This book is intended as a basic information kit that tells “the story” of desertification, land degradation and drought at the global scale, together with a comprehensive set of graphics. The book indicates trends as they have taken place over the last decades, combining and connecting issues, and present priorities.
We can no longer turn a blind eye to urgent sustainable development challenges such as climate change, the food crisis, disappearing biodiversity and the depletion of natural resources. A way to rise to these challenges is through Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). ESD is a dynamic concept that aims to enable people of all ages and from all walks of life to pursue and benefit from a sustainable future.
The earth’s climate is changing at a rate unprecedented in recent human history and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The impacts and risks associated with this are global, geographically diverse and increasingly being felt across a range of systems and sectors essential for human livelihoods and well-being. The more severe and far-reaching the impacts of climate change are, the greater the loss of species will be, and the greater the deterioration of drylands and the risk of desertification and land degradation around the world will be.
The challenges and threats of water scarcity to dryland populations are set to increase in magnitude and scope. As the world’s population has swollen to well over 6 billion people, some countries have already reached the limits of their water resources. With the existing climate change scenario, almost half the world’s population will be living in areas of high water stress by 2030, including between 75 million and 250 million people in Africa. In addition, water scarcity in some arid and semi-arid places will displace between 24 million and 700 million people (WWDR 2009).
Los desafíos y retos que supone la escasez de agua para las poblaciones de las tierras secas se van a ver incrementados tanto en magnitud como en alcance. Dado que la población mundial es ya superior a los 6.000 millones de personas, algunos países han superado los límites de sus recursos acuíferos. Con el escenario actual de cambio climático, casi la mitad de la población mundial habitará áreas con grandes problemas de agua antes del 2030, lo que incluye a una población de entre 75 y 250 millones de personas en África.
The Africa–Asia Drought Risk Management Peer Assistance Project seeks to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and technical cooperation among drought-prone countries in Africa and Asia and thus to promote best practices in drought risk management (DRM) for development in the two regions. In order to establish a baseline to guide this activity, the United Nations Development Programme Drylands Development Centre (UNDP DDC) undertook a stocktaking exercise between March and June 2011 on drought impacts, causes, trends and solutions in Africa and Asia.
The Physical Development Plan for North Montserrat is a regional policy with a multi-sectoral approach. The timeframe of the Plan is 10 years between 2012 and 2022.
The Policy on Environmental and Social Sustainability describes IFC’s commitments, roles, and responsibilities related to environmental and social sustainability. The Performance Standards are directed towards clients, providing guidance on how to identify risks and impacts, and are designed to help avoid, mitigate, and manage risks and impacts as a way of doing business in a sustainable way, including stakeholder engagement and disclosure obligations of the client in relation to project-level activities.
The agricultural Sector in Cambodia still contributes the dominant quantity to the GDP. It is the most important source of income and rural livelihood for around 80% of the Cambodian population. Cambodia’s rural population faces new challenges like high population growth, embracing market economy and international private investment, nationwide food security and decreasing agricultural production conditions as a result of rapidly changing socio-economic conditions since 1990.
This article discusses two important concepts of food security and food sovereignty in the context of Vietnam’s post-reform economy. It examines Vietnam’s persistent choice of the food security framework, its resulting policies and their implications. The article argues that the choice of food security framework has served to justify the promotion of industrial agriculture and international trade. While this model has led to increased food productivity, it failed to guarantee access to and quality of food, the other two important pillars of the food security framework.
Swidden (also called shifting cultivation) has long been the dominant farming system in Montane Mainland Southeast Asia (MMSEA). Today the ecological bounty of this region is threatened by the expansion of settled agriculture, including the proliferation of rubber plantations. In the current conception of REDD+, landscapes involving swidden qualify almost automatically for replacement by other land-use systems because swiddens are perceived to be degraded and inefficient with regard to carbon sequestration.
In recent years the Lao government has provided many foreign investors with large-scale economic land concessions to develop plantations. These concessions have resulted in significant alterations of landscapes and ecological processes, greatly reduced local access to resources through enclosing common areas, and ultimately leading to massive changes in the livelihoods of large numbers of mainly indigenous peoples living near these concessions.