The climate-smart village approach created enthusiasm and commitment from farmers in seeking solutions to the problems and constraints that they themselves identified. The approach also involved strengthening the capacity of technical staff to use new tools, and to understand and support the new methods, with complementary finance to support the changes.

When the IFAD-funded project started in 1988, few people could have imagined that 15 years later the degraded plateaus would be covered with trees on land restored to production by individual smallholder farmers. And no one imagined that a village on a barren degraded plateau would one day produce enough vegetables to meet its own needs and produce a surplus for sale, because water levels in the wells had risen so much.

Key success factors
There were several reasons for the success of the restoration initiative.
• Implementation had the active participation of the local community; i.e., it was community- led restoration.
• Restoration produced short- and long-term economic and environmental benefits.
• It systematically included women, girls and youth in restoration activities.
• The former village leader had the leadership capacity to mobilize the local community.

Since the mid-1980s, the positive impacts of these simple, cost-efficient water harvesting techniques become clear, following their increasingly widespread adoption. Their use has allowed smallholders to reverse land degradation, improve soil fertility, sustainably increase crop production, achieve food security, and create more productive, diverse and resilient farming systems. At the same time, groundwater is recharged, improving access to drinking water for the entire year, and creating opportunities for irrigated vegetable gardening around wells.

As a farmer in northern Kenya, I came to understand the importance of dryland restoration. After moving to Kaijaido country in the south, I started an initiative to restore the land, increase food security and reduce poverty, supported by a grant from the East African Community with various activities supported by FAO and Yale University.

The adoption of FMNR increased by 50% over 20 years; about 90% of all farmers now encourage natural regeneration on the land that they manage. The key to success is having local institutions that are respected and effective. The experience in Bankass shows that reforestation rates of at least 250 trees per hectare can be achieved by farmer managed natural regeneration on Sahelian agricultural lands, recreating an agroforestry parkland at a fraction of the cost of establishing conventional plantations.

The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets presents commodity market issues in an objective and accessible way to policy-makers, commodity market observers and stakeholders interested in agricultural commodity market developments and their impacts on countries at different levels of economic development.

Resources, including minerals and metals, underpin the world’s economies for almost all sectors, providing crucial raw materials for their industrial processes. Despite efforts to decouple economies from resource use towards a circular economy, demand for extractive resources will continue to grow on the back of emerging economies. The report maps existing international governance frameworks and initiatives which have overlapping subsets that focus on delivering the 2030 Global Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Influenced by international trends, as well as in response to population, climate, resource and development needs, the standards, norms, mechanisms and incentives in natural resources law at the national level have evolved in recent years. Natural resources laws are influenced by developments in the international arena, either through international treaties that are binding or through ‘soft law’ instruments that are not legally binding but nevertheless have widespread adherence among governments, or that provide principles that guide and shape national legislation.

This playbook details 23 behavior change strategies to help food service companies support diners in choosing more sustainable, plant-rich dishes when shopping or dining out – action that’s important for meeting global emissions goals and achieving the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Investments that reduce food loss and waste can deliver big wins on two pressing issues of our time: food security and environmental sustainability, according to a new World Bank report. But the results are not automatic -- countries need well-targeted solutions.

This collection of Sustainable Land Management (SLM) practices was compiled as part of the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) funded project ‘Scaling up SLM practices by smallholder farmers: working with agricultural extension services to identify, assess and disseminate SLM practices’ implemented by the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) of the University of Bern, Switzerland, hosting the World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT) Secretariat, in partnership with Uganda Landcare Network (ULN) and close collaboration with the IFAD-support