This report explores how the management of land-based biomass production and consumption can be developed towards a higher degree of sustainability across different scales: from the sustainable management of soils on the field to the sustainable management of global land use as a whole. Under business as usual conditions, the growing demand for food and non-food biomass could lead to a gross expansion of cropland in the range of 320 to 850 million hectares by 2050.

The current context in the Sahel-Saharan Band is clearly dominated by recurrent issues of desertification, land degradation and climate change.

The Government of Namibia has identi ed land degradation as a serious problem which demands remedial intervention, and recognizes that integrated ecosystem management strategies are needed to e ectively address the underlying causes.The goal of the Country Pilot Partnership for Integrated Sustainable Land Management (CPP-ISLM) is to work towards combating land degradation by using integrated cross-sectoral approaches, which would enable Namibia to ensure environmental sustainability as well as the protection of dry land ecosystems and their functions.

Faced with a new global paradigm of achieving the Sustainable Development goals by 2030 and especially on the issue of soils, goal 15.3, which says: “By 2030, fight desertification, rehabilitate degraded lands and soils, including lands affected by desertification, drought and floods, and seek to achieve a world with neutral soil degradation. ” In this regard, it is clear that the international community has taken up the sustainability approach as a “bet” to somehow remedy the problem of the degradation of the Earth's resources, and thereby create a better future.

Established in 1994, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) is the sole legally binding international agreement linking environment and development to sustainable land management. The Convention addresses specifically the arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas, known as the drylands, where some of the most vulnerable ecosystems and peoples can be found.

Women need secure access to and control of land in order to realise their human rights. In order for the women to realise their land and inheritance rights it is important for the policy makers to have in place mechanisms and institutions to guide practice. This report sets out the status of women’s land and inheritance rights in Lesotho. The aim is to provide a consolidated baseline which can inform policy making, implementation and monitoring.

The Landesa Center for Women’s Land Rights developed the Women’s Land Tenure Framework to assist anyone who is interested in understanding the complex issues associated with women’s land rights — officials, grassroots organizations, international technical advisers, policymakers, development practitioners, women’s rights advocates, land rights advocates, people who are developing programs to assist women farmers, people who are concerned with food security, and others.

Land-use planning (LUP), an instrument of land governance, is often employed to protect land and humans against natural and human-induced hazards, strengthen the resilience of land systems, and secure their sustainability. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) underlines the critical role of appropriate local action to address the global threat of land degradation and desertification (LDD) and calls for the use of local and regional LUP to combat LDD and achieve land degradation neutrality. The paper explores the challenges of putting this call into practice.

The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT) set out internationally-accepted principles and standards for responsible practices, providing a framework for governments, the private sector and civil society to use when developing policies and programmes for improving food security.

Humanitarian and development organizations working in conflict-affected settings have a particular responsibility to do no harm and contribute to the wellbeing of the population without bias. The highly complex, politicized realities of work in conflict- and post-conflict settings often require quick, pragmatic and results-oriented decisions, the foundations of which remain frequently implicit. Such decisions might follow an intrinsic logic or situational pragmatism rather than intensive deliberation.

Secure access to land and secure use of land, for housing-, agricultural- and other purposes is one of the cornerstones of making sustainable, positive development possible. As ZOA provides relief, hope and recovery to people impacted by conflicts and disasters, addressing land rights issues will need to be a permanent point of attention in our work.