One of the tools for management of balanced development of rural areas is spatial planning – a kind of activity regarding to organization of use and protection of land at the national, regional and local level. The issues of conservation and restoration of natural resources in rural areas are extremely relevant for Ukraine. Main environmental problems in rural areas are: degradation of agricultural land, loss of biodiversity and pollution of land, overground and underground water. In recent years a new environmental problem has emerged − desertification.

The global economic growth results in the increase of intensity of land use, which is one of the main natural resources. The degradation processes of land and soil occur as a result of economic activities and natural conditions creating degraded territories. Restoration of degraded territories and degradation risk prevention is an important task of each local government for sustainable development of a territory. It is determined by international and national legislation.

Utilised agricultural area is one of the most important natural resources in Latvia, which provides population with food and promotes the operation of agricultural companies. Unfortunately, appropriate land management is a problem for the majority of agricultural land owners, thereby adversely affecting the efficiency of resource use and increasing possibilities for the resource depletion. Constantly new solutions are searched for in Latvia to avert inefficient use of utilised agricultural areas and reduction of land as resource.

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.

This is the english version of the GeOC brochure done for participants 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'.

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.

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.

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.

This is the program of the closure workshop "Sustainable Land Management to Achieve Land Degradation Neutrality: Options-by-Context Approach and Tools" of the project "Impact Evaluation of SLM Options to Achieve Land Degradation Neutrality".