Cette publication a été lancée lors du colloque international sur le carbone organique du sol (GSOC) qui s’est tenu au siège de la FAO (Rome, 21-23 mars 2017). Pour les preneurs de décisions et les praticiens, il offre une vue d’ensemble sur les principaux faits et informations scientifiques concernant les connaissances actuelles et les lacunes de savoirs sur le carbone organique du sol.

Pastoral livestock production is crucial to the livelihoods and the economy of Africa’s semiarid regions. It developed 7,000 years ago in response to long-tern climate change. It spread throughout Northern Africa as an adaptation to the rapidly changing and increasingly unpredictable arid climate. It is practiced in an area representing 43% of Africa’s land mass in the different regions of Africa, and in some regions it represents the dominant livelihoods system.

The Proceedings of the Global Symposium on Soil Organic Carbon 2017 (GSOC17) presents the abstracts of all scientific presentations held during the GSOC17. 103 oral presentations and 35 poster presentations built the core of this event triggering fruitful discussions on the state-of-science in measuring, preserving and enhancing soil organic carbon in different soils of the world.

This document presents the main outcomes of the Global Symposium on Soil Organic Carbon (GSOC17) held at FAO headquarters (Rome, 21-23 March 2017). It presents key messages intensively discussed and developed by the GSOC17 participants and subsequently reviewed and synthesized by the Scientific Committee. The GSOC17 Outcome Document highlights major issues and future directions regarding Soil Organic Carbon preservation and enhancement in research, practice and policy.

In January 2018, the Rangelands Association of Kenya and ILRI partnered to host the Rangeland Communities Exchange Conference. ILRI’s support to the conference was undertaken through the 'Restoration of degraded land for food security and poverty reduction in East Africa and the Sahel: Taking successes in land restoration to scale' project. The conference facilitated community-to-community exchange of knowledge on rangeland management practices and on the ways in which management and governance frameworks interact with these practices.

To support improved rangeland resource management and monitoring for nomadic pastoralists in northern Kenya, we used a task-based mobile application to incentivize pastoralists provide more than 100,000 surveys containing information on local rangeland, water and livestock resources. In this contribution we explore the potential of combining this information with remote sensing data for improved characterization of rangeland resource use and accessibility through integration of local socio-ecological knowledge into land cover mapping methods.

The Sustainable Rangeland Management Project (SRMP) supports joint village land use planning and the protection of rangelands for local rangeland users. The project is implemented by the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries Tanzania, the National Land Use Planning Commission, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), and local civil society organizations. The project activities have been funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and Irish Aid through the International Land Coalition (ILC).