The support plan for the Sahel is a regional approach to collectively address the root causes of disruptions such as poverty, migration and youth unemployment, climate change, insecurity, governance and institutional issues in the region. In this report an overview of the current situation for each of the priority areas of the UN Support Plan is presented to demonstrate that the full implementation of the plan could utilize an existing momentum of development not seen in decades in the Sahel.

The latest IPCC report highlights that a change in diets for richer nations, and smarter land use, could ensure food security and mitigation of potential climate impacts.

Land surface processes — agriculture, forestry and other land use — account for 28% of anthropogenic emissions. However, natural land processes absorb about a third of the emissions from fossil fuel burning and energy production.

By declaring the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, the UN has recognized that there are only 10 years left to restore the world's degraded land. Countries are striving to fight climate change by 2030 through their Paris Agreement commitments and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But in many cases, their climate and development agenda are disconnected, even though sustainability and development go hand in hand – especially for rural communities. The divide is particularly severe when it comes to restoring degraded land.

Countries have publicly announced their commitments to restore degraded forests and lands.This report comes at a time when many countries are fully engaged in the challenging task of implementing their LDN targets and Bonn Challenge pledges with a goal to achieve them by 2030.

The challenge of land degradation Sustainable land use is closely connected with many sustainable development objectives Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN).  It is estimated that two billion hectares of land is degraded worldwide, and we continue to degrade another 12 million hectares of productive land every year. According to the 2018 World Atlas of Desertification produced by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, 75% of the Earth’s land area is already degraded, and over 90% could become degraded by 2050.

When the UN Convention to Combat Desertification was created at the Rio Earth Summit over 25 years ago, it became the only international convention dedicated to protecting, managing and restoring our land. The environmental benefits of that work are already well documented, particularly when it comes to the inextricablelinks with climate change and biodiversity. But this book goes much further by highlighting the impact on the wellbeing of over three billion people – nearly half the world’s population – who are directly affected by land degradation.

Land restoration has tremendous potential to help the world limit climate change and achieve its aims for sustainable development. In its latest study, the International Resource Panel finds positive spin-offs to support all 17 Sustainable Development Goals agreed to by the world’s nations as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. While other reports have focused on a subset of the SDGs, this report has intentionally considered all of them, and has done so by inviting a large number of diverse authors to participate in the process.

Women and men have unequal opportunities to address land degradation. While adoption of Sustainable Development Goal target 15.3 leads the world to ‘strive towards land degradation neutrality (LDN)’ by 2030, gender concerns are sparsely considered in LDN programming to date. To achieve LDN in regions with deeply entrenched socio‐cultural norms requires gender‐responsiveness, accounting for the varied gender components of land degradation.

Land degradation is a pervasive, systemic phenomenon: it occurs in all parts of the terrestrial world and can take many forms. Combating land degradation and restoring degraded land is an urgent priority to protect the biodiversity and ecosystem services vital to all life on Earth and to ensure human well-being

Land degradation is a pervasive, systemic phenomenon: it occurs in all parts of the terrestrial world and can take many forms. Combating land degradation and restoring degraded land is an urgent priority to protect the biodiversity and ecosystem services vital to all life on Earth and to ensure human well-being

The Restoration Opportunities Optimization Tool (ROOT) was developed out of a need to more efficiently and effectively communicate the importance of ecosystem services to decision makers.

IUCN’s collective experience working to increase ecological productivity and improve human well-being through forest landscape restoration (FLR) demonstrated that although stakeholders were interested in generating ecosystem services from proposed restoration activities, the many services and their interactions with each other were often too complicated to communicate clearly.

The Action Against Desertification (AAD) project supports eight countries – Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Fiji,
Gambia, Haiti, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal – in the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States in the
sustainable management and restoration of degraded land. Baseline assessments have been carried
out in each of these countries to establish a reference against which to monitor changes and project
impacts, as well as to better target project activities and inform other stakeholders and restoration
initiatives in the eight countries.