Meeting Name: FAO Regional Conference for Europe (ERC)
Meeting symbol/code: ERC/16/8
Session: Sess. 30

The development of agricultural technologies and a better appreciation of the existing but under-utilised knowledge of resource management will be crucial in meeting the ecological needs and in achieving the anticipated food demands of the growing population in the future. The greatest challenge for the coming decades lies in the fact that the production environments are unstable and degrading. Land degradation is proceeding so fast that unless policies and approaches change, many countries will not be able to achieve sustainable agriculture in the foreseeable future.

Forest loss contributes to one-sixth of annual greenhouse gas emissions, making it a major contributor to climate change. Experience shows that approaches to reducing deforestation and forest degradation and strengthening forest governance – such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) – can be far more effective in countering forest loss if they are jointly implemented. To date, however, few countries have capitalized on the synergies between these processes.

Meeting Name: Committee on Forestry
Meeting symbol/code: COFO/2014/REP

text of speech form participants from Asia and the Pacific.

text of speech

Meeting Name: Committee on Forestry
Meeting symbol/code: COFO/2014/REP

Forests and woody vegetation cover a total surface area of 1.3 million ha in 2015 (FAO 2015) that represents 8% of the country surface area. It includes 1 million ha of forests and 0.3 Million ha of shrubs and other woody area. The forest area has increased from 643,000 ha in 1990 to 1,041,000 ha in 2015 ((FAO 2015) that corresponds to an increase by 62% in the last twenty five years or an annual increase of 1.9%.

This paper represents part of an area of work in support of enhancing access to land and forest resources in support of rural livelihoods in Mongolia. . This synthesis report draws on field studies undertaken recently in five rural areas of Mongolia, covering all ecological zones from montane and northern taiga forest to arid forest in the Gobi. Our findings document and explain, with case studies and documentation from participatory analysis, the downward cycle of resource depletion and descend into poverty that is in action.

The WOCAT-LADA-DESIRE mapping tool is based on the original WOCAT mapping questionnaire (WOCAT, 2007). It has been expanded to pay more attention to issues such as biological and water degradation, it also places more emphasis on direct and socio-economic causes of these phenomena, including their impacts on ecosystem services. It evaluates what type of land degradation is actually happening where and why and what is being done about it in terms of sustainable land management (SLM) in the form of a questionnaire.

Meeting Name: Committee on Forestry
Meeting symbol/code: COFO/2014/REP