for society. With the acceleration of desertification, land degradation and drought during the twenty-first century in the arid and semi-arid regions of Jordan, these services are becoming jeopardized.

The Kelka forest in the Mopti region of Mali is important for the provision of ecosystem services like carbon sequestration and maintenance of the hydrological cycle. The Kelka forest area occupies more than 300, 000 hectares with 15
villages within and around its boundaries. The forest resources and soil fertility of the forest are in continuous decline due to a combination of climatic and human induced factors. For example, the availability of firewood has halved

Soil erosion and deposition values were estimated using pixel based landscape information and the Unit Stream Power Erosion Deposition (USPED) model, which works with the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) parameters. The USPED model was adapted to Ethiopian conditions based on evidence from the Soil Conservation Research Programme, and calibrated and validated using data from former research stations as well as the Abbay (Blue Nile) Basin. Additionally, some of the USLE parameters were reduced in order to achieve a satisfactory approximation of sediment loss for the Abbay Basin.

Context: Recent conceptual developments in ecosystem services research have revealed the need to elucidate the complex and unintended relationships between humans and the environment if we are to better understand and manage ecosystem services in practice.

Objectives: This study aimed to develop a model that spatially represents a complex human–environment (H–E) system consisting of heterogeneous social–ecological components and feedback mechanisms at multiple scales, in order to assess multi-dimensional (spatial, temporal, and social) trade-offs in ecosystem services.