Land has a value for each and every one of us. Fertile soil provides us with plant life, vegetables, grains, and fibres. Forests supply us with timber and firewood. We benefit from fresh water, food, and many other ecosystem services that land provides us with. Land is also emotionally valuable to people as well, perhaps through associating treasured memories such as playing on it as a child. In any case, all societies and people assign historical and cultural value to their landscapes, their nature, and all natural phenomena associated with land. However, lands are in danger.

The 2019 edition of the Land for Life Award puts the spotlight on individuals and organizations that made outstanding contributions to achieve land degradation neutrality on a large scale, with long-term changes and dedicated actions for 25 years or longer. Those remarkable projects involve local people, communities and the society, raising the level of their ambition. Meanwhile, recent assessments remind us that two billion hectares of land are now degraded worldwide. This represents an area larger than the territory of the Russian Federation, the biggest country in the world.

Many Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have committed to establishing national voluntary LDN targets. By establishing LDN targets, SIDS have defined their ambitions and key priorities to address land degradation. The LDN target setting process allowed national stakeholders to systematically analyze the causes and effects of land degradation and to come up with evidence-based decisions on what is desirable and feasible to avoid, reduce or reverse land degradation by 2030.

Land Degradation Neutrality is one of the Sustainable Development Goal targets, requiring on-going degradation to be balanced by restoration and sustainable land management. However, restoration and efforts to prevent degradation have often failed to deliver expected benefits, despite enormous investments. Better acknowledging the close relationships between climate, land management and non-linear ecosystem dynamics can help restoration activities to meet their intended goals, while supporting climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Pressing issues such as water and food security, health, peace, and poverty are deeply linked to land degradation. The authors use China’s major land restoration programs as a case offering perspective on the existing problems in China’s major policies for improving degraded land and maintaining land resources in three dimensions.

Land is the foundation for all life on Earth. How land is used and managed influences nature, food, water, energy, climate, and even our health. Today, the pressures on land and the wealth of resources it provides are greater than at any other time in human history.

Land provides crucial ecosystem services for human existence and human well-being, including provisioning, regulating, supporting and cultural services. Those services provide among others the production of fresh air, food, feed, fuel and fibre. They regulate the risks of natural hazards and climate change, offer cultural and spiritual values to our society, and support key ecological functions such as nutrient and water cycling, filtering and buffering, and are central to economic vitality.

The SWSR is a reference document on the status of global soil resources that provides regional assessments of soil change. The information is based on peer-reviewed scientific literature, complemented with expert knowledge and project outputs. It provides a description and a ranking of ten major soil threats that endanger ecosystem functions, goods and services globally and in each region separately. Additionally, it describes direct and indirect pressures on soils and ways and means to combat s oil degradation.

Land degradation remains a serious threat to livelihoods in Eastern Africa. The total population of sub-Saharan Africa is currently estimated at 750 million people, but it is projected to exceed the one billion mark by 2020. The demand for food is putting increasing pressure on the natural resource base. The current debate on the land degradation situation in Eastern Africa is short of consensus because of misunderstanding misinterpretation and discrepancies in the available information.

At the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Summit on 25-26 September 2015, world leaders adopted the global framework ‘Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’, which included 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets. The 2030 Agenda builds on the Millennium Development Goals and aims to eradicate poverty, leaving no one behind, and to shift the world on to a sustainable and resilient path.

In West Africa, many countries are adversely affected by the effects of desertification, land degradation and drought(DLDD), with climate change also increasingly making an impact on local livelihoods. The most visible consequences are a loss of soil fertility and a reduction in agricultural productivity, which can lead to food and social crises and, consequently, to increased poverty. Furthermore, farmers are often forced to exploit the land to its maximum capacity in order to obtain good yields and to avoid the risk of famine.

As of 2017, SGP has awarded over 3,800 small grants to land degradation projects in over 120 countries, many of which are in regions with extreme levels of poverty and food insecurity across Africa and Latin America. Africa, in particular, is experiencing the highest population growth of the developing world, while being exposed and vulnerable to the rising impact from climate change.