The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment projects that the intensification of freshwater scarcity in combination with continuous water extraction from delicate dryland ecosystems is likely to exacerbate desertification, thus leading to a downward spiral of ecological deterioration and a precarious depreciation of livelihoods in many developing regions. This in turn can push people to migrate, which can have far reaching implications affecting local, regional, and even global political and economic stability.

Desertification is nowhere more serious than in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), stretching from Pakistan in the east to Morocco in the west, and from Ethiopia and Sudan in the south to Turkey in the north. Yet, many MENA countries have successfully rehabilitated large areas. Concerted efforts can indeed stop and even reverse desertification, though their long-term success will depend on how well they manage their limited water resources.

Hardest hit by desertification is Sub-Saharan Africa, where poverty is more widespread, preparedness for catastrophe is lower, and means for adequately coping with the phenomenon are very weak; two thirds of the arable land will be lost by 2025.The subcontinent needs improved integrated initiatives on local, national und multinational level for a sustainable natural resources management. Environmental Information systems can increase awareness and throw light on decision making processes on the complexity of desertification badly needed by most African countries.

Despite ambitious desertification control programmes, the area of desertified land has expanded continuously since the establishment of the People's Republic of China, with increasingly serious impacts on important industrial and settlement areas. Only in the new millennium is a reversal of this trend in sight.

Morocco is one of the African countries in which implementation of the UNCCD has progressed the furthest. In the Moroccan National Action Programme, integrated rural development, poverty reduction, drought mitigation and conservation of natural resources are the four cornerstones of effective desertification control.The country has succeeded in building up strong partnerships with most of its bilateral and multilateral development partners.

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) is one of the three conventions agreed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. But from the very outset it has led a marginal existence, because industrialized countries feel far less concerned with desertification than developing countries. Moreover, the Convention?s targets are not binding and are open to a variety of interpretations by the Parties.The conflicting interests of environmental and
development policy are weakening its position further.

In the ten years since it came into being, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has had little or no effect on the further encroachment of deserts. More than 80 countries have submitted National Action Programmes to combat desertification, but they appear to lack the financial and political commitment to implement them. What are the causes behind the UNCCD's weakness? How can the Convention be incorporated more effectively and efficiently into the architecture of international development?

The tsunami disaster on 26 December 2004 claimed more than 200,000 lives. It triggered an unprecedented outpouring of reconstruction assistance from both private and public donors.The prompt provision of emergency relief averted the threat of epidemics and prevented major movements of refugees out of the affected regions. However,many of the reconstruction measures failed due to poor coordination between the actors involved and the lack of expertise underlying some of the interventions.The reconstruction effort was also very slow to get off the ground.

2005 was a year of natural disasters.The impacts of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Hurricanes Katrina and Stan, and the Pakistan earthquake prompted calls for better disaster prevention and preparedness systems. Nature's power renders us impotent, but human actions and omissions are clearly worsening the impacts of disasters in some cases.This is where risk reducing measures must lock in, as the last fifteen years of international disaster risk management show.

The devastating tsunami has shown in a tragic way the great vulnerability and exposed nature of coastal communities to natural calamities. It also has drawn global attention to the poor living conditions of fishing communities and the many threats to the sustainable use of fishery resources and coastal ecosystems. Post-tsunami rehabilitation offers the opportunity to build back better, improve and make more secure the lives of disadvantaged sections of the population and set fisheries and coastal resource use on a sustainable footing.

Post-tsunami reconstruction has been under way in the Indonesian province of Aceh for nearly two years. In the authors' view, swift coordination of goals and instruments has enabled positive synergies to be created between short-term development-oriented emergency aid and long-term recovery. In this way, and by means of a conflict-sensitive approach, the aim is to guarantee the sustainability of the reconstruction effort.

People-centred early warning systems empower communities to prepare for and confront the power of natural hazards. However, the efficiency of such systems is to be measured in terms of lives saved and reduction in losses, which is directly related to the execution of an anticipated response by the people and institutions once a warning is issued.This paper addresses traditional views on early warning systems, and what it takes to transform them into efficient, people-centred systems.