The objective of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services is to provide Governments, the private sector, and civil society with scientifically credible and independent up-to-date assessments of available knowledge to make informed decisions at the local, regional and international levels.

Shaping an enabling environment for Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) calls for integrated land use planning, inclusive and environmentally sound land access and governance, major reconfigurations of current institutional settings, financial backing, and ongoing dialogue between policy-makers, practitioners, and the scientific community.

The objective of the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services is to provide Governments, the private sector, and civil society with scientifically credible and independent up-to-date assessments of available knowledge to make informed decisions at the local, regional and international levels.

Land Degradation Neutrality is a new way of approaching land degradation that acknowledges that land and land-based ecosystems are affected by global environmental change as well as by local land use practices. Achieving the target of a land degradation neutral world encourages adaptive management during planning, implementation, and monitoring of LDN-related activities and follows the LDN response hierarchy of avoiding, reducing, and reversing land degradation.

The importance of land manifests in various components of the everyday lives of people insocieties: cultural heritage, livelihood, the environment, economy, and community, among manyothers. Land is a factor of development. It is the most influential determinant of developmentbecause women, youths, and men (and households) depend on it for their livelihoods and formaintaining their living conditions in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas.

Women constitute the bulk of people who rely on land in many of the regions most affected by desertification, land degradation and drought. One in three people on earth depend directly on agriculture, while nearly 80% of employed women in least developed countries report agriculture as their primary livelihood. Food availability fluctuations also impact women’s role in food production and intra-family food distribution, with women often reducing their nutritional intake and that of their children, with dire health consequences.

Land markets are evolving in response to increasing population pressure in Africa.
High population pressure leads to land use intensification on very small farms.
Population growth in densely populated rural areas leads to increasing rural–urban youth migration.
Tenure security enhancing land reforms enhance investments and sustainable land use intensification.
Pro-poor development strategies should target the strengthening of land governance.

A call to action: 20 interventions that will matter. The report’s Call to Action identifies 20 points where interventions can create transformative and accelerated progress towards multiple goals and targets in the coming decade. These targeted actions are based on the recent scientific literature analysing the deeper systemic interconnections that identify synergies and trade-offs between individual goals and targets. Decisions based on science. Science must play a major role in advancing sustainable development.

In Europe and Central Asia, FAO has 53 member countries today, and provides technical support in 18 countries in the Western Balkans, Trans Caucasus, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Most of these 18 countries have farm structures dominated by smallholders and family farms or dualistic farm structures with many small farms and few large corporate farms (FAO, 2018).Land fragmentation and small farm sizes are a fundamental structural problem resulting in low productivity and competitiveness in the globalized economy (Di Falco et al.

We cannot live without healthy land and soil. It is on land that we produce most of our food and we build our homes. For all species — animals and plants living on land or water — land is vital. Soil — one of the essential components of land — is a very complex and often undervalued element, teeming with life. Unfortunately, the way we currently use land and soil in Europe and in the world is not sustainable. This has significant impacts on life on land.

Valuations of tenure rights are required by the State and by the private sector for a wide variety of reasons, often forming and informing the basis of transactions, taxation, compensation and accounting. Value and the valuation process form a part of our everyday lives, and yet these are often shrouded in mystery and are not clearly understood.

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.