A new Model Land Use Bill is proposed to address the lapses identified in the Nigerian Land Use Act (LUA, 1978), such as poor administrative system for lands, ownership, and the absence of community participation. This policy brief promotes a new land management structure for ease of business, to improve social and environmental protection, and to reduce land-grabbing by dispossession. The impact of land grabbing is one of many problems of social and environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and livelihoods impacted by deforestation.

Gender equality is a key to eliminating poverty and hunger, as it has been demonstrated by the FAO throughout its research worldwide. As part of the FAO efforts on generating evidence and knowledge, and in compliance with the FAO Policy on Gender Equality, the purpose of the Country Gender Assessment for Uzbekistan is to contribute to the production of knowledge for better informed, targeted and gender sensitive actions in agriculture and rural development.

Deforestation, land degradation, and unsustainable land management threaten our lives and are responsible, both directly and indirectly, for many economic, social and environmental issues. In particular, countries in Northeast Asia face the growing threats of desertification, land degradation and drought (DLDD). In China, it is estimated that “more than 40 per cent of Chinese arable land is degraded” (China Daily 2014). “The annual cost of land degradation in Mongolia is estimated at 2.1 billion United States dollars (USD)” (UNCCD, 2018).

The extensive arable land and great biodiversity present in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have the potential to ensure sustenance and a good quality of life for its more than 600 million inhabitants. LAC has experienced important changes in land use. When the Europeans arrived in the 15th century, the forest cover of LAC accounted for approximately 75 per cent of the territory.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This UNCCD-SPI technical report provides well-established scientific evidence for understanding the strong linkages between land use and drought and how management of both is connected through water use. It introduces a new concept of Drought-smart land management (D-SLM) and organizes relevant approaches and practices in fourteen groups across four major classes of land use.

Monitoring progress towards the 2030 Development Agenda requires the combination of traditional and new data sources in innovative workflows to maximize the generation of relevant information. We present the results of a participatory and data-driven land degradation assessment process at a national scale, which includes use of earth observation (EO) data, cloud computing, and expert knowledge for Argentina.